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It’s Reveal Day and there are 1,930 new gTLD bids

Kevin Murphy, June 13, 2012, 06:59:06 (UTC), Domain Policy

ICANN received 1,930 new generic top level domain applications, 751 of which were for contested strings.
While the unveiling of who applied for what is not expected to happen until early this afternoon in London, the organization just published a bunch of facts and figures about the bids.
A grand total of 230 strings are in direct contention, covered by 751 applications (39%) or an average of three or four applicants per string.
There are 66 self-designated geographic applications, aiming to represent many of the world’s cities and regions. That’s 3.4% of the total.
Internationalized domain names — gTLDs in non-Latin scripts — account for 116 applications, or 6% of the total.
Applications that have been pushed into the the tricky “community” route stand at 84, or 4.6%.
Organizations from a total of 60 countries are participating in the round.
North American businesses account for a little under half of all applications, with 911 (47.2%) active bids. Europe is the next largest with 675 (35%), followed by Asia-Pacific with 303 (15.7%)
It’s good news for applicants from Latin America and the Caribbean and from Africa. With just 24 (1.2%) and 17 (0.9%) applications respectively, they’re pretty much all guaranteed a spot in the first evaluation batch.
The names of every applicant — and possibly the public parts of their applications — will be revealed during an official ICANN event at Kings Place, here in London, today.
The gig starts at noon UK time (11am UTC), and will be webcast from 1pm here at icann.org for those not attending in person.
There’ll be a press conference, a panel discussion (which I’m moderating) and a networking event.
Some attendees are retiring to a hotel opposite the venue for drinks afterwards, but I suspect a lot of eyes will be glued to laptops.
Don’t expect many more posts from DI today, but please follow @domainincite for updates if you’re not already.


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Comments (3)

  1. Raj Alla says:

    If google don’t want to sell .app TLD names thru the Registrars …can they keep the whole TLD level domains for them or only allow their own Registrar to sell ?

    • John Smith says:

      ICANN mandates the equal treatment of registrars. The registry can however make the registration process so bothersome that most registrars could decide it is not worth the hassle.

  2. Ray Marshall says:

    Glad to see that the City of Los Angeles didn’t apply for .losangeles. From my perspective, this increases the value of .LA. Also curious if .LAT will be contested since it seems to similar to .LA.

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