Most Asked Questions

4th May 2008

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What is “.Sport” ?

.Sport is a proposed new generic Top Level Domain, targeted as the sports community and all those who share its values.

What is a generic Top Level Domain ?

From http://www.icann.org/general/glossary.htm#G Most TLDs with three or more characters are referred to as “generic” TLDs, or “gTLDs”. They can be subdivided into two types, “sponsored” TLDs (sTLDs) and “unsponsored TLDs (uTLDs), as described in more detail below.

In the 1980s, seven gTLDs (.com, .edu, .gov, .int, .mil, .net, and .org) were created. Domain names may be registered in three of these (.com, .net, and .org) without restriction; the other four have limited purposes.

Over the past twelve years, various discussions occurred concerning additional gTLDs, leading to the selection in November 2000 of seven new TLDs for introduction. These were introduced in 2001 and 2002. Four of the new TLDs (.biz, .info, .name, and .pro) are unsponsored. The other four new TLDs (.aero, .coop, .tel and .museum) are sponsored.

Generally speaking, an unsponsored TLD operates under policies established by the global Internet community directly through the ICANN process, while a sponsored TLD is a specialized TLD that has a sponsor representing the narrower community that is most affected by the TLD. The sponsor thus carries out delegated policy-formulation responsibilities over many matters concerning the TLD.

What is ICANN ?

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is a not-for-profit organization with its offices in Marina del Rey, CA and Brussels, Belgium. Among others, ICANN’s mission is to coordinate the allocation of top level domain names, like .com, .org and many others. For more information about ICANN, please refer to its web site at http://www.icann.org

Why not “Sports” ?

While “sports” is widely used in North America, we think the British English singular “sport” is more apt to reach a wider audience. We counted 26 languages in Latin script which use the exact spelling “sport”, and this is by no way exhaustive.

Sounds like I need a .Sport domain !

Thank you for your interest, but please be patient. At this stage .Sport is only a proposal. We intend to submit an application to ICANN in the near future.

When will .sport domains be available ?

[Updated November 2009 ]

The last news is that ICANN is unable to commit to a timeline for accepting applications for new top level domains. This should be sometime in 2010. From that point on, it will take several months to examine applications and select the ones which will be added to the Internet. If our application is selected, we do not expect to become operational before 2011.

Can I help ?

Yes, you can. If you are active in the sports community, in the Internet industry, an investor and would like to actively support our application, join the DotSport consortium. If you are a potential user of a .sport domain name, support us by signing the Petition. The more support we get from the community, the better chance we stand to succeed through the application process.