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Dot-mayhem: The domain landgrab, by the numbers

Google's wants 101 new domain extensions, Amazon 76, and Microsoft 11. Here are all the key details from today's reveal.

Paul Sloan Former Editor
Paul Sloan is editor in chief of CNET News. Before joining CNET, he had been a San Francisco-based correspondent for Fortune magazine, an editor at large for Business 2.0 magazine, and a senior producer for CNN. When his fingers aren't on a keyboard, they're usually on a guitar. Email him here.
Paul Sloan
2 min read

When the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers decided to expand the domain landscape -- letting brands and anyone else with the money apply for the rights to own and run .anything -- it did so to create competition in a world of expanding demand.

And competition is what it's getting. That's clear now that ICANN has revealed who's going after what domain extensions and where there are competing applications.

The basics, according to ICANN and some data crunching from Melbourne IT Digital Brand Services:

  • 1,409 unique domain names applied for
  • 116 are Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs), meaning they use non-Latin script
  • 230 domain names have more than one applicant vying for the same name
  • 13 applicants for .app
  • 10 applicants for .art
  • 11 applicants for .home
  • 3 applicants for .sucks
  • Microsoft is applying for 11
  • Twitter and Facebook are applying for zero
  • The big collision among the applicants: Amazon vs. Google. Google is going after 101 new domain extensions -- not just names like .Youtube, but odd ones like .Dog. And Amazon is going after 76.

    These are the top-level domains Google wants. Google

    While there are subtleties when it comes to deciding which ones are in conflict -- does .kid cancel out .kids, for instance? -- there are 23 direct matches, where both tech giants want the same generic top-level-domains, or gTLDs.

    FairWindsPartners, which helps companies with domain strategies, sorted some data for us and came up with following Amazon-Google domain collisions. They include some doozies such as .search, but also some curious ones, such as .you. (ICANN wants competing companies to try to strike deals on their own.)

     
    Google and Amazon are both going after these TLDs Dan Farber/CNET, data from FairWIndsPartners

    Most of the applicants are from the U.S., although the tax-friendly zones such as the Gibraltar and the Cayman Islands had a strong showing. Frank Schilling, whose new company applied for 54 TLDs, lives in Cayman.

     
    Dan Farber/CNET, data fromMelbourne IT

    And ICANN, a global nonprofit organization, is making out well from all this. With applications fees of $185,000, ICANN pulled in more than $357 million, one-third of which is set aside for potential litigation fees.