ICANN To Reveal New Internet Domain Applications In Mid-June

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the domain name system technical oversight body, will shortly make public the list of applied for new domains under its expansion programme.

The release of the list is targeted for 13 June, ICANN said in a release this week. There will be a comment period until 12 August.

There were more than 1,900 applications for new top-level domains at the closing of the application deadline at midnight on 30 May, ICANN said.

Examples of top-level domains, or TLDs, are .com, .net and .org.

“We will reconcile all payments and submitted applications, and will release the final numbers when the applied-for domain names are published,” ICANN Chief Operating Officer Akram Atallah said in the statement. “As we said yesterday, our target date for publishing the list of applied-for domain names is 13 June 2012.”

Google yesterday published a blog from company Vice President Vinton Cerf, noting that some 50 percent of all websites still lie in the .com domain. Cerf also said the number of generic (unsponsored) TLDs has only grown by 14 percent in the past 28 years, and that Google is working to help with the TLD expansion.

ICANN today also announced the nearing of deadlines for public comments on its fiscal year 2013 operating plan and budget, and the Whois policy review team final report.