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.

Bali to apply for .bali, and the dot is delightful

The regional government of the Indonesian province of Bali is to formally announce an application for the .bali top-level domain at ICANN 87 in October, according to a local report.

Governor Wayan Koster said the local government is supporting a bid for .bali, according to IndoBaliNews

It’s not clear from the report whether the government is the applicant or merely signing off on an application by a third party, which is a necessity under ICANN’s rules regarding geographic strings.

What makes the proposal for .bali uniquely interesting — delightful, even — is that the dot also has meaning.

The Balinese word “dot” means “want”, so it’s not too much of a stretch to interpret .bali as “I want Bali”. The marketing is built-in.

This is handy given that tourism apparently accounts for 80% of Bali’s economy.

According to DI Stringtel, the only significant wrinkle to the application would be that Bali is also the name of a small town in Rajasthan, India, which also enjoys geographic protection.

.bali is only the third geographic gTLD to be announced that I’m aware of. The other two were .india and .bharat, both of which were announced by the Indian national registry, NIXI.

As I reported last year, the two Indian bids would likely be rejected because there’s a hard ban on country names under ICANN’s rules.

Bali will host ICANN’s Annual General Meeting in October, following the postponement of the Oman meeting.

As .web goes live, “.website” changes hands

Identity Digital’s 2026 acquisition spree has continued, with the registry taking over a gTLD that means “.website” but has remarkably few registrations even a decade after launch.

ICANN records show Jolly Host, an Identity Digital subsidiary, is now the contracted party for .网站 (or .xn--5tzm5g as it appears in the DNS), which is the Chinese for “.website”.

The original registry was Hong Kong-based Global Website TLD Asia, part of the DotAsia registry group managed by former ICANN director Edmon Chung.

Despite the apparent goldmine of such a common term, addressing a market as large as China’s, as of today .网站 has just 2,871 domains in its zone file, the most it has ever had.

The news comes just a few days after the fate of English-language .web was finally sealed, with Verisign getting its prize delegated after a decade of legal wrangling.

It’s the seventh gTLD contract Jolly Host has had reassigned to it since February.

Domain name universe tops 400 million

The number of registered domain names topped 400 million for the first time, according to the estimates in Verisign’s latest Domain Name Industry Brief quarterly report.

There were 401.6 million domains across all TLDs at the end of June, up 9.1 million or 2.3% compared to the first quarter and 29.9 million, or 8.1%, compared to a year earlier, the company reported.

About a third of the net new names were registered in .com and .net (let’s be frank, mostly .com), leaving Verisign’s flagships with a combined total of 179.1 million names. Annually, .com/.net was up 8.9 million names.

ccTLD domains were up 2.3 million at 148.6 million, while legacy, pre-2012 gTLDs, such as .biz and .info, were up by a total of 400,000 names to 21 million.

Post-2012 gTLDs slightly outperformed .com, with 3.3 new names to end Q2 at 52.9 million. The larger of them, including .xyz, .top, .site, .online and .vip, all experienced six-figure growth, with .vip pushing .site out of the top 10.

The top 10 largest ccTLDs all experienced growth and there was no change in their rankings.

That said, I don’t fully understand the source of some of Verisign’s numbers. For example, for not the first time the DNIB reports Russia’s .ru at 6.9 million domains, which is about 800,000 more than the .ru registry self-reports.

That’s the difference between .ru being the clear number-four ccTLD and it being pretty much tied with the Netherlands’ .nl. Both ccTLDs self-report 6.1 million names, rounded, on their own web sites.

Team Internet sells fewer domains but makes more profit

Team Internet, still reeling from Google’s decision to cut off one of its primary revenue sources, nevertheless stayed profitable in the first half of the year, the company reported.

The company’s domains division, one of three reporting units, saw a 6% dip in revenue when compared to the same period last year, coming in at $97.9 million versus $103.9 million.

At the EBITDA level, its profit for the six months to June 30 was $13.7 million, up by 28% from $10.7 million a year earlier.

Team Internet’s Search division, which had been reliant on Google’s now essentially discontinued AdSense for Domains service, saw a 63% decline in revenue to $48.3 million, converting an EBITDA profit of $8.5 million into a loss of $2.6 million.

The company said that revenue from AdSense for Domains is now “negligible” and that its transition to Google’s Related Search on Content returned the division to profit in June, though this is not visible from the reported H1 numbers.

Combining all three of the company’s divisions, overall Team Internet reported EBITDA profit of $19.5 million, down 21% on last year, on revenue down 32% at $179.1 million.

There was no news on the company’s plans to spin off its domains business, where a deal is expected shortly.

Ireland’s .ie formally changes hands

IE Domain Registry has formally taken the reins at .ie after a decision by ICANN’s board of directors.

