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How do you keep track of what new generic top-level domains (newgTLDs) are now available? Particularly when there seem to be new ones being announced weekly? Because I’ve written about newgTLDs here previously, someone recently asked me those questions, and my response was simply that I look at ICANN’s web page of delegated strings:
http://newgtlds.icann.org/en/program-status/delegated-strings
Now, these are the newgTLDs that have been delegated by ICANN, meaning that they now appear in the “root zone” of DNS. This does NOT mean that you can go right now and register a domain underneath one of these new TLDs—but it means that the TLD is on the path toward you being able to do so. When a TLD is delegated, the technical infrastructure is now in place so that the TLD could start to be used. Next up the newgTLD will go through a “Sunrise” period where trademark owners have an early period to register a domain in the newgTLD before it enters at some point into “general availability” where people can register domains under the newgTLD. Note that the dates and length for this Sunrise period are set by the operator of the newgTLD and so can vary a good bit. ICANN maintains a page showing the dates for the Sunrise period for newgTLDs to help with this.
The “general availability” date of the newgTLDs is also controlled by the operator although I suspect that the answer for many is “as soon as we possibly can ”. Some newgTLDs also have restrictions on who can register domains under the new TLD - there are a lot of variations given the 1,900+ applications for newgTLDs.
If you look at that URL above and don’t see a newgTLD you thought would be there, you can also look at ICANN’s “application status” page to find out where in the process a given newgTLD is at the moment.
I’ll be honest, too, and say that while I use the link above to track what newgTLDs are now delegated, I am often alerted to the delegation of newgTLDs by tweets or other social network messages from people who operate DNS services and notice the delegations in the root zone. I also monitor sites on DNSSEC statistics (such as this one) because all newgTLDs have to be signed with DNSSEC.
What about you all? Any other sites or services you use to learn what newgTLDs are now available? Please leave a comment and let us know.
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To keep track of new gTLD launches, I simply check my spam folder. That’s where the pitches from registrars pushing the defensive registrations to “protect your name” end up. :-)
George - Ha! Indeed that certainly is another method!
I meant to also mention that ICANN’s TLD DNSSEC report is very useful:
http://stats.research.icann.org/dns/tld_report/
It runs each morning and, as I understand it, gives the current status of the root zone. I should also note that the DNSSEC reports that are automatically generated by scripts are more up-to-date than the ICANN page that I referenced at the top of the article which seems to be manually updated. For instance, both this ICANN TLD DNSSEC report (alphabetical) and Rick Lamb’s DNSSEC stats at http://rick.eng.br/dnssecstat/ (reverse chronological) show the 16 newgTLDs that were added on Saturday, January 18. Presumably the “Delegated Strings” page will be updated sometime today to reflect this information.
Hi Dan,
I generate a weekly “these are the strings delegated this week” post to an announce-only email list that we (the ISPCP) sponsor. So if a person would prefer to get a once-weekly email update on the strings that have gone into the root, they can subscribe to that list. Here’s a link to the page to do that.
http://ispcp.info/mailman/listinfo/gtld-delegations
I use that ICANN delegated-strings page (that you point to in the article) to generate the post. We’ve got a “name collisions” slant to it, since we’re mostly posting that list to ISPs so they can feed the names into their help-desk systems. But others might find it useful as well.
To keep track, users can also:
- Check NEWSgTLDs.com every hour or;
- Subscribe to its RSS feed or;
- Subscribe by email or;
- Subscribe to “New generic Top-Level Domains (new gtlds)” on LinkedIn (1440 subscribers) or;
- Spend 10 mn to try to find the right link on the Icann website :-)
This has launch details for Donuts TLDs: http://www.donuts.co/tlds/
What I love about a post like this is that it brings to light how many other great resources are out there. In addition to the ones mentioned here in comments (thanks, Mike and Jean), others have pointed out to me:
Great to see so many resources out there tracking this new evolution of domain names!