necro thread...
But I should clarify a few things
.tk IS an official tld. Its the internet country code for
Tokelau, a territory of New Zealand located in the South Pacific.
All countries(or prettymuch all) have a tld, theres way way more then 13 "official" ones. Pretty much any tld you use is an "official" one(unless if you fake it, see below).
The .tk is kinda strange in that its servers are actually in amsterdam and is run by a dutch company. (although in most countries there is some specific company or group of companies that manages the tld, but often these companies are located in the same country(even if their servers aren't))
As to ICANNs influence, the US gov can't sieze a .tk domain legally like they can with .com .us .org .net and many more.
Which is why you'll find that some torrent sites and the like have moved to domains out of their reach. That is.. legally out of their reach. In reality they can still get rid of an entire tld by pointing to their own root servers or possibly other methods(I vaguely remember reading of cases where this was done in the past, but coincidentally googleing for it all results in reports about Iran trying to censor its internet) but this is overkill and unlikely.
To create your own tld you have 2 options:
-Fake it, setup your own servers and configure clients that need to use to use your servers for that specific tld (an example would be tor's .onion domains, or .local used in many local networks).
But this will mean it won't work for anyone who doesn't have that config.
-Buy it(this became possible around the time of OPs post), you'll need $185000 and submit a request to ICANN.
You'll need to show that you have a legitimate claim on the name of that tld.
After that it'll cost about $25000 a year to keep it. Check
https://newgtlds.icann.org for more info.
imo, option 1 is useless for paying customers. and option 2 is unrealistic for all but the biggest corporations.
Hope this informs some people.. but please don't necro old threads. OP probably abandoned the idea long ago, he might even be dead and noone told us.