New gTLD’s Explained

ICANN, the organization that administers (rather than registers) domain names has been working for several years on extending the Top Level Domain names (TLD’s). TLDs are extensions such as .com, .org or .net. At the start of the process there were 22 TLD’s. This is going to be expanded to upwards of 1400, over the next few years. For the first time, domain names can also be in non- Latin scripts, such as Arabic or Chinese.  As of January 2014, over 100 new generic -TLD’s have been added to the IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) Root Zone Database. From February 2014, the new gTLD’s were rolled out to the general public, to register as second-level domains, including:

Personalizing The Generic: Choosing and Customizing Your gTLD For Success

Generic is increasingly becoming the last adjective companies and organizations would apply to the expanding TLD landscape. As more and more TLD applications receive ICANN approval and make their way down the pipeline, groups whose products and aims might overlap with several different TLD monikers must give serious thought to which categories they will choose to align themselves and their brand. In today’s highly fragile marketplace, how a business decides to specify its TLD could very well be the difference between success and flounder.