Over 300 new TLDs have already hit the market and even more are yet come. Even with so many TLD releases, understanding and using these new TLDs is still going to take time, in fact, it's going to be a marathon rather than a sprint. One important technical issue with the new TLDs, which may get overlooked by businesses and companies, is whether or not the software applications and/or systems they sell work with the new TLDs.  For instance, some web browsers still do not resolve directly to new gTLD websites. Therefore, when entering a new TLD domain name into the browser bar, the user may simply be taken to a search results page instead of the intended website. Applications are also having problems, especially those that use email addresses as unique identifiers for their users.  Apparently new account creation with Skype does not recognize email addresses using a new TLD domain name.

Fortunately, Google recently announced a tool at the Google I/O conference called Domain Test. Domain Test is a tool designed to help developers test their applications for compatibility with new top-level domains. Developed by Google and launched in a partnership between Google Registry, Donuts Inc, Uniregistry, and Ausregistry, Domain Test is an open source project available under the Apache 2 license and can be used across 126 new TLDs. These gTLDs have a series of characteristics, such as string length and the use of non-Latin scripts, that can cause bugs in software. Domain Test helps developers identify and fix these problems. It is freely available for use and modification. Domain Test can be downloaded here:  https://github.com/google/domaintest

To learn more about ICANN's promotion of Universal Acceptance of All Top-Level Domains, please visit:  https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/tld-acceptance-2012-02-25-en