.net prices going up

Verisign is exercising its option to raise the price of a .net domain, capped by contract with ICANN by 10%, starting about six months from now.

The company told the markets yesterday:

On August 27, 2026, VeriSign, Inc. announced an increase to the registry-level wholesale price for new and renewal .net domain names from $10.91 to $12.00, effective March 1, 2027, per its agreement with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).

It will be the first .net price increase to go into effect since February 2024.

Under its registry agreement with ICANN, Verisign is allowed to raise its wholesale fee by 10% per year, most of which is high-margin profit.

.net has about 12.4 million domains in its zone file, and the number doesn’t tend to fluctuate much despite regular price increases.

Comment Tagged: .net, verisign

Robles to join ICANN board

ICANN’s Address Supporting Organization has selected Oscar Robles to serve an abridged term on ICANN’s board of directors.

He will serve until the end of ICANN’s public meeting in November 2027, serving the remainder of the term of Alan Barrett, who died recently.

He was selected from a shortlist of two by the ASO’s Address Council under emergency procedures that than the usual rather lengthy election process, the ASO said.

Robles is very active in the industry in the Latin America region, involved in the creation of LACNIC and LACTLD and working for Mexican ccTLD registry NIC Mexico.

His selection is subject to normal ICANN Empowered Community approval, which is usually a formality.

Comment Tagged: aso, ICANN

Former ICANN director Bertrand de La Chapelle dies

Former ICANN director Bertrand de La Chapelle has died unexpectedly, according to friends and colleagues paying tribute to his life this week.

La Chapelle served on the ICANN board between 2010 and 2013, at the behest of the Nominating Committee, during a period when directors were navigating ICANN through the tricky dual problems of approving the new gTLD program and the then-controversial .xxx TLD.

Even after his directorship ended, he was a frequent, vocal, eloquent, often flamboyant, and arguably iconic presence at ICANN public meetings.

La Chapelle came from the worlds of technology and diplomacy, representing his native France during the World Summit on the Information Society and sitting for a period as vice-chair of ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee.

Friends and colleagues on social media variously described him as “thoughtful”, “charming”, “purposeful”, “witty” and “inspirational”, and expressed their shock at his sudden loss.

Comment Tagged: ICANN

Fifty-six orgs get 85% off their gTLD fees

ICANN has revealed the final statistics for its Applicant Support Program, the deal that sees non-profits and others get up to 85% off their $227,000 new gTLD application fees.

The number of qualified, fully confirmed applicants topped out at 56, from 78 submitted applications. Four were withdrawn, three were found ineligible for support, and 15 were “terminated” for failing to pull the final trigger before the August 12 cut-off date.

The major question arising from the final stats is whether ICANN met its ambition of bringing in more applicants from less-developed economies, particularly those in the Global South or indigenous peoples.

Only one application was approved from the Latin America and Caribbean region — which includes every nation in the western hemisphere south of the US-Mexico border. That applicant fit into the “Micro/Small Business From a Less-Developed Economy” category.

That’s the kind of statistic likely to raise eyebrows when ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee meets to dissect the results of the program.

There was also only one approved applicant in the “Indigenous/Tribal People’s Organization” category. That applicant came from the Asia-Pacific region, which could indicate any number of minority ethnic groups in dozens of countries.

Africa fared a little better, with six small businesses and one non-profit getting approved for the discounts. Asia-Pac had a total of 30, split almost evenly between for-profit and non-profit.

North America, a region covering not much more than the USA and Canada, accounted for 14 approved applications, while Europe accounted for four.

The final stats of the ASP can be found here. The full details of the applicants and their strings will come on Reveal Day in October.

Comment Tagged: applicant support program, asp, ICANN, new gTLDs

Texas will object to .texas gTLD

The US State of Texas has become the first government to publicly object to any gTLD applications matching its name.

Anthony Sauerhoff, state chief information officer, wrote to ICANN earlier this month to unambiguously state that Texas does not support any applications for .texas.

“At the Governor’s direction, I hereby inform you that the State of Texas does not support and does object to the application for the gTLD string “.texas,” and any derivative thereof,” he wrote (pdf).

“Delegating this string to an entity other than the State of Texas risks misuse, reputational harm, and potential confusion among residents and businesses,” he added.

The letter does not confirm that Texas itself has applied for the string.

