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Could Musk’s DOGE kill off D3’s .doge?

Kevin Murphy, February 18, 2025, Domain Policy

The creation of the US Department of Government Efficiency raises the possibility of a government objection to .doge, a gTLD that D3 Global has announced it plans to apply for.

D3, a domain name consultancy that is promising to deliver gTLDs in next year’s application round that connect to identities currently only available on blockchains, has said it it working on a bid for .doge.

But that’s an exact match to DOGE, a not-quite “department” of the US government created by President Trump in the last few weeks and headed by megalomaniac billionaire troll Elon Musk.

DOGE is tasked with cutting government spending, waste and fraud, and the department’s devil-may-care modus operandi seems to spawn fresh controversy on an almost hourly basis.

In the D3 context, the word “doge” rather refers to a social media meme from well over a decade ago — a photo of a dog called Kabosu, now dead, used as the mascot of a cryptocurrency called Dogecoin.

D3’s partner on the bid is Own The Doge, a project of PleasrDAO that says it paid $4,240,000 in 2021 for the non-fungible token (NFT) of the original Kabosu photo.

Own The Doge then broke the NFT up into almost 17 billion pieces, which are traded like other digital assets. It also makes money selling Kabosu merch, licensing the image, and selling ownership of single pixels of the original image.

The silly governmental meaning and the silly crypto meaning are linked. Musk, a known fan of Dogecoin, seems to have first proposed DOGE as the name of the agency he proposed to lead as a kind of in-joke.

His first tweet on that topic came August 20 last year, a few weeks before the .doge bid was announced.

Given the timing, the exact-match spelling, and the crossover in the semantic Venn diagram, it seems a .doge gTLD application could present a pretty big target for a formal objection.

If the US decided to start throwing its weight around on ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee, which has substantial powers to scupper gTLD applications, it’s easy to see how it could horse-trade its way to getting a full consensus GAC objection.

But would a Musk-influenced Trump administration choose to object? Or could its mere existence actually prove beneficial to .doge’s future prospects?

We asked D3, and chief marketing officer Mark Trang told us:

While we’re not going to speculate on whether or not the Department of Government Efficiency will affect a future TLD like .doge, anything the current administration does to raise the visibility of domains, cryptocurrencies, and blockchains we view as a positive for our industry.

It almost certainly is far too early to speculate, but that’s never stopped me before.

Quite apart from the .doge issue, the Trump administration has yet to show its hand on how it will interact with internet governance in general and ICANN and the domain name industry in particular.

It looks today, over a year before the next new gTLD application window is scheduled to open, that this kind of thing is pretty far down the Trump administration’s priority list, if it’s even on the radar at all.

The relatively small National Telecommunications and Information Administration, which supplies the US with its civil service GAC representatives, doesn’t even have its politically appointed leadership yet.

The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, seen by some as Trump’s playbook for government reform, says nothing about ICANN or domain names in its NTIA section (pdf), and even gets the meaning of the A in the name wrong, calling it the “Agency”.

As for Musk, he’s known to be well across domain names as a concept, though he may be a .com fanboy. When he reacquired x.com from PayPal, before subsequently renaming Twitter around the domain, he said it was for sentimental reasons.

While it was pretty much an open secret that the pre-Musk Twitter planned to apply for a .twitter gTLD, the renaming to X of course means that it cannot be a dot-brand under ICANN rules banning single-character Latin TLDs.

But rules don’t seem to matter too much at this moment in history, when the US seems more than ready to dispose of decades-old conventions and use raw financial power to achieve its goals.

So, yeah, it’s pretty much too early to speculate about what .doge and the domain name universe looks like under the Trump/Musk administration, but it’s probably not too early to be worried, or maybe even a little afraid.