In the future, you may be surfing the net to a URL with the .windows name at the end. Today, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Named and Numbers organization revealed a massive list of what companies had applied to take control of top-level domain names. That list included Microsoft, which has applied to own the .windows domain, along with .xbox, .docs and of course .microsoft.
Other brand names that Microsoft has applied for in the top-level domain request race are .azure, .hotmail, .skydrive, and .skype. Other tech companies such as Google have applied for .android, .chrome, .cloud, .lol, .vip, and .wow. Amazon has tried to apply for some more generic top-level domain names including .book, .fire, .music, .movie and .free
News.com reports that each applicant had to pay a whopping $185,000 per string, plus an unspecified amount of extra money in order to show the ICANN that they could in fact run a high level domain name. The ICANN will look at all of the applications, including areas of trademark and copyright ownership. The review process is expected to take a while; the first new top level domain names may not go live until sometime in 2013.
Source: ICANN
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