Domain Incite, citing ICANN documents, has reported on the imminent launch of the new generic top-level domain, .dot. From the very beginning, it was regarded as highly promising. Suffice it to say that several applicants competed to operate the domain at an ICANN auction in November 2014, where Dish DBS Corporation outbid a formidable competitor, Google, by paying $700,000 for the rights to administer it.
According to information submitted by the registry to ICANN, the sunrise period will begin on July 21 and run through October 19. During this period, registered trademark owners will have the opportunity to be among the first to register the corresponding domain names. Immediately after the sunrise period concludes, an early access period will begin on October 20 and run for 12 days, allowing applicants to register domain names ahead of the general public by paying a premium fee. General availability is scheduled to begin on November 2. The cost of domain name registrations has not yet been announced.
Given the prime meaning of the word “dot,” it is easy to guess that the name dot.dot looks like a trump card in the .dot deck. However, there are no chances of obtaining it: it has been reserved by the registry to be used for the domain zone’s main site. As for the remaining domain names, only time will tell how strong demand will be. Registration will be open to all eligible applicants, and the registry describes .dot as a space “designed for builders and the things they create… products, communities, brands, or ideas worth a name of their own.”
It is worth noting that this is already the second new domain zone that Dish has introduced to the market this year. The first was .latino, for which general availability began on June 12. In any case, the launch has been rather modest so far. As of now, the .latino zone has fewer than 800 registered domain names. Meanwhile, Google search results mainly point to a TLD-hopping movie piracy site and a Vietnamese gambling site.
