ICANN, yesterday announced the release of its beta version Top-Level Domain Verification Tool.

According to the company, this verification tool has been developed in response to problems reported by gTLD registries and end-users of the non-acceptance of some existing TLDs. These problems occur in some current applications because they do not recognize any TLD of more than three characters or they rely on legacy information where only com/net/org and a handful of ccTLDs are recognized as valid.

Applications relying on such erroneous TLD criteria result in an inconsistent experience for users, detracting from the benefits of a single, global interoperable DNS. This TLD verification tool will provide a means for application developers and providers to incorporate current root-zone data into their applications.

This code has been designed to query root servers, capture a list of all valid TLDs and then store locally the results of the query. The tool is being released as a library created in both Java and C++. In addition to Java and C++ programs, this library can be called from programs written in other common languages such as Perl, PHP and Python.