Domain

February 26, 2013; Source: PC Magazine

The nonprofit Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) governs the Internet’s domain names. It’s the organization that put the .org in your website address, and starting in April, it will be rolling out approximately 20 new extensions a week. If you don’t have one of them, you missed the boat for this round, but there will almost certainly be more rounds to come in the future. The ICANN applicant’s guidebook for those interested in attaining a new top-level domain notes that claiming one of these suffixes comes at the cost of a $185,000 fee.

There were some obvious nonprofit grabs amongst the filings, such as the AARP scooping up the .aarp extension. NPQ explored the list of filings to see who was interested in securing more broadly applicable top-level domains that might be of interest to those in the nonprofit sector. Here’s a taste of what we found:

Top-Level Domain Name Extension

Filed For By

.charity

Corn Lake, LLC and Spring Registry Limited

.church

Life Covenant Church, Inc. and Holly Fileds, LLC

.college

XYX.com, LLC and Binky Edge, LLC

.community

Fox Orchard, LLC

.foundation

John Dale, LLC

.giving

Giving Limited

.university

Little Station, LLC

.vote

Monolith Registry, LLC and Double Falls, LLC

A lot of nonprofits were likely priced out of this game, perhaps unable to justify spending $185,000 on an Internet naming extension that might never amount to much. On the other hand, nonprofits that are serious about long-term digital strategic planning should be thinking about “what’s in a name.” It’s possible that, at some point in the future, your constituents may expect to find you at yourname.nonprofit instead of at yourname.org. –Mike Keefe-Feldman