Yesterday, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the international body that regulates the Internet, released its list of applicants for new .com alternatives. There are obvious ones like .amazon and .hsbc, but less obvious ones like .ninja have also crept in. A few South African companies also got involved.

Some of the usual suspects you’d expect to appear on this list are there, but others are not. For example Coca-Cola and Facebook abstained, but Google has applied for dozens of the generic top-level domain (gTLD) name strings. gTLD is jargon for the equivalent of .com.

Google went for the obvious ones like .youtube, but joined seven other organisations, including the online retailer Amazon, in the pursuit of .music.

The most contested name is .app which received 13 applications.

Icann said that it had received a total of 1 930 requests for its first round of new net names – 166 of them were in alternatives to the Latin alphabet.

Anyone with an objection to any of the applications can now lodge their complaint within the next seven months, here.

Considering each application cost over R1,5 million, some companies will be hoping for the best.

Of those that might get a few objections, .church and .islam seem to stand out.

After this process, ICANN will aim to make the new domains live in batches of 500, with the first set going live some time after March 2013.

On the South African front, Ninja didn’t actually apply for .ninja, but Naspers has opted for .naspers, someone has gone for .capetown, .durban and .joberg.

The Electronic Media Network Limited, better known as M-Net, has gone for .africamagic, .kyknet, .mnet, and .mzansimagic, while MultiChoice went for .dstv, .gotv, and .multichoice.

SuperSport grabbed the .supersport one, too.

So what is the big deal, beside the obvious defending of ones brand? The main draw seems to be security.

Roland LaPlante, senior vice president of Afilias, a company that applied for hundreds of the new top level domains (including .shiksa – mazel tov) for itself, and on behalf of other companies, explains it:

They’ll have complete control of what goes on in their top-level domain. And that means, in those domains, there will be no SPAM, no phishing, no malware, none of the other evil things that are happening on the Internet today. So there’s a big security benefit to having your own top level domain, particularly if counterfeiting has been an issue for you.

Check out the full list of what was applied for HERE.

[Sources: BBC, Forbes, NPR]