No applicant has yet gone on-record with an announcement that .texas is among their submitted applications, so it’s quite possible that any plans were withdrawn, pre-armed with the knowledge of Texas’s lack of consent.

“Texas” is a protected string under the rules in ICANN’s Applicant Guidebook, so government support is required.

Comment Tagged: .texas, ICANN, new gTLDs, objections

WordPress hints it applied for more new gTLDs

WordPress.com owner Automattic has dropped some pretty major hints that it applied for a modest portfolio of new gTLDs in ICANN’s just-closed application window.

In a blog post, the company all but confirmed that it has applied for at least one gTLD, probably more, to sit alongside its currently owned .blog.

“We’re not trying to find the next .com,” Automattic wrote. “We’re not trying to collect as many extensions as possible.”

The post reads:

The people using WordPress today are building far more than blogs. They’re creating businesses, stores, portfolios, communities, publications, restaurants, services, and just about everything else you can imagine. So we’re not looking for one domain extension that can somehow describe all of them.

We’re asking which additional TLDs could give more of those people an address that genuinely makes sense for what they’re building. That doesn’t mean applying for dozens of extensions.

It means thinking carefully about a small number of meaningful options that could complement .blog and better reflect the different ways people use WordPress today.

Annoyingly, no strings are listed in the post, but it’s worth noting that the killer gTLDs for many of the categories it enumerates — stores, restaurants, services and so on — are already taken.

.blog had over 363,000 domains in its zone file at the last count and is generally not considered a bigh-abuse budget extension, making it one of the more successful gTLDs from the 2012 application round.

Comment Tagged: .blog, automattic, ICANN, new gTLDs, wordpress

Could you type a .chrysanthemun domain name?

Does .chrysanthemam portend the end of type-in domain names, or is it just an incredibly dumb gTLD idea?

Chinese portfolio applicant Journey To The West Corporation announced earlier in the week that it has applied for .chrysanthemim, one of 323 strings it revealed on its web site.

It’s not yet clear whether .chrysantemum is a primary string, or a back-up in case one of its primary applications turns out to be in a contention set, come Reveal Day in October.

The chrysanthemom flower is an important symbol in Chinese culture, which fits into the theme of many of Journey To The West’s announced strings, which are a mixture of Chinese-script IDNs and English words relating to Asian culture.

But it’s still a heck of a strange string to apply for, breaking many of the rules of memorability and navigation that most of the domain industry holds to be self-evident.

Not only does .crysanthemum fail the radio test, it fails it hard. Probably harder than any other applied-for string. If you have to spell out the domain audibly in a radio commercial, and the listener still can’t remember how to spell it 30 seconds later, it’s a crappy domain — and the whole .chrysenthumum namespace would suffer from that problem.

Link Freedom Group CEO (and apparent font of incredibly obscure trivia) Vaughn Liley pointed out to me today that “chrisanthemum” is such a tough spell that even top-level spelling bee competitors have flunked on it, just moments away from winning the trophy.

But maybe that doesn’t matter. Maybe we should be thinking the long game, where domains-as-navigation is even less important than it has become over the last decade or so. Maybe .chrisanthemum could live perfectly happily in a world where we surf the web using primarily voice, or apps, or AI, or brainwaves.

Still, I wouldn’t buy one.

Comment Tagged: .chrysanthemum, ICANN, journey to the west, new gTLDs

LFG boss on why Telegram gTLD fight might not be all bad news

It’s currently the highest-profile fight of the 2026 new gTLD round, but the CEO of one applicant has a positive spin on having to go up against one or two deep-pocketed social media giants.

The announcement by Telegram boss Pavel Durov yesterday that his company has applied for the .gram top-level domain has arguably brought more attention to the new gTLD program than ICANN has managed in six months, but it also created the most visible contention set.

.gram was also among the 316 strings that portfolio applicant Link Freedom Group announced late last week, and I’d be very surprised if Instagram owner Meta doesn’t also emerge as a contender (or legal rights objector).

But LFG CEO Vaughn Liley reckons it might not be all bad news. He’s actually taking it as a validation of a business model Nova Registry, the .link registry that he also manages, has been pushing for the last five years.

Durov suggested in his Twitter feed that .gram would not be a dot-brand in the way that most companies use them — keeping all the names to themselves and using them to brand products or business segments.

