By Ding Xianjie King & Wood Mallesons’ IP Legal Group
I. Generic Top-Level Domain and the New Gtld
gTLD (generic Top-Level Domain, “gTLD”) is one of the top-level domains (TLD) managed by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). Under the current gTLD system, there are only 22 gTLDs available (not including the TLDs representing 200+ countries and territories, such as the .cn). These TLDs are generic terms representing the nature of the industry, such as, .com means commercial organizations (but unrestricted), .edu refers to educational establishments, .gov refers to U.S. government entities, .net originally refers to network infrastructures (now unrestricted). The frequently used ones are .com, .edu, .net, .org, .info, .biz, but the most commonly used and the most popular one is undoubtedly .com.
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