One Company Is Responsible For 300+ New Top-Level Domain Applications

One week from today, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Named and Numbers (ICANN) is

due to announce a list of more than 1,900 newly proposed generic top-level domains (TLDs) — potential additions to the current and common TLDs such as .com, .net and .org.

One company has applied for more than 300 of those new TLDs.

That company is Donuts Inc., which announced this week (news release PDF) that it has submitted 307 applications for new domain name extensions.

Who?

Donuts Inc, is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington (just outside of Seattle) and was founded by a group with extensive domain industry experience. (Co-founder Paul Stahura, for example, founded the domain name registrar eNom in 1997 and later sold it to Demand Media.) The company says it has more than $100 million in funding, which at least partly explains how it afforded to pay ICANN’s $185,000 application fee for each of its proposed TLDs — a total of almost $57 million. Donuts also says it will partner with Demand Media as its registry services provider — i.e., as the technical backbone for managing any new TLDs it wins.

ICANN said this week that it received more than 1,900 applications for new TLDs, so Donuts’ group of 307 applications represents about 16 percent of the total.

After next week’s “reveal day,” ICANN will have a comment and objection period, so there’s no guarantee that Donuts will get all 307 TLDs that it’s seeking. Other current domain registrars are also expected to have applied for new domain extensions.

Google has already confirmed that it applied for more than 50 TLDs.

(tip via Mark Monitor)