LONDON – The U.K. capital will apply for its own Internet domain, .london, to capitalize on the city’s strong brand, the Financial Times reported.
It will do so with the help of start-up company, Top-Level Domain Holdings, created to manage some of the hundreds of new Web domain names scheduled to launch later this year, it said.
London & Partners, the city’s promotional organization, has picked the firm to help it apply for and run the .london domain.
Major cities in other countries, including New York and Mumbai, also plan to apply for their own domains, according to the FT.
The news comes as the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a California organization that runs the online domain system, is planning to dramatically expand the number of domain names in use beyond the established ones, such as .com and .net.
Applications for new suffixes close at the end of the day Thursday, with ICANN set to reveal the names applied for at the end of the month, the paper said.
Peter Dengate Thrush, executive chairman of TLDH, said the London contract was the most significant deal for his company to-date.
“We expect the .london registry to be very successful as London is such a powerful brand,” he told the FT. “We expect it will be one of the earliest ones available and that it will be very large.”
