Five years after the start of ICANN’s new gTLD program, registration of new domains continues. Although the delegation of new gTLDs peaked in 2015 and 2016, the number of TLDs keeps growing.
Domain Incite reports that both new domains, .DEV and .INC, will be launched on January 16, 2019. .DEV, owned by Google since 2015, will offer priority registration to brand and trademark owners between January 16 and February 19. Premium registration at a higher cost will become available on February 19-28. Starting on February 28, registration will open to all other users. The news was announced on November 13, 2018, at the Chrome Dev developers’ summit.
.DEV is the latest gTLD from Google’s portfolio that was registered under the new gTLD program. Just like the earlier launched .APP, this domain is mainly intended for software developers. Its registration back in 2014 caused a lot of headache for developers who traditionally used .DEV for local testing of their projects. According to Google regulations, .DEV has embedded HTTPS support, which a developer’s internal test server may not support for various reasons. But over the four years since the registration of .DEV, the issue has been resolved and .DEV’s launch will hardly cause any complications.
Even before registration opened, Google launched the WEB.DEV domain with one of the corporation’s new products, a testing tool for .DEV web developers.
The second new domain, .INC also faced difficulties during its launch but for completely different reasons. Back in 2012, when DOT Registry announced its plans to apply to ICANN to manage .INC, .CORP and .LLC, the National Association of Secretaries of State (NASS) came out strongly against these domains. NASS representatives demanded tough restrictions be imposed on these domains to prevent any fraud or confusion.
Several other companies bid for control of the .INC domain in addition to DOT Registry. The auction took place only in mid-2017, making GTLD Limited from Hong Kong the owner of .INC. GTLD Limited was founded by Edmon Chong, CEO of DotAsia (administrator of the .ASIA domain). .INC cost Chong more than $15 million. Plans for the launch of .INC are very similar to those of .DEV. Experts believe that at the first stage, GTLD Limited will earn the lion’s share of its revenue from the companies that will register domains in .INC for protection purposes. Earlier, .SUCKS and .FEEDBACK used this strategy.
