Guess what is common between app, home, inc and art! These are the four would be global top level domains (GTLDs) for which ten or more applications were submitted to The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).

‘App’ topped with the maximum number of 13 applications, followed by ‘home’ and ‘inc’ with 11 applications each. There were ten submissions for art.

There were seven applications for ‘web’ but also two for ‘webs’ and three for ‘website.’ If taken together, there were a total of 12 applications for the genre. Similarly, there were nine applications for ‘shop’ and two for shopping, which made the total tally 11 for the genre.

Google topped with maximum number of submissions, with as many as 101 listings showing google.com in the applicant email IDs. The final list released by ICANN showed many IDs with gmail.com, so there could be even more Google entries out there. But leading social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn surprised with nil entries. However, many major ICT players like Cisco, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle were present, though with much fewer and mostly non-generic entries.

Today, .com continues to be the most sought after GTLD globally, in spite of a plethora of other TLDs having become available over the past years. The rush for .inc, which is highly reflective of .com and attracted 11 applications, clearly talks of the value that the Internet real estate stakeholders attach to it.

In fact, if one were to take into account other similar to-be GTLDs like llc (9 submissions), ltd (7), corp (6) and gmbh (6), then the total number of applications easily hover around 39. Interestingly, Google features as an applicant for all these GTLDs. Internet’s first GTLD, .com, looks all set to form a ‘first family’ too.

Interestingly, ‘company,’ which is the genesis for .com, managed to attract just one application, perhaps because it doesn’t sound so Internet-ish.

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