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The new gTLD next, next and next round
“The goal is for the next application round to begin within one year of the close of the application submission period for the initial round.”
Believe it or not, that sentence appears in the new gTLD program’s Applicant Guidebook that ICANN published in June 2012, 12 years of seemingly interminable review and revision ago.
Ah, 2012…
Obama was reelected for his second term. The final of the Euros took place in Kyiv. Gangnam Style topped the charts. Harvey Weinstein won an Emmy. Microsoft released Windows 8. Jedward sang for Ireland in Eurovision. Everyone had an opinion on Joseph Kony and Grumpy Cat.
Naturally enough, a lot of people aren’t very happy about the massive delay between the close of the last application window and the opening of the next one, currently penciled in for the second quarter of 2026.
So the community has done something about it, placing language in the draft of the next AGB that commits ICANN to open subsequent, post-2026 rounds without all the mindless navel-gazing and fannying around.
The intent is pretty clear — make application rounds more frequent and more predictable — but there’s still plenty of wiggle-room for ICANN to exploit if it wants to delay things yet again.
Here’s what the proposed AGB language (pdf) says:
ICANN works towards future rounds of new gTLDs taking place at regular and predictable intervals without indeterminable periods of review and, absent extraordinary circumstances, application procedures will take place without pause. A new round may be initiated even if steps related to application processing and delegation from previous application rounds have not been fully completed.
The ICANN Board will determine the timing of the initiation of a subsequent application round of the New gTLD Program as soon as feasible, but preferably not later than the second Board meeting after all the following conditions have been met:
1. The list of applied-for strings for the ongoing round has been confirmed and the window for string change requests has closed. This will provide applicants in a subsequent round with an understanding of which strings can be applied for.
2. ICANN org has not encountered significant barriers to its ability to receive and process a new batch of applications.
Absent extraordinary circumstances, future reviews and/or policy development processes, including the next Competition, Consumer Choice & Consumer Trust (CCT) Review, should take place independent of subsequent application rounds. In other words, future reviews and/or policy development processes must not stop or delay subsequent new gTLD rounds.
If the outputs of any reviews and/or policy development processes has, or could reasonably have, a material impact on the manner in which application procedures are conducted, such changes will apply to the opening of the application round subsequent to the adoption of the relevant recommendations by the ICANN Board. Once adopted by the Board, the implementation of that policy or review recommendation(s) will then become a dependency for the timing of that subsequent round of applications.
The language is among several draft sections of the 2026 AGB that ICANN this week opened for public comment.
An intriguing question now arises: will this commitment on subsequent round timing have any impact on the number of applications submitted in 2026?
People in the know tell us that there’s a decade-long backlog of wannabe applicants, particularly in the dot-brand world, but will any of them decide to slow down their ambitions if they know they only have an extra year or two to wait for another round?
Or will they trust ICANN’s record of delay over the somewhat flexible promises of the AGB?
It’s not just an academic question. How much applicants will ultimately pay ICANN in application fees, after rebates, will depend on how may applications are filed.
That draft text doesn’t comply the SubPro report and doesn’t comply with board adoption of that recommendation.
So if Org wants it this way, they have to ask Board to reject that specific SubPro recommendation and replace with something of their liking.
Intriguing …. . Academic Really . Simple maths.
So the max delegation rate into the Root Zone per year is being set at 500. So if there are 1500 applications on Reveal Day June 2026 that would be 3 years to complete- right ? , but what if there were 15000 applications due to pent up demand ( heaven forbid, with the poor old evaluators ( but rich ones !) working 24/7, that would be….. 30 years to complete , right ?, but then there are contention set resolution(s) issues to resolve , name collision issues, CPE disputes and the likely prospect of delays due to WW3 …
Maybe 2046 …..
Not really. The 5% per month root zone increase quickly adds up to much more than 500 per year, so there is no real delegation rate issue of that magnitude.
Those limitations that cap at 500/year are administrative capabilities of ICANN, like evaluating 500 applications, vetting 500 different companies, signing 500 different contracts… and there is no ceiling to those capabilities. If ICANN gets 15k applications, they can scale up to meet that demand in much less than 30 years… and they will have both the money and the incentives to do so.