courtesy of blog.guillon.com
Previously on this site I’ve written about the generic top level domain (gTLD) debate, which has been contentious from day one. I tried to have some fun with the debate with this animated video from almost two years ago. And in July of 2011 I interviewed Antony Van Couvering, a former colleague from VeriSign and someone very much in the middle of the gTLD debates.
If the term is new to you, new gTLDs are domain extensions like .com and .org that are sponsored and operated by a company or organization. Think .nike, .newyork, .espn, .paris, etc. ICANN, the organization that manages many elements of Internet addressing, has been pushing a big expansion of gTLDs forward for a number of years.
So where do things stand today? The 2013 timeline above is courtesy of Jean Guillon, whom I’ve gotten to know via LinkedIn and has become an authority on gTLDs. If you’d like to learn more about gTLDs, here are some other resources below:
A good read from SearchEngineLand about what marketers should know about gTLDs
Here’s some eye candy courtesy of ICANN, a video showing all the new gTLD applications to date. Applications cost $185,000 per gTLD, and 1,930 applications were announced in June of 2012: