.corp

Status:	Proposed
Type:	Generic
Category:	Commerce
Priority #:	348 - Dot Registry LLC 926 - STRAAT Investments (NU DOT CO LLC) 1014 - Donuts (Cotton Fields, LLC) 1393 - DotCorp Ltd. 1906 - Google (Charleston Road Registry Inc.)
More information:

.corp is a proposed new gTLD in ICANN's New gTLD Program.

Applicants

There are five applicants for the .corp TLD including:

1. DotCorp Ltd., a Hong Kong-based company that intends to offer .corp internationally.
2. Dot Registry LLC, an American company that is also applying for .inc, .llc, .llp. Dot Registry LLC intends to limit registration of their strings to only verifiable American companies that qualify for the respective designation; this initiative has already received some support from U.S. Secretaries of State. The company is using Neustar for their backend registry services.
3. STRAAT Investments, the parent company of .co Internet is applying for 13 domain name strings including .corp.
4. Donuts(Cotton Fields, LLC), a new registry company that filed for 307 new gTLD applications. Each gTLD application was submitted to ICANN under different company names. This applicant submitted a Public Interest Commitment, which can be downloaded here.
5. Google (Charleston Road Registry Inc.), applied for 101 TLDs. Sarah Falvey, Senior Policy Analyst of Google is the main contact person in the application.

Former Applicants

1. PROC Registry, LLC, Joshua Bourne, Managing Partner of FairWinds Partners is the main contact person in the application. This application was WITHDRAWN.

Objections

Jeff Bullock, the Secretary of State for Delaware, has raised concerns about new gTLD applications for .inc, .corp, and .ltd. He believed that the applications do not adequately safeguard consumers, businesses, the public at large, state regulators, or the internet itself from the gTLDs being potentially used for fraudulent or misleading purposes. Delaware's lenient company laws make it the state US corporations are most registered in.

Name Collision Concerns Impede Delegation

ICANN hired firm Interisle Consulting to carry out an independent investigation on the issues that may arise from new gTLDs that are identical to TLDs being used on internal networks. The publishing of the report sparked a community-wide debate that later became known as the Name Collision issue. The firm reported at ICANN 47 that .home and .corp gTLDs were cause for serious concern since those strings are widely in use by internal naming systems. In response to the report, ICANN labeled the .home and .corp strings as "high risk" and proposed that neither of the strings be delegated until it could be proven that risk is low. These two strings are currently severely delayed and some community members guess they may never be delegated.