Application procedure
How does the application proceed?
After submitting your application, ICANN verifies whether you fulfill all the requirements for the operation of your own registry. Among other things the criteria of this assessment are:
- the choice of the character string for your top-level domain (minimum of 3 characters)
- Your business model and your financial security over a period of three up to five years
- the technical and operational performance of the registry
An overview of the application procedure can be found here. In case some points of your application happen to be insufficient, it is possible to make use of an extended evaluation in order address and resolve any problems or questions.
In addition to that, third parties may file an objection to your application which may lead to objection proceedings.
If two applicants aspire towards an identical or very similar TLD there will be made a selection among the competitors in the scope of the so-called string contention process.
When you have finally finished the application process successfully, ICANN verifies the technical and operational performance of your business by doing a last check.
If your application succeeds in all tests, your gTLD will be confirmed by ICANN, and it will be inserted into the root zone file. The duration of the whole application process is estimated by ICANN to be at least eight months. After successful completion of the application process, you will have a maximum of 12 months to start operation of your new gTLD.
