Privacy slip-up in domain name expansion

The nonprofit organization overseeing an expansion of the Web's domain name system accidentally published the private contact information of some applicants this week.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) briefly took down the applicants' documents after it realized that it had published some of their postal addresses.

The organization re-posted the documents late Thursday after stripping out the personal information.

The slip-up came the same week that ICANN unveiled the nearly 2,000 applications for new top-level domains.

Applications included .love, .music, .auto and .apple. The new Web address endings will be alternatives to traditional endings, such as .com and .org. 

Google alone applied for more than 100 new domains, including .google, .youtube, .lol, .car, .mom, .dad, and .fun.

Groups had to pay $185,000 to apply for each new top-level domain. In total, ICANN pulled in about $350 million in application fees, which it says will only cover the cost of overseeing the program.

In a statement, ICANN apologized to applicants for revealing the contact information. 

The incident wasn't the first privacy mishap for ICANN. The group had to take its application system offline in April when it identified a glitch that allowed some groups to look at the confidential applications of their rivals.

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