Friday, April 5th, 2013

It’s not really “new”, but .jobs is likely to beat other TLDs to the market later this year.

Forget prioritization draw numbers, new TLD objections, and contention sets: .jobs may be the first “new TLD” to be available for registration this year.

It’s not really a “new” TLD. .Jobs is a sponsored top level domain that was entered into the root in 2005.

But it was initially heavily restricted. Companies could only register domains that matched their exact company name.

That’s a lousy way to grow registration numbers and make money. So in 2010 Employ Media, which operates .jobs, sought to expand eligibility for domains so you could register just about anything. It started a controversial project called Dot Jobs Universe in which tens of thousands of generic domains, such as city.jobs, were registered and turned into job boards.

dot jobsICANN ended up threatening to shut down .jobs, and online job sites including Monster and CareerBuilder joined in the fight.

ICANN later gave up the battle.

Today ICANN issued a press release commending .jobs on using the new trademark clearinghouse for its upcoming sunrise. The release also announced that .jobs is opening up its registration policies later this year.

Just about anyone register a .jobs domain on just about any topic later this year.

Matthew Embrescia, President & COO of Employ Media, told Domain Name Wire today that .jobs hopes to be the first TLD to test the clearinghouse and get out of the gate later this year. That’s likely to be the case, as it doesn’t have to worry about what actual new TLD applicants do: the new RAA, testing, contracts, etc. And a number of registrars are already integrated to sell .jobs domains.

Registrants will technically have to be “consistent with the charter and registration agreement” for .jobs domains. But that doesn’t mean much. The domains will have to be used for jobs content and registrants will need to agree to support the Society for Human Resource Management code of ethics.

Embrescia said the company doesn’t have firm dates for the launch yet and hasn’t decided on pricing.