UPDATE: LACNIC has advised the proposal for .LAC is a possible fraud and they are investigating commencing legal actions.
It may not be as sexy as .XXX, but the proposed .LAC generic Top Level Domain for Latin America and the Caribbean has opened for free pre-registration with the grand total of nine pre-registrations with an anticipated launch date of mid-2012. But there is an earlier proposal for a gTLD for the Latin American and the Caribbean region - .LAT - with many of the same supporters and board members.
The idea of a gTLD for Latin America and the Caribbean is similar in
many ways to the existing .EU and .ASIA TLDs and also to the proposed
.AFRICA, the latter having competing organisations proposing to bid for
the gTLD.
Within Latin America and the Caribbean, the proposal for a
continent-wide gTLD has the support from many in the industry who
believe it will be beneficial for uniting a continent largely united by
language, but often by little else.
But to be successful, it is likely there will need to be agreement and
cooperation between the regional internet organisations - LACTLD (Latin America and Caribbean Top Level Domain association), LACNIC (Latin American and Caribbean Internet Addresses Registry) and eCOM-LAC (Latin American Federation and Caribbean for Internet and Electronic Commerce).
The proposals for a gTLD encompassing Latin American and the Caribbean
is facing competition with proposals for both a .LAT and .LAC with both
proposals having some of the same board members and representatives.
The .LAT proposal appears to have technical support from the .MX
registry whose CEO, Oscar Robles, is the president of LACTLD and on the
board of LACNIC. On the .LAT website, it is noted that eCOM-LAC in
partnership with NIC Mexico will shortly release a proposal to apply for
.LAT.
However there is another crossover of interests with the president of
eCOM-LAC, Oscar Messano, also being the president of LACNIC.
Meanwhile both gTLD proposals have the same treasurer - the Brazilian
registry. And the El Salvadorian registry has representatives on the
boards for both proposed gTLDs.
It seems there are some who do not want to appear to miss out and are
wanting to guarantee their involvement no matter which proposal is
successful.
But the .LAC proposal has tried to get a jump on .LAT with
pre-registrations commencing. At the time of writing there were nine
pre-registrations, these being news.lac, holiday.lac, jamaica.lac,
internet.lac, fangdigital.lac, dealmob.lac, domain.lac,
united-domains.lac and uniteddomains.lac.
Pre-registration for the proposed gTLD is being handled by United
Domains, an existing registrar that supports over 1.4 million domain
names for more than 250,000 clients.