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Top Level Domain Changes | Top Level Domain Changes Google Proposed to ICANN

Are we going to visit some major changes to the Internet soon? Well, there are TLD expansion program is announced in 2008 and now Google have submitted proposals to have .google and some other TLDs. Now the ball is in ICANN’s court and let us see how it plays the same.

Ok let us put the stuff in some simple words.

Take any domain for example to understand the stuff.
Eg. Take the URL http://www.thinkerviews..com/top-level-domain-changes-google-proposed-google-tld-to-icann for example.
It contains how, where and what; 3 parts which refers to protocol, domain, resource respectively.
Here in this example,
http is the protocol. (or a way of communication, a language or set of rules and standards).
www.thinkerviews.com is the website or domain.
top-level-domain-changes-google-proposed-google-tld-to-icann https://www.thinkerviews.com/top-level-domain-changes-google-proposed-google-tld-to-icann (or click a link to the URL, which indeed does the same thing) you are telling the browser to get the resource “top-level-domain-changes-google-proposed-google-tld-to-icann” from website “www.thinkerviews.com” by using “http” protocol. It is very similar to the postal address you are typing.

Now in the website address “www.thinkerviews.com”, there are major two parts subdomain and domain.
www is the subdomain and thinkerviews.com is the domain.
Let us look at domain first, which can again be distributed into two segments domain name and top level domain. By the way www is a subdomain and when any subdomain is not specified it refers to www subdomain only (Eg. thinkerviews.com refers www.thinkerviews.com). Sudomains are meant to make the user experience much better.
Eg.
uk.burger-joints.com clearly tells you that it is related to burger joints in UK and
au.burger-joints.com is related to burger joints in AUstralia, ditto for
ca.burger-joints.com links the burger joints of Canada,
blog.burger-joints.com is the blog for that particular domain and
www.burger-joints.com is the main website (which as you know now, equivalent to burger-joints.com).

There is a set of predefined top level domain names which provides the information about the nature of the domain (and hence the website. You can get the full list of TLDs at http://data.iana.org/TLD/tlds-alpha-by-domain.txt. But the majors are

TLD : Nature
com : Commercial
org : Organization (earlier it was for the non-profit organizations, but now there is no restriction)
net : Network organization
gov : Government (of US)
mil : Millitary services
edu : Educational (Mainly universities)

and more…

Interestingly 50% (or around) domains posses .com as the TLD. To distinguish/classify the domains further. The country codes are being used in conjunction of other TLD. Eg. .co.us is company in USA and .co.in is a company in India. Country codes are vaild TLDs and hence used in that way Eg. crossword.in (the official site of the crossword bookstore chain in India). Even the combinations like .net.in, .com.au etc. are valid too. Other famous TLDs are .biz (business), .info (informative) and more. The first TLD was created in 1984 as the matter of fact. In 2008 there was the expansion of the TLDs was announced by ICANN to fulfill the needs of growing web. TLDs .me (a personal domain), .xxx (the Sex oriented – pornographic site) and others were widely discussed. This will not only help classifying the site in the super web of Internet but filtering of the websites can also be done easily.

Google applied for several TLDs like:

  • .google : for the trademarks it have
  • .docs : for the core business need
  • .youtube : to let users specify what service they need (and make user experience better)
  • .lol : domains with creative potential

May be in future, the entire list of proposed domains will be published. And of course, the approved ones will boom the Internet by exposing its existence. So we might be seeing a more explanatory domain names sooner as if the Google’s proposals (or some of them) will be accepted; there might be proposals for .apple, .ipad, .iphone, .microsoft, .facebook TLDs.

What you think about the proposal?

2 comments { Add Comment }

  1. Here is the updated summary for the applications http://newgtlds.icann.org/en/program-status/statistics

    And here you can find the details for the posted applications: http://newgtlds.icann.org/en/program-status/application-results/strings-1200utc-13jun12-en

  2. The applications about proposing new gTLD strings were submitted during the 12 January 2012 to 30 May 2012. Let us consider this as round 1 of the process. Based on the evaluation results for these application we may see round 2 (and more) for the same in future! 13 June 2012 is scheduled as the Reveal Day for the results. The list of the applications is available to view (and make a comment / give feedback or even file an objection) at http://newgtlds.icann.org/en/program-status/application-results/strings-1200utc-13jun12-en.

    You can visit http://gtldresult.icann.org/application-result/applicationstatus to see the current status for any application submitted during the period, in user friendly manner. If you want to download the same and analyze at your leisure, it is available for downloading in two different formats, CSV and PDF respectively.

    Which are the chosen ones (or favorite) by you?!

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