Google Plans to Open Up .App, .Search Domains If It Gets Them

ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, has been working on launching and selling a new type of generic top-level domains. These domains would be administered by the companies that bought them, rather than ICANN itself.

Many have criticized the move as an obvious cash-grab that will make some people very rich and will force companies into buying domains they don't want just so that their competitors won't get them.

Still, plenty of big companies have announced their intentions to buy several of these domains, Google and Amazon probably having the biggest number of applications.

Apparently, Google plans to open up some of these domains, if it were to acquire them, so that any company could use them.

In a letter to ICANN, Google's CIO Ben Fried said that his company was in support of the plan to proceed with the granting of the new generic TLDs.

He also said that, after some of the objections to some of its applications, Google believed that there was a real interest in many of the domains, but also said that it would open up access to some of them.

Among them are quite obvious choices such as .app, .blog, .cloud and .search. Google says that it will be amending its application on these domains, hinting that it may open them up if it receives them.

"While we believe that restricted and single-registrant models allow significant opportunities for innovation that are not possible with a traditional open registry business model, we understand that there is particular sensitivity within the Internet community about certain broad terms that serve as industry descriptors," Google explained.

"Google has identified four of our current single registrant applications that we will revise: .app, .blog, .cloud and .search," Google added.

"These terms have been identified by governments (via Early Warning) and others within the community as being potentially valuable and useful to industry as a whole.We also believe that for each of these terms we can create a strong set of user experiences and expectations without restricting the string to use with Google products," it said.