The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers or ICANN is seeking public input for creating, approving and adding generic top-level domains (gTLDs) to the Internet.
ICANN Wants Your Input On Domains
“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,” said Dr Paul Twomey, President and CEO of ICANN.
“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.”
ICANN hopes that the new process on approving gTLDs will allow for a wider variety of them to be added in an efficient manner. They believe that with the public input, a system could be in place for approving new gTLDs by the end of the year, and applications for new top-level domains would start being approved in 2008.
“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,” Dr Twomey added.
ICANN has been involved with two other extensions of the Internet space. The first was in 2000 when seven TLDs were added and the second was in 2004 with six more being approved.
“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,” Dr Twomey said.
“When the new approval process is complete, Internet users around the globe will have more choice in the TLD market.”
According to ICANN there are 120 million registered domain names in the world. The most common gTLD is “. com” with 62 million domains.
