The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) on Thursday kicked off a new application process for generic top-level domains (gTLDs), its first since 2012. The domain name system as we know it came into being thanks to RFC 920 , penned by internet pioneers Jon Postel and Joyce Reynolds, which suggested creating .gov, .edu, .com, .mil, and .org gTLDs. When Postel and Reynolds wrote their RFC, the sole domain name was .arpa – reflecting the origins of the Internet at the USA’s Advanced Research Projects Agency. As use of the nascent internet grew, it became inappropriate for all users to be tied to .arpa. Postel and Reynolds saw a need for new domains and proposed “in the future most of the top level names will be very general categories like ‘government’, ‘education’, or ‘commercial’. The motivation is to provide an organization name that is free of undesirable semantics.” In 1985, the five gTLDs recommended by Postel and Reynolds became available, along with .net.…