Domainer AI slop crackdown on the cards in Oz

Startling rule changes have been proposed for Australia’s .au domain, potentially making it much tougher and more expensive to register names to monetize or resell.

If implemented, the proposed new rule “effectively limits a registrant to registering a domain name that matches its name, business name or trade mark” in the .com.au and .net.au namespaces.

The recommendation, one of 10 to come out of a yearlong Policy Advisory Panel review, would remove the part of .au’s eligibility rules that currently acts essentially as a catch-all allowing people to register domains for any purpose.

The change seems to be squarely aimed at making it harder for domain investors to populate the namespaces with large amounts of low-quality monetized domains, particularly now that generative AI has trivialized the practice.

Local registry auDA said its board of directors has approved the panel’s recommendations and will create an implementation plan that will be published for public consultation before coming into effect.

The decision to restrict who can register what domains was the most controversial of the recommendations, with four of the seven-person panel voting in favor of the change, with two votes against and one abstention (who later sided with the minority view).

The panel unanimously voted against the idea of banning domain monetization outright, but said it “reached a different majority view on the use of monetisation to satisfy the allocation rules”.

The panel found that allowing registration purely for monetization “may disproportionately benefit domain investors and weaken trust in the allocation framework”.

The current rule was “viewed either as a legitimate source of flexibility or as a self-fulfilling loophole enabling monetisation”, the panel wrote.

It noted: “The consumer harm identified in submissions was most acute where monetisation was used to achieve allocation. Advances in artificial intelligence have also made it easier to create payper-click websites for this purpose.”

A minority of the panel issued a 10-point rebuttal to the majority view, saying they had failed to identify any harms created by the current rules and that the change could make it harder for the likes of schools or charities to register domains.

The panel attempted to measure how many .au domains are currently in the hands of investors, by assuming that anyone owning more than 50 names was a likely domainer, and found that well over half a million of .au’s 4.4 million domains could be in domainer hands.

It said: “auDA data shows that 3,386 registrants hold more than 50 Domain Name Licences across com.au, net.au and .au direct, out of 1,702,174 registrants in those namespaces. Together, those registrants hold 582,895 domain names.”

The full report of the panel can be read here (pdf).

Helsinki throws in the towel on city gTLD

Helsinki has become the third of the world’s capital cities to decide that it doesn’t want to run its city gTLD after all.

The City of Helsinki has notified ICANN that it wants to terminate its registry contract for .helsinki, which it had experimented with but never fully embraced with gusto.

Curiously, the termination notice was filed in May, but the city specifically requested that ICANN not end the contract before the August 12 cut-off date for new gTLD applications.

Presumably, Helsinki was keen that nobody else applied for .helsinki in the current round — if it was still in the DNS root zone, an applicant would have to be mad to apply for it.

Helsinki becomes the third capital, after Budapest and Doha, to terminate their city gTLD contract.

.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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

New gTLDs: what we do and don’t know about the 2026 round

We don’t know how many new gTLD applications were submitted during the just-closed 2026 application window, but we do know the floor.

ICANN said late Friday that it had received more than 1,600 — that’s down by roughly 300 on the 2012 application round — when the window closed August 12.

It won’t be able to give a number for the total confirmed applications until every applicant has submitted their $227,000 initial application fee, and the current deadline to pay up is 2359 UTC on August 21.

That’s still during business hours this Friday in ICANN’s home time zone in California, so the absolute earliest a final confirmed number could be released is this coming weekend.

We also don’t know yet the full list of strings that have been applied for. That information will not be released until Reveal Day, which is expected to come some time in October. ICANN said it will put a date to Reveal Day in mid-September.

Due to the more convoluted process of string selection in the current round, even Reveal Day will not paint the full picture.

Unlike 2012, this time around applicants were given the option of submitting a secondary string for consideration that they are allowed to switch to if, following Reveal Day, they find themselves in contention with other applicants they don’t think they can beat at auction.

ICANN said at the weekend that more than 1,100 of the 1,600 applications contained replacement string choices.

