Featuring the .Shop Top Level Domain

FITCHBURG, Wis. - Oct. 2, 2013 - PRLog -- For more than 30 years, the .COM Top Level Domain (TLD) has ruled the Internet as the most popular TLD ever created. Originally intended to stand for 'Commercial', domains in the .COM TLD spam every continent, topic, and country on the face of the planet.

Today, there are just 22 generic Top Level Domains - like .COM and .BIZ - from which to choose. But with over 200 million domain names, well, it's easy to see that 22 just isn't enough.

In 2012, Internet regulators held a historic application round, inviting companies to apply to create any new TLD that they wanted. The response from the business community was enthusiastic. 1,930 applications for new TLDs were filed for everything from .shop and .site to .web and .buzz.  Domains within new TLDs like the .NYC TLD may go on sale as early as 2014.

DotAnything.co will be profiling the most popular new TLDs in a ten-week series on new TLD applicants. This week's featured TLD is the .Shop TLD.

The .Shop TLD is the most popular TLD in the 2012 application round. In 2012, SEDO, a popular domain name marketplace, released its list of the top ten most valuable TLDs. Number one on the list was the .Shop TLD.

Sedo’s list has indeed proven prophetic, as more .Shop domains have been pre-registerd than domains in any other TLD, even surpassing the number of pre-registrations for .Web domains and .Site domains.  But why is the .Shop TLD so popular? According to Shweta Sahjwani, Strategic Partner Manager for DotShop Inc., “.Shop will allow Registrants in the e-commerce market to differentiate themselves from the 200+ million domain names out there. As of now, a domain belonging to an online store appears identical to any other domain name in a .gTLD (com) or .ccTLD extension (eg .in).” DotShop Inc. - a wholly owned subsidiary within the Directi Group - is one of the nine applicants seeking to operate the .Shop TLD.

It is unclear at this stage which company will be awarded the contract to operate the .Shop TLD. There were nine applications filed in the 2012 ICANN application round from companies seeking to operate the .Shop TLD. These nine applicants were as follows:


Commercial Connect LLC
Sugar Maple, LLC (a Donuts company)
Dot Shop Limited
Amazon EU S.a.r.l.
Charleston Road Registry
DotShop Inc.
GMO Registry, Inc. (GMO applied twice)
Beijing Jingdong 360 Du E-Commerce TLD

All applicants for the .Shop TLD, with the exception of Commercial Connect LLC, have now passed the Initial Evaluation phase of the new TLDs application process. Commercial Connect LLC is currently participating in the Extended Evaluation phase for its .Shop application.  Depending on the results of the Extended Evaluation of Commercial Connect's application for .Shop, Commercial Connect may or may not be allowed to proceed to the next phases of the application process, which is the Dispute Resolution phase.

The Dispute Resolution phase of the ICANN evaluation process has been running concurrently with Initial Evaluations and Extended Evaluations. The Dispute Resolution phase of the new TLDs application process is an opportunity for applicants or other interested parties to file disputes against new TLD applications on one of four dispute grounds: Legal Rights, String Confusion, Limited Public Interest or Community Objection.

The deadline for filing a dispute against an application for a new TLD has closed. Surprisingly, just two objections were filed against an applicant for a .Shop TLD:

* An objection was filed against the Amazon application for the .Shop TLD by Commercial Connect on the basis of String Confusion.
* An objection was filed against the Amazon application for the .Shop TLD by Japan Association of New Economy (JANE) on the basis of Community opposition.

In addition to the objections above, Commercial Connect LLC also filed several additional String Confusion objections against other strings, such as .Store and .ShopYourWay, which it felt were too similar to the .Shop TLD and could potentially cause consumer confusion.

The Next Step: Negotiations or Bidding?

If, after the Dispute Resolution phase is complete, more than one applicant is still 'in the running' in a given contention set, then applicants are encouraged to negotiate amongst themselves. So far, this has resulted in either applicants agreeing to combine their applications or else in a bidding processes hosted by third party providers. For example, Tucows, Directi and Namecheap recently combined their bids for the .online Top Level Domain.

Since extended evalution can take up to 90 days, and a bidding process may take additional time, it may late in 2014 before domains within a .Shop TLD could be created either by a Restricted Registry creating wholly owned domains or by an Unrestricted Registry selling domain names within the .Shop TLD to the general public.

Photo:
https://www.prlog.org/12220043/1