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Tomorrow is lowkey Reveal Day

Kevin Murphy, October 6, 2026, 08:15:28 (UTC), Domain Registries

ICANN’s much-anticipated new gTLD Reveal Day is tomorrow, October 7, but it’s going to be a much more subdued affair than the 2012 round.

In 2012, there was a live, in-person event at a swanky hotel in London, led by senior ICANN execs, a panel discussion hosted by yours truly, a drinks reception, invited mainstream TV media, and maybe a couple hundred attendees from all over the world.

I recall being handed, maybe half an hour before the official announcement, an embargoed list of the 1,930 applied-for strings and their applicants, on a hard copy thick enough to choke a small horse or a large dog.

Applicants in attendance almost assaulted me in their eagerness to get even a few minutes’ preview of what was on the list. I didn’t break emargo, but I assure you that much trolling ensued.

But in 2026 it looks rather like it’s going to be a simple case of ICANN publishing the list on its new 2026 Round Application Publication and Statistics web site at 1800 UTC tomorrow. That’s midnight for me, so please excuse me in advance for any sloppy mistakes in my initial coverage.

There’s at least one good reason for the lack of an in-person event, of course — applicants are forbidden from discussing their applications with rival applicants after the Reveal, due to the rules banning private resolution of contention sets.

In likelihood, few would actually show up to a live event. Some aren’t even going to the ICANN Annual General Meeting later this month precisely to avoid the mere possibility of cocktail chitchat spilling over into the perception of cartel conspiracy.

ICANN has confirmed that 1,616 applications are proceeding. It had previously said “over 1,600”. It seems it had received 1,663, but 47 of those didn’t pay their $227,000 application fee before the deadline. Those souls will have to hope they have the longevity to wait for the next round if they want to try again.

Each of the 1,616 applications may or may not have a back-up secondary string that they are allowed to switch to if they find themselves tomorrow in a contention set with a couple of 800-pound gorillas or tech bros who would easily eat them alive at auction.

They have until the end of play UTC on October 21 to decide whether to switch. They can only do so if changing strings would not create a contention set with another applicant’s primary or secondary string.

They can also choose to withdraw their applications, receiving a 65% refund on their fee. That offer is valid only until November 27.

November 17 is String Confirmation Day. That’s when we get the final list of strings and contention sets and the real fun begins — objections can be filed until March 17.

Evaluations aren’t expected to begin until halfway through 2027. There’ll be a lottery in the “first half” of the year to determine who gets to go first and win a possible first-mover advantage.

We already know what a lot of the applied-for strings are, of course. I currently have 1,050 announced strings in my database, but I cannot yet say with any degree of certainty how many are primary, how many are secondary, and which were just some clown bullshitting on Twitter in the hope of an early pay-off.

We know of very few dot-brands, and if any big publicly traded tech giants are planning to unleash dozens of generic dictionary-word applications, they have yet to show their hands.

So far, the most-contested string is, perhaps understandably, .bit, which has six announced applications. The second is, perhaps less obviously, .moon, with five.

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