ICANN said that it has has entered into commercial and technical negotiations with two of the candidate registries, .post and .travel of the ten candidates that originally applied to run a top-level domain (TLD) earlier this year.
The other eight have evidently not been rejected, although at least one applicant has publicly stated he considers his application has been declined. An ICANN spokesperson said that .post and .travel have not yet technically been approved.
The .post application, filed by the Universal Postal Union, would map the database of standardized global postal codes into the domain name system. The .travel domain, is backed by Tralliance Corp and a few dozen travel industry consortia.
ICANN has the authority over what domains are added to the official domain name system. It’s not clear how close to full approval these two proposed TLDs are, or whether either is a slam-dunk to be added to the root.
The last time ICANN considered new TLDs, in 2000, the commercial and technical negotiations did not come until after ICANN’s board had discussed all the applications and approved seven, during a public meeting.
There has been no such meeting this time. The ten applications have been reviewed by three independent review panels, the members of which ICANN did not name. The reports of these panels, unlike during the 2000 process, have not been published.
