It was announced this week that a further nine new gTLDs are to be delegated to the root zone, moving them one step closer to them being available for
public use. The nine domains in question are a range of different areas; .audio, .beer, .church, .guide, .hiphop, .juegos, .life, .luxe and .loans.
The new gTLDs are to be added on top the other 259 gTLDs which have already been delegated since the launch of this new phase of gTLDs. The root zone is the 'address book' of all TLDs used on the internet and is administered by IANA.
A third of the recent batch (audio, .hiphop and .juegos) have been sponsored by Uniregistry which is accounting for a sizeable number of the new gTLDs
being released and is founded by internet investor Frank Schilling.
The current amount of domains delegated to the root zone is not yet half of the expected amount of 617 to be delegated by the end of 2015 with many more
domains yet to be delegated focused on providing Internationalised Domain Names.
You can see the current status of the delegation queue on ICANN’s new gTLD page at http://newgtlds.icann.org/en/program-status