Tomorrow is lowkey Reveal Day

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.

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.