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The Latino community may soon have its own top-level domain, .LAT, if a proposal by two organizations goes through. eCOM-LAC, an organization that works to ensure regional representation of Latin America, and NIC Mexico, the entity that manages the top-level domain of .MX for Mexico, announced the new extension earlier this month as an effort to "identify, differentiate, and add value to Internet resources related with Latinos."
Ars wrote:
Because Latin American culture extends far beyond the geographical boundaries of any one (or several) countries, the organizations feel that .LAT will help identify culturally-targeted sites to the community and the rest of the world. The domain extension has not yet been approved by ICANN, but the definition of .LAT will get the ball rolling while eCOM-LAC and NIC Mexico complete the application to have it approved as a new top-level domain.
ICANN's Jason Keenan told us that there is still currently no process to apply for new TLDs, however—the process for approving new domains is still in development. Therefore, any talk of applying for new domains is just "batting around ideas" in advance of ICANN's next round of applications, which is expected to open in mid-2008. Depending on the complexity of the application and how much contention there is over the same string, some applications will gain approval quickly while others will take quite a bit longer.
If approved, .LAT will become one of the first TLDs based on an ethnic group instead of being limited by country. The first, according to Keenan, was .CAT for Catalonians (for those not familiar, Catalonia is an autonomous community within Spain). With a new TLD approval process coming in 2008, .LAT and .CAT could be just the beginning of a bigger wave of domains focused around culture and lifestyle. We may one day see TLDs like .GLBT or .BIKE for the gay/lesbian/bisexual/trans and cycling communities, for example. The question is: who plans to beat me to applying for .NERD?
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