.top is a
generic top-level domain, officially delegated in
ICANN's
New gTLD Program on August 4, 2014.
The domain name extension .top is managed and operated by the .top registry (registry backend ZDNS) which belongs to Jiangsu Bangning Science & Technology Co., Ltd. in
Nanjing
Nanjing (; , Mandarin pronunciation: ), alternately romanized as Nanking, is the capital of Jiangsu province of the People's Republic of China. It is a sub-provincial city, a megacity, and the second largest city in the East China region. ...
,
China
China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's most populous country, with a population exceeding 1.4 billion, slightly ahead of India. China spans the equivalent of five time zones an ...
and can be registered by anyone since November 18, 2014 without special requirements.
A
second level domain under the
top level domain (
TLD) .top can consist of digits, letters, hyphens and specific special characters while it can have a length of 1 up to (a maximum) of 63 characters. Like most other TLDs It can be registered for a period of at least 1 year up to (a maximum) of 10 years in advance. The private registration (
WHOIS privacy) of .top domains is supported as well the ability to register
internationalized domain names
An internationalized domain name (IDN) is an Internet domain name that contains at least one label displayed in software applications, in whole or in part, in non-latin script or alphabet, such as Arabic, Bengali, Chinese ( Mandarin, simpli ...
(
IDNs) which includes the character sets Arabic, Chinese (simplified & traditional), French, German, Japanese, Russian and Spanish.
Meaning
The meaning of the word "top" (
adjective
In linguistics, an adjective (abbreviated ) is a word that generally modifies a noun or noun phrase or describes its referent. Its semantic role is to change information given by the noun.
Traditionally, adjectives were considered one of the m ...
) is globally recognized a synonym for "best", "high-end", "leading", "highest (rank / quality / position)", "state-of-the-art", "outstanding" etc. in a large number of (western) languages. This plus its easy spelling makes it one of the most used expressions in print / radio / TV / web when it comes to pointing out how something is valued. In opposite to the generic 3 letter TLDs
.com
The domain name .com is a top-level domain (TLD) in the Domain Name System (DNS) of the Internet. Added at the beginning of 1985, its name is derived from the word ''commercial'', indicating its original intended purpose for domains registere ...
/
.net &
.org which are all
abbreviations that stand for "commercial" / "network" & "organization", the generic 3 letter TLD .top is a complete word, "top".
Development
* June 20, 2011, ICANN officially announced that the application for new gTLDs was to open in 2012.
* April 11, 2012, the application was submitted online. On June 9, 2012, it appeared on the ICANN public list.
* March 20, 2013, it passed initial evaluation.
* March 20, 2014, the registry signed a contract with ICANN.
* August 5, 2014, the domain entered the root zone of ICANN new gTLD.
* October 15, 2014, it entered its
sunrise period
The sunrise period of domain name registration is a special period during which trademark holders may preregister names that are the same or similar to their trademarks in order to avoid cybersquatting. This occurs prior to the general launch of th ...
.
* November 18, 2014, .top domains could be registered openly. Registration volume exceeded 10,000 on the first day.
* April 24, 2015, .top was put on record with Chinese national government department MIIT (Ministry of Industry and Information Technology).
* September 2015, .top domains obtained 250,000 new registrations within one week, making its registration volume surge to 530,000.
* December 2015, .top registration reached around 1,000,000.
* May 2022, .top registration reached around 1,900,000.
References
External links
*
{{Generic top-level domains
Top
A spinning top, or simply a top, is a toy with a squat body and a sharp point at the bottom, designed to be spun on its vertical axis, balancing on the tip due to the gyroscopic effect.
Once set in motion, a top will usually wobble for a few ...
Computer-related introductions in 2014