The California based and privately operated non-profit organisation ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) is, besides other technical mandates, responsible for the management of top-level domains such as .com or .info (also called generic top-level domains) and country code top-level domains such as .de (for Germany) or .us (for the United States). ICANN’s mission is also to enable the creation of new top-level domains (http://icann.org/topics/new-gtld-program.htm) through a bottom-up and consensus-based process within a global multi-stakeholder environment.

There had been two previous rounds of new top-level domain introductions by ICANN, in 2000 and 2004. The next round is expected to take place in 2011, the DOTHOTEL team will submit an application for the .hotel top-level domain within it.

All so-far existing top-level domain are listed at http://www.iana.org/domains/root/db