It might be unwise to read too much into this immediately, but my hunch is that this means applications for dot-brand gTLDs could be lower than the previous hype would suggest, perhaps as few as 500, far fewer than the 2012 round.

It would be unusual for a company with an unambiguously registered and enforced trademark, and either a desire to either run it as a dot-brand or simply defend it, to apply for an alternative string as a contention back-up. I can’t imagine trademark lawyers advising such a move in anything but fringe cases.

We do know who some of the big non-brand applicants are, however.

Probably the biggest is Link Freedom Group, a new outfit from the same people behind Nova Registry, which operates .link, and headed by CEO Vaughn Liley. It’s published a list of 316 gTLDs it said it has applied for.

That means it wrote a check to ICANN for $71,732,000 just in up-front application fees. It’s also the largest known bulk applicant in the new gTLD program to date, beating the Donuts/Rightside record for even the 2012 round.

More on the LFG bids later.

Another old-hand putting in a bid is Colin Campbell, who headed 2012 success story .CLUB Registry before its sale to GoDaddy, has co-founded USA Made in America with industry veteran Michele Van Tilborg to apply for .factory.

This new company has already found itself in contention with LFG, which has also submitted a bid for .factory. Funnily enough, the same string was applied for in the original application round 26 years ago, but not in subsequent rounds.

USA Made in America says it has secured a $10 million debt facility to fight an ICANN auction of last resort, should it come to that.

John Alagna, brother of Joe of subdomain provider it.com Domains, said he’s formed a new company, TLD1 LLC, and what he saved on branding consultants he’s invested in applications for .bewell, .etc, .joinus, and .whatsnew.

He’ll be in contention with LFG too. Both companies say they have applied for .etc.

Out on social media, somebody under the name suffix.domains claims to have applied for 13 strings — .asap, .create, .future, .lfg, .mvp, .out, .pal, .planet, .research, .share, .tag, .this and .visit. There are a few LFG contentions there too.

Another new company, Endpoint Domains, says it has applied for .big, .fab, .fart, .ftw, .happy, .nsfw, .private and .true and that it might reveal more strings in future.

Elsewhere, the CEOs of registrars Porkbun and Dynadot, Ray King and Todd Han, have reportedly formed a new entity called Oinkadot to apply for 25 strings: .anime, .bit, .bug, .cancel, .dine, .dragon, .ghost, .glitch, .hack, .heart, .king, .loop, .manga, .moon, .panda, .puff, .queen, .sign, .spice, .stack, .stay, .super, .weed, .wire and .zzz.

I make that a total of 367 announced strings so far.

What you’ll notice from these TLD lists is an absence of non-Latin (maybe even also non-English) strings.

That could simply be because I haven’t seen any announcements yet, but if it proves that the level of internationalized domain names, or names serving under-served regions, is low, that’s going to be bad optics for ICANN, which has made globalizing the gTLD space one of the key selling points of the program.

Government moves to nationalize .me

The government of Montenegro says it has set the ball rolling on the creation of a state-owned entity that will eventually manage its local ccTLD, .me.

The ccTLD, which enjoys over a million of registrations largely due to its friendliness to English speakers, is currently managed by a joint venture, doMEn, primarily controlled by GoDaddy and Identity Digital.

In a statement issued by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister for Economic Policy, the government said (machine translated from the original Serbian):

Launching the process to establish a state-owned company that will manage the national .ME internet domain represents an important step towards returning the management of one of the country’s most valuable digital resources into the hands of the state.

In this way, we are strengthening Montenegro’s digital sovereignty, ensuring greater control over a strategic resource, and creating the conditions for a larger share of the benefits arising from management of the domain to remain in the country and be directed towards its further development.

The move squares with government policy documents published in May which indicated that Montenegro wants to take greater control over its TLD, at the same time putting the squeeze on revenues that today primarily flow to its American managers.

The May statement strongly suggested continued involvement of doMEn, at least as part of a transition process to state ownership, with the government taking more than 50% of the profits from the estimated €10.1 million ($11.75 million) .me brings in annually.