ICANN have announced they have engaged NORC at the University of Chicago to conduct a gTLD Whois Registrant Identification study, seeking a foundational understanding of the types of entities and kinds of potentially commercial activities observed among gTLD domain names.

According to a post on the ICANN Blog, NORC intends to use Whois Registrant contact data to classify the kinds of entities that register a representative sample of gTLD domain names, including natural persons, legal persons and Privacy or Proxy service providers. NORC will then analyze Internet content associated with each sampled domain to classify the entities that appear to be using those domains, along with any observable potentially commercial activities. Draft study results are expected to be published in mid-2012.

For more information, see the ICANN Blog posting here.