gTLDs That Didn’t Make It To The Internet
The roll-out of new generic domain names has seen a few eyebrow raisers take to the web, but not every gTLD is approved.
If you grew up during the late 1990s, you will know that the internet was a very simple place. Every American website address ended in .com, unless it was a Governmental organisation or a charitable enterprise. In Britain, the .co.uk top level domain provided a domestic alternative to the international .com TLD, but there were still very few domains to choose from. The introduction in 2001 of seven new TLDs (including .biz and .museum) provided a rare burst of activity in this largely sedentary industry.
Today, we live in a world of .wtf and .sex. Proprietary domains include .volkswagen, .deloitte and .chanel, while .sucks and .amsterdam were also released in quick succession. The current variety of gTLDs extends to 1,349 entries, with the sponsoring organisations who proposed specific suffixes ranging from Cypriot universities to the Aga Khan Foundation. An increasing number of gTLDs are in Arabic and Chinese, while it’s easy to understand the logic behind creating .wiki and .events domains.
What about those gTLDs still too obscure or risqué to be granted permission? Some are still in the pipeline, with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) endlessly ploughing through a substantial backlog of applications in its role as arbiter of website domain releases. On average one new gTLD is introduced every day, and the end of May heralded the arrival of .realestate, .shop and the rather unintuitive .dot – which may perhaps be of interest to semaphore fans.
Eyebrows were raised in 2014 when ICANN rubber-stamped the .hiv suffix but refused to release .gay as a gTLD to a preferred bidder. To the dismay of the LGBT community, and the anger of community applicants who intended to release suffixes only to registered gay-friendly organisations, .gay was instead released for auction on the open market. A third Request for Reconsideration was lodged earlier this year by the community applicants, but these ongoing arguments mean it is not currently possible to use a .gay web suffix.
Other gTLDs have been dismissed out of hand, such as .amazon, which was requested by the online retailer and rejected because of complaints from South American countries claiming ownership of the term Amazonia. Numerical gTLDs are unlikely to be approved, though the Bulgarian Government’s inability to get .6r registered as the Cyrillic translation of .bg has been attributed to .6r’s visual similarity to the Brazilian .br TLD. A Texan domain investor lost $185,000 on a rejected application for .nukular, which ICANN dismissed due to “a firm stance towards gTLDs that promote war, hatred, racism and other such unreasonably violent domain manifestations.” For similar reasons, there are also no .bomb, .gun or .war suffixes.
One of the problems with endlessly introducing new gTLDs is that they can cause compatibility issues; .email is often rejected as a valid web address on Android devices despite working fine in most desktop browsers. There is currently little co-operation between the owners of gTLDs and the software developers and network providers responsible for actioning website requests, though this is an internet-wide issue stretching back to the 2001 launch of .aero and .info in particular. ICANN may not be universally popular, and its decision-making is sometimes questionable, but it has an unenviable job in deciding which domain name suffixes to ban or restrict.