ICANN is the backbone of the Internet, domains and corporate antagonism
Just a week after rolling forward its gTLD program, ICANN is rolling in the dough.
With 25 successful gTLD applicants, each of which passed the preliminary approval process that examines the applicant’s legal rights, ICANN collected $125,000 in deposits or $5,000 per application.
The deadline for gTLD applications is April 12 and interested parties much display interest in writing by March 29.
In May, ICANN plans to publish a list of applicants and their respective gTLDs and then the fun begins: each application costs $185,000 with no warranty of approval, so companies must have a strong case prior to applying.
We do not plan to apply for .DomainGang because we find the gTLD concept silly and unnecessary, much like the SOPA bill.
The whole gTLD is created to make more money for ICAN. I think large online companies will be paying for these domains to use them in marketing campaigns or maybe for their emails. Like Facebook employees has name@fb.com instead of regular @facebook.com email addresses. Now they could be name@mail.facebook. It doesn’t make much sense in my given example but there could be some good variations of it.