Telnic's sole purpose is to act as the Registry Operator and Sponsoring Organization for .tel, a new sponsored Top Level Domain awarded on May 30th 2006 by ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. Different to any other Top Level Domain (TLD), .tel is exclusively dedicated to communications, its purpose is to link domain names to contact information that is directly stored in the Domain Name System (DNS) and which can then be published to any internet-connected device in the appropriate format.