Mumbai. Since October 2013, many new gTLD [generic Top Level Domains] are made available by ICANN and hundreds are waiting in queue. These gTLD are released on a weekly basis for general public usage.
What is a DNS?
In order to explain the concept of gTLD, let me explain you what a DNS [Domain-Name System] is and how it's related to an IP address.
Let us consider this example,
www.google.com- Here, the domain name
www.google.comis separated by two dots in between, dividing the it in three labels.
- The
.comlabel on right-hand side is termed as TLD [top level domain].
- The second label
googleis called as domain name. A single TLD has millions and millions of domain names in it. For eg. yahoo.com, facebook.com, etc. are domain names in the TLD .com
- The third label
wwwis what we call a sub-domain. Generally, a sub-domain is the sole property of the respective domain name. For eg. This blog techriots.blogspot.com belongs to Google rather than myself.
Now, these TLDs are furthermore divided into three subtypes,
- Country-code TLD [ccTLD]: These TLD's are country specific and mostly two digit in size. ICANN has provided a unique ccTLD to every country and territory and managed by the respective local organiusation. For eg. .in (for India), .us (for USA),etc.
- Special TLD: .arpa is the only available special-TLD. For more information, click here.
- Generic TLD [gTLD]: Most TLD with three or more characters are referred to as generic TLD. This is the category which is under tremendous development since the invention of internet.
Initial gTLD
Only seven gTLDs (.com, .edu, .gov, .int, .mil, .net, and
.org) were created in 1980, of which three (.com, .net, .org) were available without restrictions. Since then this list has been increasing from three to currently hundreds of them being made available and many more to follow suit.