In 2011 the news was announced that ICANN has given the green light for applications of an own gTLD. This allows you to apply for your own extension such as for instance .paris, .london, .hotel, .mail… ICANN has now put the next step by opening a website via which you can effectively submit your application. Do keep in mind that, if you wish to file such an application, you should have a significant budget.

Everyone who’s interested to do so, can file an application via this website until April 12th 2012. You TLD doesn’t need to meet certain conditions, however there are certain things which aren’t allowed (for instance .job won’t be allowed because of its resemblance with .jobs which is already an existing extension). As it looks now, ICANN will only approve a maximum of 500 applications.  If there are filed more, priority will be given to those who seem to have a big basis and which have everything technically and legally worked out.

Below you’ll find an overview of the different steps you’ll need to take and fees that apply when filing such an application:

– ICANN evaluation fee: $185.000
This is what you pay ICANN to evaluate your application. In some cases, a partial refund of this amount is possible if you decide to quite before the end of the process. But otherwise this amount is non refundable even if your application is rejected

– Yearly ICANN fee: $ 25.000
This is a fixed cost per year. If you create over 50.000 sub domains under your TLD, you need to add $0,25 per sub domain

– Submitting a legal file: do take into account an amount of 4 or 5 zero’s
To submit a successful file, the best thing to do is to work with an agency that knows the legal aspects of such applications. Half of your application consists of a questionnaire on how legal affairs are dealt with.

On top of that, you still need to take into account the entire back-end. While it might initially seem so, this is much more than providing a few nameservers. ICANN imposes very strict rules on the uptime you need to achieve and you need to synchronize your data with an escrow service and so on. For a TLD under which only a few domain names will be created, there are products on the market for only a ‘few’ 10.000 euro’s. If you wish to register domain names under your TLD, you need to count €100.000 and more per year just for the technical realisation of the project.

So now it’s wait and see who files an application although many cities seem interested. Large companies also seem to find this an interesting project but for them it would be a prestige project.

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