Google Announces Plans to Share the Internet at Crucial ICANN Summit

LONDON, April 10, 2013 /PRNewswire/ --

names.co.uk reveals Google's letter to ICANN saying .app and .search will be shared with the wider Internet community

names.co.uk, one of the UK's top domain name registrars, has today confirmed that Google will have to compromise on its share of generic Top Level Domains on the Internet, after attending today's 46^th ICANN meeting in Beijing (http://beijing46.icann.org).

Google has previously made a play for some of the most valuable new Top Level Domains including .app, .search, .blog and .cloud. Last night it became clear that the Internet giant would have to compromise its original commercial vision to stay in the race to control these key domains. In a surprise U-turn Google presented a letter to ICANN publishing their intention to offer a concession to their proposals for controlling closed generic terms .app .search .blog and .cloud.

In their original submission for .app, Google proposed to completely control all .app domain names and restrict use only to Google applications. With the App industry being so competitive, government and industry pressure has mounted and it looks like Google has taken note. Now Google has officially requested to change whole sections of their original application forms for extensions like .app, which effectively means that they plan to relinquish total control. Instead Google will open up .app to all industry developers, not just those of its own application developer network.

Kelly Salter at names.co.uk has been following the events in Beijing and commented: "This U-turn by Google is amazing because it demonstrates that the domain industry and Government Advisory Committee are positively influencing the amount of control that commercial organisations can have over our free and open internet.  It would surely be anti-competitive to allow Google to control the .app space simply for their own commercial gain and so this is a win for all Internet users.  Google wrote to ICANN on 07^th March saying they wanted new TLD's to help increase innovation in a market that has always been, effectively, stagnant - I'm glad they have realised innovation can come about not just by the Google route."

Stephen Ewart at names.co.uk went on to say, "The Internet community have spoken and told Google to 'play nice' with other Internet users. I hope Amazon is paying attention because they have made their own controversial applications. Google will have to change their whole business model for extensions like .app, where previously they planned to use it to control Google network application specific content.  For Google to completely change direction tells me they are anticipating ICANN will speak out against generic extensions like .app being closed."

The next two years will see one of the biggest changes the Internet has ever seen, with over 1,000 new domain name extensions being launched globally. The ICANN board also revealed during the last 24 hours that they expect to make an announcement between 20-30 April on the "closed generic" TLD applications.

Aboutnames.co.uk

names.co.uk provides professional online services for businesses and individuals including Web Hosting, Domain Name Registration, Email services, Ecommerce solutions and Business Servers. names.co.uk has over 15 years' experience in the Internet industry and employs a team of nearly 200 expertly trained individuals across the UK.

names.co.uk is part of the Dada Group, an international group of companies who specialise in providing professional Internet services. As a group, they currently have over 1.8 million domains registered in over 250 extensions, 500,000 websites hosted on our platforms and over 490,000 clients using their products and services.

For more information please see http://www.names.co.uk

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SOURCE names.co.uk