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.

Harper replaces Deutsch on ICANN board

ICANN’s Nominating Committee has revealed its picks for ICANN’s board of directors and it looks like they will be considerably less controversial than last year’s round.

Sarah Deutsch is leaving the board at the end of October’s annual general meeting at the conclusion of her maximum third three-year term. She is designated as North American for ICANN’s geographic diversity quotas.

She’s being replaced by Barbados-born, Berlin-based, UK-educated, Niel Harper, a security expert who runs an Estonian consulting agency.

Apparently a real citizen of the world, he nevertheless represents the Latin America and Caribbean region.

ICANN said he has been chief information security officer for the likes of Interpol and the United Nations Office for Project Services, among other roles around the world.

NomCom also announced that Kenyan tech policy expert Catherine Adeya is retaining her seat for a second three-year term.

Last year’s NomCom selection caused far more friction, with board chair Tripti Sinha publicly criticizing its members for essentially firing her vice-chair.

But the NomCom-appointed gender mix, something that often comes in for scrutiny, will clearly change this year.

The current board has five female directors out of a nominal 20 total. All five are voting members (as opposed to the four non-voting liaisons) and all five were appointed by NomCom, rather than a stakeholder group.

Obviously, Deutsch’s retirement and replacement with a male director would change that mix to a quarter of voting directors and a fifth of total directors being female, lower than the typical ICANN participant ratio.

However, one seat is currently unoccupied due to the recent death of Alan Barrett, an Address Supporting Organization appointee, and it’s not yet clear who will replace him.

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.

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.

ICANN board seat up for grabs

ICANN’s Country Code Names Supporting Organization has put out a call for nominations for candidates to potentially replace one of its current directors on the ICANN board next year.

It’s the seat currently held by Byron Holland of .ca registry CIRA. His first term on the board is up at next year’s AGM — the ccNSO starts its election process well in advance — and he’s eligible to be nominated again for another term.

The only people not eligible are those hailing from the Latin America and Caribbean region. That’s because the ccNSO has geographical diversity rules and its other director, Patricio Poblete, is from Chile.

Nominations must be submitted before the end of August 13, with voting taking place in November. A formal appointment will be made before the end of April 30 next year, with the successful candidate taking their seat at the end of the ICANN 90 public meeting in early November 2027.

Only representatives of ccTLD managers that are members of the ccNSO may be nominated. Further details have been published here.

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.

.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.

“Bulletproof” registrar gets third ICANN bollocking

Trustname.com, a company that advertises itself as a privacy-devoted “bulletproof” registrar, is still refusing to suspend domain names used for phishing, malware, and payment card theft fast enough, according to ICANN.

The Org has sent its third notice of contract breach in five weeks and given Estonia-based Trustname, also known as Fewmoretaps, until August 6 to come back into compliance or lose its accreditation.

ICANN’s notice is focused on one domain this time, which it said was confirmed as hosting “phishing, payment‑card harvesting, and malicious client‑side code” about a week ago.

Trustname confirmed the domain, which Compliance did not name, as abusive on July 11, but it remained up until July 14 when the registrar correctly applied the clientHold suspension status after repeated nagging from ICANN, according to the notice.

“The actions the Registrar took were not prompt,” ICANN said, calling this a violation of Section 3.18.1 of the Registrar Accreditation Agreement.

Compliance first publicly reported Trustname’s alleged sins on June 10, accusing the company of dragging its feet and allowing abusive registrants to transfer their domains out rather than immediately suspending them.