The board voted last week to redelegate Ireland’s ccTLD to the company that has in effect been in control of it since the turn of the century.

From the late 1980s, .ie was formally delegated to University College Dublin, which started subcontracting its management to IEDR in 2000.

The redelegation by IANA, now formally approved by ICANN, appears to be a formality, with ICANN saying no significant concerns raised by the university or local internet community.

Verisign’s crystal ball sees more growth for .com

Verisign has cranked up its growth predictions for .com for another consecutive quarter, partly driven by the availability of AI website creation tools.

Announcing its second-quarter financial results last week, the company said that it now expects its domain name count in .com and .net — in practice that usually means .com — to be between 5.2% and 6% for 2026.

That a sharp increase from the 3.1% and 4.3% range it had predicted just three months ago, and more than double the low-end growth in estimate in its February 1.5% to 3.5% forecast.

In Q2, it reported a “record” of 12.7 million new registrations, bringing the .com/.net total to 179.1 million. That compared to 11.5 million in Q1 and 10.4 million in Q2 last year. The net quarterly increase was 3.05 million.

Verisign described its now-confirmed 76.3% renewal rate for the first quarter as the highest it has seen in 20 years.

Explaining the growth, CEO Jim Bidzos said: “Registrars are focused on customer acquisition and are successfully engaged with our marketing programs. Additionally, AI tools are making content and website creation faster and easier.”

The company’s domain base had stagnated for a period whilst major registrars focused more on squeezing higher average revenue per customer rather than growth in domain volume.

Verisign reported net income of $217 million for the second quarter, up from $207 million a year earlier, on revenue that was up 6% at $435 million. A cash-printing machine, the company returned hundreds of millions of dollars back to its shareholders through buybacks and dividends.

.web could be a huge payday for Verisign

.web entered the root zone this week, ending over a quarter-century of drama over the once-coveted gTLD, and now it looks like it could be immediately worth tens of millions to its new registry.

Verisign got it, of course, seemingly by paying off the company, Altanovo Domains, that has been doggedly pursuing it through ICANN’s quasi-judicial complaints procedures for the last decade.

The company said in a statement: “The delegation of .web follows the successful resolution of all previous disputes related to the generic top-level domain (gTLD), the details of which are confidential.”

Now it seems Verisign is going to use its newfound freedom — the .web registry is not subject to the same feature and pricing controls as .com — to milk it for all it’s worth.

The company told analysts last night that it’s going to launch .web later this year with its mandatory sunrise period for trademark holders, followed by a Limited Registration Period for existing .com registrants.

CEO Jim Bidzos said: “We intend to run an LRP, and the rules that we will use is we will give all of our holders of .com registrations, the opportunity to come and get the same registration in .web before we open registrations for general availability.”

That could be incredibly lucrative. If, say, Verisign charges about $15 per domain per year, and about 1% of .com domains have their matching .web names registered, you’re looking at about $25 million a year of high-margin revenue added to the top line immediately.

I’m plucking those numbers out of thin air, of course. Verisign has not revealed its pricing for .web, and there’s no way of telling how for sure many .com owners will want to defensively register .web equivalents for, as Bidzos put it, “a companion website”.

The fact that .net has been stagnant for over a decade may prove informative — registrants’ mindset of “must get the matching .net and .org”, which was prevalent in the pre-2012 world, is not standard when hundreds of other gTLDs are available.

Verisign also revealed that some .web domains will carry premium prices, which could also prove to be a windfall, particularly if the premium fees carry over into renewal pricing, which the company is now able to do.

Verisign obtained the rights to .web in 2016 when it secretly bankrolled a company called Nu Dot Co, which had applied for the gTLD, in an ICANN-managed auction that saw a $135 million winning bid.

The clandestine nature of the proxy bidding was a huge source of controversy, and the runner-up bidder, Altanovo (then part of Afilias, spun out as an indie after Identity Digital acquired it) started filing ICANN complaints not long after.

While published ICANN documentation does not yet reflect it, it looks like Altanovo has yanked its Independent Review Process complaint against Verisign, with Verisign’s statement strongly suggest it was paid to do so.

I suspect Verisign was eager to bring .web to market to get some form of mind-share advantage before the gTLDs currently being applied for in the 2026 round start to come to market in a couple years. For Altanovo, patience may have meant profit.

Many in the industry, myself included, assumed a decade ago that Verisign’s primary goal in obtaining .web was defensive — it wanted to keep what it saw as .com’s strongest competitor out of the hands of its rivals and would probably just leave it dormant.

That may or may not have been true at the time, but based on current evidence it looks like that’s no longer the plan, if it ever was. Verisign’s talking about a launch before the end of the year.