View articles by subject:
IP Resources
Web chiefs seek help on new digital districts
- Posted in: Domains
on 14th May 2007 Link to this page
Please copy and paste the link below to link to this article:
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) announced on 10 May that a series of new generic top level domains (gTLDs) are likely to arrive next summer – and it wants the online community to help design them. Following on from the creation seven years ago of specialist gTLDs like .info and .name – and more recent ones such as .aero, .travel, .jobs and .mobi – ICANN is seeking the viewpoints of site managers and regular Web users to determine how next year’s suffixes should titled and used.
In a press release, ICANN President and CEO, Dr Paul Twomey, said: ‘When ICANN was founded in 1998, only a few TLDs, including .com, were generally available to the public for registration of domain names. Our mission has been to expand the number of TLDs available to users – and we have made great progress. When the new approval process is complete, Internet users around the globe will have more choice in the TLD market.
‘If the new approval process comes on-line as planned, the global Internet could see new top-level domains added and available between June and August 2008.’
Explaining ICANN’s decision to make the process more interactive and transparent, he said: ‘This is all about choice. We want the diversity of the world's people, geography and business to be able to be represented in the domain name system. That is why it's so important for people to participate in the development of a new gTLD process. We will get input from businesses, governments, and the public at large in the coming months and at the ICANN meeting in Puerto Rico on 25-29 June 2007.’
The TLD system encompasses a total of 120 million domain names. Two thirds of these are gTLDs, with the remainder consisting of country code top level domains (ccTLDs), such as .au (Australia), .fr (France) and .ca (Canada). Since December 2005, the development of new gTLDs has been steered by ICANN’s Generic Names Supporting Organisation (GNSO), which will now play a major role in administrating users’ ideas for the 2008 domains.
Useful links:
Read ICANN’s FAQ on the creation of new TLDs here.
Read minutes and listen to tapes of GNSO deliberations here.
Take part in ICANN’s new gTLD discussion forum here.
Email your questions and comments to newgtld@icann.org.
Add to RSS: 
Add this page to:
