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Web domain giant ICANN makes finding .pizza and .porn easier than ever
You might be able to find almost anything on the Internet, but ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) is worried we might be running out of places to find it.
The private organization coordinates and doles out unique identifiers to sites, and today they’ve released a list of applications they’ve received as part of their new generic top-level domain (gTLD) program.
Currently, there are 22 gTLDs — think .com, .net, .info. But ICANN’s looking to expand on that by allowing companies to request their own, proprietary suffixes. And the response has been massive. Yesterday, the organization released a list of nearly 2,000 applications they received during this first round of domain creation.
There were four applications for .pizza and three for .sucks; surprisingly, only one for .porn.
Not everyone's excited about the possibilities presented by new gTLDs. The Washington Post quotes Scott Bain, Chief Litigation Counsel for the Software and Information Industry Association: “ICANN’s program may open up new opportunities, but it also presents a whole new frontier of potential — and likely — abuse by those seeking to profit from the name, reputation, and content of others.”
There are also plenty of applicants hoping to profit off their new domains, with Donuts, a year-old web registry, attempting to collect 307 for probable resale.
Each application cost $185,000 to submit. As Forbes notes, this means that multi-domain applicants like Donuts, Amazon (who submitted 76 names) and Google (who submitted over 100) ended up shelling out several million for a shot at a more unique identifier. Further, the two latter corporations applied for 20 of the same domains, meaning they’ll have to duke it out for ownership of properties like .wow and .play.
ICANN plans on announcing the results of this applicant round in Dec. or Jan., with the first new domain going live in 2013 after all appropriate testing. Domain owners are free to use the property as they choose.
As for the most popular requests, there were 13 applicants hoping to snag the .app domain, 11 for .home and .inc, 10 .art hopefuls, nine for .blog, .book and .LLC, eight for .design, .movie, music and .shop, seven for .cloud, .hotel, .LTD, .mail and .news.
There were also four applications for .pizza and three for .sucks; surprisingly, only one for .porn.
You can see the full list of applied-for gTLDs here.