A domain name needs at least one “dot”

It’s final: ICANN won’t allow any of the new gTLD’s to be run as dotless domain names. Google for example had applied for .search to be used as a “dotless domain name”, meaning that you would be able to go to “search” in the address bar (without anything in front of it) and end up on your favourite search-engine (which would obviously default to Google itself). But they most certainly won’t be able to offer that feature now as ICANN thinks it might cause security problems.Neither will any of the other new gTLD’s be allowed to set up their extension so that they can be used without any subdomain in front of it. So sending mails to somebody@mail has also been nipped in the bud.

Some country code TLD’s have however been set-up so that they can be accessed without subdomain in front. Since ICANN has little control over the working of such country codes, they can keep on working like that. Most however aren’t very known and simply redirect to the registry website (like http://dk or http://sh) or point to a webserver that doesn’t respond or shows an error.