Google confirms new gTLD bids

Kevin Murphy, April 9, 2012, 07:21:00 (UTC), Domain Registries

Google will apply for several new generic top-level domains, according to a report in AdAge.

The company will apply for some dot-brands, and possibly some keywords, the report indicated.

“We plan to apply for Google’s trademarked TLDs, as well as a handful of new ones,” the spokeswoman said in an emailed statement.

AdAge speculates that .google and .youtube would be among the applications, which seems like a fair assumption.

The revelation comes despite the fact that Google engineers recently stated that there would be no guaranteed search engine optimization benefits from owning a gTLD.

However, I wouldn’t be surprised if keywords representing some of Google’s services, such as .search and .blog, are also among its targets.

The total cost to Google is likely to run into millions in ICANN application fees alone.

It will also be interesting to see which registry provider — if any — Google has selected to run its back-end.

Google is one of the few companies out there that could scratch-build its own registry infrastructure without breaking a sweat.

The AdAge report also quotes Facebook and Pepsi executives saying they will not apply.

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