16

For some weeks in 2012, "arbitrary" gTLDs could be applied for at ICANN:

On June 20, 2011 ICANN's board voted to end most restrictions on the generic top-level domain names (gTLD) from the 22 currently available. Companies and organizations will be able to choose essentially arbitrary top-level Internet domains.

According to a search on https://gtldresult.icann.org/, no one tried to register .onion in the last application period. I’m not sure, but I guess ICANN will open the application system again, sometime.

Does the Tor project plan to register the .onion TLD with ICANN?

Would the Tor project have any privilege to claim this TLD, so that no one else may register it beforehand?

If someone else would register .onion and create domains matching those of hidden services, we’d have two incompatible systems.

(EDIT: see also the related questions "How would a registration of the .onion gtld impact the tor network?" and "What happens when I visit a .onion website".)

Community
  • 1
unor
  • 398
  • 1
  • 19

3 Answers3

6

Always useful to search Tor's bug tracker. They discussed it, see Ticket #6116: apply for .onion gTLD at IANA.

I'd say it's undecided. There are no plans to spend the money for now, but if one of Tor's sponsors wanted them to apply for that domain in future, they'd do it.

I'd speculate, it's pretty unlikely. I guess they would rather talk their sponsors into sponsoring full time develop(s) for that money.

adrelanos
  • 2,847
  • 2
  • 20
  • 35
5

According to RFC 6761 domain names can be reserved for "special use". Currently several people are attempting to reserve .onion, .exit, .i2p, .gnu, and .zkey so that they couldn't become TLDs (as mentioned in this weeks Tor Weekly News)

Community
  • 1
3

Update 2015

IANA added .onion to the list of Special-Use Domain Names.

This was based on RFC 7686: The ".onion" Special-Use Domain Name.

Tor’s ticket #6116: apply for .onion gTLD at IANA got closed.

Everything’s fine.

Community
  • 1
unor
  • 398
  • 1
  • 19