What is the Real Purpose of New gTLDs? Allowing For Fully Internationalized Domains
Will the majority of the estimated 4,000 new gTLD applications even be in English?
The Gulf News and other leading international news outlets have issued breathless reports about the potential of IDN gTLDs. In a recent interview Rod Beckstrom, outgoing ICANN CEO, stated that he was “surprised to hear that ICANN may see as many as 100 gLTD applications filed from India alone.”
Beckstrom emphasized that the purpose of the gTLD applications is to serve unique communities and “[i]f you have a community based application, you will get a higher priority” during the application process.
Current holders of IDN.com expect Verisign to obtain aliased IDN gTLD versions of .COM during the gTLD application period. However, IDN developers and investors would be shortsighted to underestimate the significance and worth of thousands of other multilingual gTLDs that will be applied for and given to communities starved to build sites on domains in their own languages.
Ultimately, the number of international applications that will request IDN gTLDs will not be known until the end of April.
“will not be known until January”
Would the applied for strings be published in January or only in April 27 (15 Days after the application window closes)?
My understanding is that the applications will be made public on a rolling basis beginning in January, which is when the applications process officially opens. At that point we will have a good sense of how many gTLD applications are IDN related.
The Gulf News, which recently had an exclusive interview with Rod Beckstrom wrote: “Actual applicants won’t be known until the applications process opens in January and continues until April 12.”
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Applications will not be made public until two weeks after the window closes – April 26, 2012
@Tom and Matt – received confirmation and link (http://www.icann.org/en/topics/new-gtlds/faqs-30sep11-en.pdf) that approximately two weeks after the window will be closed full applications will be released.
Thanks for the comments, and I will correct the above.
Every cloud has a silver lining.