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.kids goes live, plans to launch this year

Kevin Murphy, April 13, 2022, Domain Registries

The long-anticipated .kids top-level domain has its first live site, and the registry has announced plans to start selling domains towards the end of the year.

The contractually mandated nic.kids is now resolving, leading to the registry web site of the DotKids Foundation.

Hong Kong-based DotKids, which has close ties to DotAsia and ICANN director Edmon Chung, said the plan is to start a sunrise period in the third quarter and go to general availability in the fourth quarter this year.

There’s also going to be a special registration period for children’s rights groups and a Q3 “Pioneer Program” for early adopters.

The idea behind the gTLD is to provide a space where all content is considered suitable for under-18s, though the exact policing policies have yet to be written. DotKids is using the UN definition of a child.

It will be a tough balancing act. My fifteen-year-old nephew isn’t happy with content that doesn’t involve the laser-beam dismemberment of tentacled beasts, but a decade ago was content to watch Peppa Pig on a loop for hours a day.

DotKids won the rights to .kids, somehow beating rival applicants Amazon and Google, in 2019. It signed a very strange Registry Agreement with ICANN last year.

Previous attempts at creating child-friendly domains have proven unsuccessful.

In the US, there was a government-mandated .kids.us brought in 20 years ago, aimed at under-13s, but it was a spectacular failure, attracting just a handful of registrations. It was killed off in 2012.

Russian speakers have their own equivalent gTLD .дети, a word that has taken on more sinister overtones in recent weeks, but that currently has only about 800 names under management.

DotKids has its work cut out to make .kids a commercial success, but it is a non-profit and it was the only new gTLD applicant to have most of its ICANN fees waived under the Applicant Support Program.

Little interest in Russian gTLDs?

Kevin Murphy, January 18, 2012, Domain Registries

Despite being given the opportunity to launch top-level domains in Cyrillic script, only a handful of companies from Russia are expected to apply to ICANN for new gTLDs.
That’s according to Andrey Kolesnikov, CEO of Coordination Center for TLD RU, which runs the country’s .ru and .РФ registries.
“There won’t be many applications from Russia, only from about 10 companies,” he said at a recent press conference, while estimating at least 1,000 applications overall.
Just 10 applicants is a surprisingly low estimate, given the resurgence of interest in Russian domain names in 2011.
The year-old .РФ (.rf, for Russian Federation) domain has been a roaring success in volume terms. Launched in late 2010, it now has about a million registered domains.
CC itself is planning to apply for .ДЕТИ, which means “.children” in Russian.
RU-Center, the largest Russian registrar, intends to apply for the city-gTLDs .МОСКВА and .moscow.
Other IDN-friendly nations may be more enthusiastic about new gTLDs. ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom said last week that he heard that Indian companies could apply for as many as 100.

Russian registry to apply for “.children”

Kevin Murphy, November 28, 2011, Domain Registries

The Russian .ru domain name registry has announced plans to apply for .ДЕТИ, the Russian word for “.children”, under ICANN’s new generic top-level domains program.
It’s the first public announcement of a top-level internationalized domain name that is not geographic nor a transliteration of an existing TLD.
Coordination Center for TLD RU, the registry, said that the initiative was inspired by the success of .РФ (.rf), which is on track to register its millionth domain before the end of the year.
Registry CEO Andrey Kolesnikov said in a statement: “We kicked off preparations for the applying for another top-level domain – .ДЕТИ, which should for an Internet space reserved exclusively for the youngest users.”
IDN gTLDs are one of the benefits of the new gTLD program that nobody — not even trademark interests — disputes, but until now there were no “proper” examples to cite.
VeriSign and Afilias have already announced plans for IDN versions of their existing gTLDs – .com, .net and .info – and ICANN has approved IDN ccTLDs for a couple dozen nations.