.com is so 20th century - Welcome to ICANN's great domain name auction
ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) has held its lottery draw for 1,930 new sponsored global top level domains (gTLDs). — Successful bidders will be able to use gTLDs like .christmas and .sport …
Context & Ripple Effects
ICANN approved a new top-level-domain program in 2011 to increase competition and choice, then disclosed the 1,930 applied-for strings in June 2012. Large technology companies including Google, Microsoft and Amazon were among the applicants for names such as .app, .xbox and .book.
The draw replaces ICANN’s proposed Digital Archery prioritization process after tickets went on sale on December 13. It matters because the raffle sets the order in which the unusually large application pool enters evaluation, rather than deciding which strings are ultimately delegated.
First-order effects
- Applicants in the 1,930-name pool receive a defined place in ICANN’s evaluation queue, replacing the abandoned Digital Archery mechanism.
- ICANN gains an administrable way to sequence its new-gTLD workload after the earlier prioritization system was withdrawn.
Second-order effects
- Applicants seeking commercially valuable suffixes such as .app, .xbox and .book must plan around their assigned evaluation timing, making queue position an operational advantage in a crowded application round.
- The shift from a technical timing contest to a ticketed draw moves the immediate contest among applicants from execution of Digital Archery to the lottery’s ordering rules.
Third-order effects
- If ICANN processes the application pool as designed, the Internet’s naming system moves away from a small set of broadly used generic suffixes toward a larger registry market built around branded and category-specific domains.
- The episode shows that expansion of the domain namespace depends not only on approving new strings but also on governance mechanisms that can fairly sequence high application volumes.
The trend: ICANN’s new-gTLD program is turning domain names from a concentrated set of generic endings into a broader, competitively allocated registry market.