So this is it, the moment we’ve all been waiting for is just a little more than a day away. ICANN plans to reveal who applied for what during a live event being held in London on Wednesday June 13.
News from applicants and service providers has been flooding the wire since the official close of the application period on May 30th. Here is a summary of what we know a day out from the big Reveal Day:
- Neustar, our backend partner, was selected to provide services for 358 TLDs, including TLDs such as .Green, .SiTE, and .NYC.
- Donuts Inc., a newly formed domain name registry, has applied for 307 TLDs, and in some cases has partnered with the likes of Demand Media and eNom on several applications.
- Verisign was selected to provide services for 220 TLDs and will apply for 14 TLDs for itself.
- ARI Registry, an Australian service provider, has secured 161 contracts (85 generic, 70 brand and 6 geographic TLDs)
- Melbourne IT ended up filing 146 applications for its clients (I assume that these were mostly brands).
- TLDH (Top-Level Domain Holdings, enthusiastically announced a total number of 92 applications (24 for clients and 68 in its name).
- Fairwinds Partners has applied for approximately 100 TLDs for its clients.
- Uniregistry, a new and exciting outfit headed by Frank Schilling has applied for somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 TLDs.
- Google announced that it has applied for about 50 strings.(I think it is fair to say, though I can’t be certain, that Google will develop their own backend registry technology.)
- Key-Systems announced that it will provide services for 31 clients.
- Demand Media applied for 26 gTLDs in addition to the TLDs it partnered up with Donuts on.
- AFNIC applied for 16 TLDs.
- Nic.at (Austria’s ccTLD operator) has submitted 11 applications, 6 of which are geographic).
- Nominet has applied for 7 strings on behalf of clients.
- UK-based CentralNic has applied for 60 TLDs including 10 from ICANN Wiki Founder, Raymond King his business partner Peter Brual.
- GoDaddy has announced that it has applied for 3 TLDs (.godaddy, .home, .casa) Both .home and .casa will be contested.
- web.com announced its application for .web
- Afilias has yet to announce the number of applications it was involved with.
Finally, on the homefront here in Japan, GMO Internet in Japan has applied for several geographic TLDs, including .tokyo, .osaka, .nagoya, and .yokohama. The company has poured lots of cash in its bid for .Shop as well. GMO has relationships with several large brands in Japan and secured Canon and Hitachi early on in. (Back-end system is believed to be CloudRegistry)
Reveal Day is just another small step in a long process. After the strings are fully announced tomorrow applicants will have their work cut out. Let the contention resolution begin!
