First new gTLDs sign registry and registrar agreements

I attended the recent ICANN meeting in Durban, South Africa, during which a new milestone in the rollout of the new generic Top Level Domains (gTLDs) was reached:

Three companies signed the Registry Agreement while five others signed the Registrar Accreditation Agreement, including registrars from Australia, France and the U.S. Registries operate Top-Level Domains; registrars are the entities through which domain names are registered.

The three registries applied for Top-Level Domain Names in the Arabic, Chinese and Cyrillic scripts.

UCL, as the world’s leading centre of linguistic expertise in cooperation with SOAS, has been providing linguistic support to ICANN as it makes the Internet’s addressing system truly international at last.

Existing gTLDs include .com, .org and .net, but there are going to be many more exotic ones, especially brand names, over the next few months.