What are gTLDs and ccTLDs?

What are gTLDs and ccTLDs?

There are well over 200 TLDs assigned by ICANN. TLD stands for Top Level Domain. such as .com, .net, .mobi, .us, .de, etc. 

A sub-domain is essentially a part of a domain such as About.DNBlogger.com where “About” is a sub-domain of the main domain DNBlogger.com. A domain can have virtually unlimited sub-domains. Generally each sub-domain opens its own page. 

gTLDs stands for generic Top Level Domains such as .com, .net, .org, .biz, .info, .travel, .mobi etc. Many gTLDs are sponsored TLDs.

A sponsored gTLD (occasionally also called an sTLD) is a specialized gTLD that has a sponsor representing a specific community that is served by the gTLD. The sponsor will carry out delegated policy-formulation responsibilities over many matters concerning the gTLD. For example .aero, .cat, .coop, .jobs, .mobi, .museum, and .travel are sponsored gTLDs. Entities that wish to register domain names in a sponsored gTLD are required to meet certain eligibility requirements established by ICANN.

An unsponsored gTLD Registry operates under policies established by the global Internet community directly through the ICANN process. The .biz, .com, .info, .name, .net, .org, and .pro are unsponsored gTLDs.

ccTLDs stands for the more than 200 country code Top Level Domainssuch as .us (United States), .ca (Canada), .de (Deutschland/Germany), .eu (Europe), .es (Espaňa/ Spain), .in (India) etc. 

In addition to gTLDs and ccTLDs, there is one special TLD called .arpa, which is used for technical infrastructure purposes. ICANN administers the .arpa TLD along with the Internet technical community under the guidance of the Internet Architecture Board. 

Recently ICANN announced the availability of virtually anything as a TLD and many people have already started calling those as vTLDs i.e. vanity TLDs. 

There are also repurposed TLDs i.e. the TLDs associated to countries being used as something else by companies that licensed them from those countries. A number of the world’s smaller countries have licensed their TLDs for world-wide commercial use. For example, Tuvalu and the Federated States of Micronesia, small island-states in the South Pacific have licensed their ccTLDs to be used as domain names using the .tv and .fm TLDs to television and radio stations.

For a complete list of ccTLDs, you can check out this site of Internet Assigned Numbers Authority: 

http://www.iana.org/domains/root/db/ 

For all about Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers i.e. ICANN, check out this: 

http://www.icann.org/