Rather, he wrote: “a billion Telegram users could get their own second-level domains — yourname.gram. Users would be able to set up their interactive websites hosted by Telegram — with one prompt”.

That’s what I sometimes refer to as the auto-dealer model. Some car brands in Europe already dish out domains in their dot-brands, along with a prebuilt template-driven web site, to their licensed dealerships.

Telegram has applied for the .gram domain zone.

If the application is approved by ICANN, a billion Telegram users could get their own second-level domains — yourname.gram.

Users would be able to set up their interactive websites hosted by Telegram — with one prompt ✨

— Pavel Durov (@durov) August 18, 2026

You’d have to assume Telegram would charge a premium for these billion vanity domains, unless it’s prepared to fork over hundreds of millions of dollars in ICANN fees alone annually.

LFG’s Liley told DI he was surprised by the Telegram announcement, and while it’s LFG’s goal to win as many of its applied-for strings as possible without paying more than the $227,000 application fee, he’s happy that Durov seems to be validating part of .link’s business model.

“Nova Registry have been banging this drum for years with the .link TLD so it’s refreshing to see such a high-profile CEO as Pavel Durov championing the use case,” he said.

Nova acquired .link from Uniregistry at auction a few years ago, and set about a model of partnering with other tech companies who could offer custom .link domains as part of an upsell premium package.

It’s signed up the likes of WordPress-owned Gravatar and Bitly on “link in bio” or digital business card services, where .link names are used to consolidate registrants’ contact details in one place.

“The overarching message is very positive for me,” Liley said.

Would LFG prevail in, or even bother with, an auction against Telegram, Meta and potentially other -gram brands? I doubt it, but perhaps if the contention set keeps generating headlines the $227,000 application fee could be written off as a .link marketing expenditure.

Comment Tagged: .gram, contention, ICANN, lfg, link freedom group, new gTLDs, nova registry, telegram

Harper replaces Deutsch on ICANN board

ICANN’s Nominating Committee has revealed its picks for ICANN’s board of directors and it looks like they will be considerably less controversial than last year’s round.

Sarah Deutsch is leaving the board at the end of October’s annual general meeting at the conclusion of her maximum third three-year term. She is designated as North American for ICANN’s geographic diversity quotas.

She’s being replaced by Barbados-born, Berlin-based, UK-educated, Niel Harper, a security expert who runs an Estonian consulting agency.

Apparently a real citizen of the world, he nevertheless represents the Latin America and Caribbean region.

ICANN said he has been chief information security officer for the likes of Interpol and the United Nations Office for Project Services, among other roles around the world.

NomCom also announced that Kenyan tech policy expert Catherine Adeya is retaining her seat for a second three-year term.

Last year’s NomCom selection caused far more friction, with board chair Tripti Sinha publicly criticizing its members for essentially firing her vice-chair.

But the NomCom-appointed gender mix, something that often comes in for scrutiny, will clearly change this year.

The current board has five female directors out of a nominal 20 total. All five are voting members (as opposed to the four non-voting liaisons) and all five were appointed by NomCom, rather than a stakeholder group.

Obviously, Deutsch’s retirement and replacement with a male director would change that mix to a quarter of voting directors and a fifth of total directors being female, lower than the typical ICANN participant ratio.

However, one seat is currently unoccupied due to the recent death of Alan Barrett, an Address Supporting Organization appointee, and it’s not yet clear who will replace him.

Comment Tagged: ICANN, nomcom

Let’s just get this out of the way: yes there will be a .fart fight

clownpenis.fart will very probably be a real domain name one day, but there will be a .fart fight over it.

Two applicants — Link Freedom Group and Endpoint Domains — have confirmed that they have applied for the new gTLD .fart, meaning that very probably in a couple of years you’ll be able to buy .fart domains.

And the legendary clownpenis.fart domain will inevitably become a reality.

If you’re young enough not to know what the heck I’m talking about, I’m referring to the infamous Saturday Night Live skit that aired in the 1999 season in the US, in which a blue-chip investment company is forced to advertise its services using that domain because nothing else was left.

Here you go:

.fart could of course come in for objections. The applicants might withdraw. They might even go to auction. There’s still a long way to go in the ICANN evaluation/approval process.

But yeah, two sets of industry experts decided to spend at least $227,000 on .fart.

4 Comments Tagged: .fart, contention, endpoint domains, ICANN, link freedom group, new gTLDs