ICANN reveals who wants hundreds of new domains — from .app to .zulu

It’s reveal day: the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has released the list of the top level domains (TLDs) and the names of the applicants who wanted more than .com. ICANN closed applications for new TDLs on 30 May, but we didn’t know exactly which domains companies around the world had asked for (except for .lol, of course) until now.

Previously, if you wanted to buy a domain name, you could only choose from a (pretty boring) list of just under two dozen options — including .biz, .org and .net. ICANN received over 1 900 applications for new domains — and it seems the hottest one out there is .app.

No less than 13 organisations applied for .app — among them, Amazon and Google. ICANN will decide who will be granted the domain after they start evaluating the applications next month. Anyone with objections to a claim has seven months to lodge a complaint with ICANN.

The big G will be in for quite a fight — they applied for more than one hundred domains, including some rather strange .somethings (like .baby, .dad, .dog, .eat, .foo, .meme, .mom and .rsvp) and the more predictable ones like .android, .blog, .chrome, .cloud, and .google. It’s an interesting way to spend just over US $18 million — each application for a TLD cost US$185 000, and they’ll have to shell out US $25 000 to ICANN annually for each domain they’re granted.

Google and Amazon applied for a lot of the same domains — including .dev, .drive, .free, .game, .map, .search, .shop, .show and .store. Microsoft applied for eleven domain names (like .azure, .bing and .xbox) and Apple applied for just one: .apple. Social media giants like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn were not among the companies on ICANN’s list.

Other contested domains include:

• .art — ten applicants, including Deviant Art
• .home — eleven applicants, including Google and Go Daddy
• .live — three applicants, Microsoft and Google
• .love — seven applicants, including Google
• .mail — seven applicants, including Google and Amazon
• .sex — two applicants

The list also includes a number of domain names written in a non-Roman alphabet — like عرب (.Arab) クラウド (.cloud) and 삼성 (.Samsung). ICANN received 17 applications from Africa — among them domains which were applied for by emerging markets giant Naspers, who asked for domains like .africamagic, .dstv and .mnet. UniForum SA — the current administrator of South Africa’s .co.za domain — applied for .africa and Top Level Domain Holdings asked for .zulu.

The application price and the technical expertise needed to run a domain may be the reason why most of the applicants are quite large companies. Some of these new domains could be up on the web from early next year.