Jack Simpson, a spokesperson for ARI Registry Services, which has worked on a number of TLD applications for Australian and overseas clients, said that ICANN's statement that it would seek simultaneous release of results from TLD application evaluations is "definitely a good thing".

"ARI Registry Services has long been an advocate of removing the batching process from the new top level domain program and that's predominantly because we're looking for a fair and equitable solution to the evaluation and subsequent delegation of all the applications that have been received thus far," Simpson said.

ICANN is now seeking public input on how to deal with delegation of the new TLDs into the domain name system's root zone. The organisation will not delegate more than 1000 domains to the root in a single year.

According to Simpson, attrition during the evaluation process, as applicants drop out, enter a contention phase for domains for which there is more than one applicant, or suffer hiccups during pre-delegation testing, will help reduce the number of new domains that need to be delegated to the root at the same time.

"We believe there will be a number of gateways whereby the number of applications that are being evaluated will go through a process of natural selection," Simpson said.