December 21, 2012
ICANN's Prioritization Draw for new generic Top Level Domain (gTLD) took place several days ago.
Held at the Hilton Los Angeles Airport, the draw assigned randomly-drawn priority number to new generic Top Level Domain applications, which will be used to determine the order in which initial evaluation results are released.
The first ticket out of the proverbial hat was an application for "Catholic" in Chinese.
There are around 40 Australian applications for new domain name extensions and the following are the first 20 drawn, in order of prioritisation:
173 - .SELECT
206 - .CEO
338 - .MONASH
370 - .ISELECT
378 - .CBA
413 - .SALON
608 - .AMP
639 - .WEBJET
783 - .UBANK
929 - .PHYSIO
949 - .COMPARE
954 - .COURSES
981 - .TENNIS
984 - .NAB
1007 - .GLOBALX
1019 - .YELLOWPAGES
1148 - .COMMBANK
1199 - .IINET
1208 - .SBS
1224 - .NETBANK
Those at the head of the list aren't guaranteed to be first cabs off the rank for actual rollout - there are still hoops for all applicants to jump through. As mentioned, the prioritisation numbers simply relate to evaluation results.
1766 tickets were sold in the draw, which accounted for 92% of new gTLD applications. The first stage of the draw was for IDN's (Internationalized Domain Names- those that provide support for non-Latin characters) with tickets in the lottery and the second for non-IDN applications with tickets. The third and fourth states were for IDN/non-IDN applications respectively without tickets.
Each ticket in the draw cost $100, with the proceeds going to Kiva, Invenio and Wikimedia Foundation.
The first batch new domain name extensions passing muster are expected to go live between March and August of next year.
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