ICANN is looking for sponsored TLDs – restricted domains backed by specific interest groups – and the strings applied for reflect a number of verticals and hint at the possibility of innovative services.

While some of the applications, such as .asia, .jobs, .mail, .mobi, .travel, .post and .tel have already been covered here, there are a couple of surprise entries, such as .mail and .cat, and one unexpected omission.

The Virginia-based Society for Human Resource Management has applied to run .jobs. VeriSign Inc confirmed Friday that if successful, it will be tapped to provide the back-end registry infrastructure for this domain.

Also looking to VeriSign for possible services is an organization called The Anti-Spam Community Registry, backed by noted London-based spam-fighting group The SpamHaus Project, which has applied to launch and run .mail.

Having a .mail address would guarantee that you do not spam, according to the application. Names would take the form example.com.mail, and would be used primarily in email, though the web could be used to lookup a registrant’s mailing practices.

As previously reported, the Universal Postal Union has applied to run .post, apparently set on using the domain to map its database of standardized global postal codes into the domain name system.

There are two applications to run .tel, one from Pulver.com Inc, a provider of PC-to-PC voice over IP services, and one from Telname Ltd, a London-based organization that also applied for .tel in 2000 under the name Telnic Ltd.

Telname’s application envisages a domain that could be used much like a telephone number for IP communications. It’s somewhat similar to the already publicized .mobi application, backed by Nokia, Microsoft and nine other firms.

Pulver’s idea, meanwhile, looks very much like a full-blown implementation of the ENUM, a way of representing phone numbers in DNS. The longstanding ENUM plan has been to use a second-level domain under the .arpa TLD.

Another revitalized bid that was declined by ICANN in 2000 comes from the International Foundation for Online Responsibility and ICM Registry Ltd, which proposes a .xxx domain for adults-only web sites and services.

Finally, there are two regionally oriented applications. A Hong Kong organization called DotAsia Organization Ltd, which has most of the country-code domain registries of that region behind it, wants .asia granted.

DotAsia appears to be unique in that it is also proposed that ICANN grant it the local-language versions of .asia. While there are new standards for representing non-ASCII strings in the DNS, there are to date no TLDs that use it.

There is also an application for .cat, from an organization called Fundacio puntCAT which, according to the available evidence, seems to want a domain to represent the interests of the people of the Catalonia region of northern Spain.

This article is based on material originally published by ComputerWire