As the January 2012 date draws nearer, more and more people are announcing their intentions to apply for their own New TLD. It seems that London is now joining the likes of Berlin, Madrid and Paris in an attempt to get .London approved as a New TLD.

The announcement suggesting the city’s intention to go for .London is certainly good timing, as it further increases London’s profile ahead of the Olympic Games to be held next year. London and Partners, the official city promoter, has announced that it is looking for organisations to help submit a bid to get .London approved by ICANN next year.

L & P is responsible for all City promotion and tourism within London, and was set up by Major Boris Johnson in April this year in an attempt to cut costs.

It is thought that several companies that already offer registry services are interested in backing the bid for the new domain.

Nominet, the company who manage the .uk namespace, are expected to be one of the existing registry providers who respond to the request. Nominet CEO, Lesley Cowley, has commented that after watching other capital cities move forward with their New TLD bids, it was hard to imagine London getting left behind. She also confirmed Nominet’s intention to respond to the Request for Proposal, saying that the TLD would be run on a not for profit basis, with excess funds being allocated to good causes. This is much the same as the existing Nominet Trust.

Another player in the running to submit the bid for L & P is CentralNIC, who provide registry services for a number of domains such as us.com and uk.com. As the company itself is London based, the CEO Ben Crawford has commented that they are the logical choice for the .London contract, and that they would be very interested in responding to the RFP.

If the bid goes ahead and is eventually approved by ICANN, bloggers have begun to wonder if this will allow smaller cities across the globe that share London’s name to share use of the TLD. However, ICANN does afford capital cities special privileges, so it looks likely that this will not be the case and use of the TLD will be reserved only for registrants based in London, UK.

When a capital city enters a bid for a .city TLD they are required to provide supporting documents proving that there is support for the application from the relevant governmental body. If the bid for .London is to go ahead, this is likely to mean backing from the City Mayor as well as Ministerial backing.

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