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Reveal Day 13 June 2012 - New gTLD Applied-For Strings

ICANN developed the New generic Top-Level Domain Program to increase competition and choice by introducing new gTLDs into the Internet's addressing system.  What is a gTLD?  It is an Internet domain name extension such as the familiar .com, .net, or .org.

ICANN New gTLDs

Context & Ripple Effects

Reveal Day is the moment ICANN's New gTLD Program stops being policy and becomes a market: the full list of applied-for strings is public, and per The Verge's same-day report Google, Microsoft and Amazon are among the applicants chasing extensions like .app, .xbox and .book. The program's stated purpose is competition and choice in the addressing system, but the applicant roster makes clear the first wave is dominated by large brands securing their own namesakes.

The arc matters because this is not the first contested string to reach the root: .XXX went live in the root servers in April 2011 over sustained opposition, setting the template for how disputes over offensive or brand-encroaching strings get handled. The Guardian's 'commercial landgrab' framing, echoed across CNET, Engadget and ABC News coverage, shows the criticism arriving before a single new string is delegated.

First-order effects

  • Brand applicants like Google, Microsoft and Amazon move from speculation to exposure: their specific strings are now public, triggering objection windows where trademark holders and governments can formally challenge applications.
  • Every company whose brand appears in someone else's application must now fund a defense strategy — legal objections, watch services, or its own competing application — rather than relying on the old .com-era status quo.

Second-order effects

  • Registrars and brand-protection firms gain a structural revenue stream from defensive registrations across hundreds of new extensions, shifting pricing power toward whoever operates the registries.
  • ICANN's dispute-resolution machinery becomes the bottleneck asset: the pace at which objections are adjudicated determines when winning applicants can actually launch, making the program's credibility dependent on process speed.

Third-order effects

  • If the pattern holds, the namespace reorganizes from a handful of generic extensions into brand-owned and category-owned territories, with the .com premium eroding for companies that control their own string.
  • The landgrab criticism points toward recurring pressure on ICANN's multistakeholder governance model, where each application round forces governments and rights holders to renegotiate their role in DNS policy.

The trend: Internet addressing is opening from a fixed set of generic extensions into a contested market where major brands buy their own namespaces, with ICANN's objection process setting the tempo.

Related: Google, Microsoft, Amazon scramble for new top-level domains · .XXX Goes Live in the Root Servers

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