.top

The domain name .top is a new generic top level domain (gTLD) accredited by ICANN and were officially delegated in ICANN's New gTLD Program on August 4th, 2014. .Top domain is managed and operated by .TOP registry[1][2], which is affilicated to Jiangsu Bangning Group in Nanjing, China[3], and can be registered by anyone for use since November 18th, 2014.

Development of .TOP Domains On June 20th, 2011, ICANN officially announced that the application for gTLD was to be open in 2012. On April 11th,2012, the application for .Top was submitted online. On June 9th, 2012, .Top was successfully on the ICANN public list. On March 20th, 2013, .Top passed initial evaluation. On March 20th, 2014, .Top officially signed a contract with ICANN. On August 5th, 2014, .Top entered the root zone of ICANN new gTLD. On October 15th, 2014, .Top embraced its sunrise period. On November 18th, 2014, .Top could be registered openly, and the registration volume exceeded 10,000 at the first day. On March 5th, 2015, .Top was supported on the sedo.com which is the biggest platform trading domains in the world. On April 24th, 2015, .Top was put on record with Chinese national government department MIIT (Ministry of Industry and Information Technology)

Background & Current Uses Since the open registration day November 18th, 2014, .top domain has attracted numbers of international and domestic investors as well as terminal enterprises, and is developing at momentum with its registration, ranking 9th among all new gTLDs[4]. Users from more than 100 countries and regions are using .top to build websites[5][6].

References

• 1. http://icannwiki.com/Top_Registry
• 2. http://www.nic.top/en/
• 3. http://www.bangning.top/
• 4. https://ntldstats.com/
• 5. https://namestat.org/top
• 6. Reason of .top's popularity: http://www.nic.top/en/news_view.asp?id=203