ICANN finally announced the strings that have been applied for in the New gTLD programme at the Big Reveal, some 10 days ago. Since then we have had lots of reaction and further news from ICANN, applicants and registries. There has been some major news coverage on the story, the BBC said:

"The net will get a lot bigger in 2013. That's when the net's familiar domains will be joined by a slew of novel names."

CNN also reported on the announcement, saying:

"The largest-ever expansion of the Internet's naming system is coming -- and the world got its first look at the list of proposed new Web domains."

This is very important press coverage for the New gTLDs and have made many people aware of the process that probably weren’t previously.

North American applications made up 47.2% of the total number of applications. The Latin American region submitted 24 applications and the African region submitted just 17. Rod Beckstrom confirmed that economic support had been available and they have made an effort to ensure that applicants from these regions were not excluded on financial grounds.

There were a few surprise applicants. Amazon, the online department store, had not publicised any involvement in the programme previous to the big reveal, but have applied for 76 strings. Amazon has gone after lots of generic domain name extensions from .app to .video, in addition to their brand TLDs, like .amazon and .kindle. It has been reported that a large number of Amazon’s applications contain the following clause:

"Amazon and its subsidiaries will be the only eligible registrants"

There is a suggestion that Amazon will keep any TLDs they secure private. This means that the general public would not be allowed to register the names. Amazon is yet to publically comment on their applications in terms of the potential registrants. Potentially bad news if you are looking forward to a new domain registration.

Also in contention for a large number of these generic strings is Google, who submitted 101 applications in total. In addition to their generic string portfolio Google has applied for .google, .android and .chrome as part of their .brand list. The big spender of the programme though was domain start-up Donuts Inc. splurging more than $56 million on application fees alone. Paul Stahura, the founder of eNom, Richard Tindal, former head of NeuStar and Dan Schindler, former CEO of CentralNic are all involved with the start-up who are promising to keep all the strings they secure public.

.app is the most contested string with 13 applicants. ICANN will hopefully hit any one of those applications in the batching process and process .app first. Processing such a hotly contested string early on should help applicants, ICANN and registries deal with the delegation of these names.

Overall the reaction from the public in general to the announcement has been positive. As with all the way through the process, there are some concerns about the legal impact of these new domains. Everybody is keeping their fingers crossed for swift resolutions to the contested strings so they can be delegated as soon as possible.

As always, we will be at the forefront of the industry in terms of securing the TLDs for your registration and supporting you with any queries you may have. The first TLDs from this initial batch of applications aren’t likely to go live until Q1 2013, so you have plenty of time to consider what TLDs you will be registering. If you want to keep up to date with all the latest news then check us out on Twitter , Facebook and Google+.