More cheap new gTLD applications approved

ICANN has approved 18 more requests for reduced-fee new gTLD applications under its Applicant Support Program.

As of last week, the Org said it has conditionally approved a total of 16 requests, up by 13 on a month earlier, and fully approved 27, up by five. “Fully approved” means ICANN has received payment from the applicant.

Only one request has so far been rejected, because the applying entity was found not to be eligible for the program.

There are now a total of 44 applications that have been processed, with 32 more in the pipeline.

The ASP offers up to an 80% discount on the $227,000 base new gTLD application fee, along with a range of other perks, to non-profit organizations on tight budgets.

Identity Digital takes over 25-year-old TLD

Identity Digital’s recent acquisition spree has continued, with the company recently taking over as registry operator for a sponsored gTLD that made its debut in 2001.

The registry’s affiliate, Jolly Host, has taken over .aero from aerospace trade group SITA, the Societe Internationale de Telecommunications Aeronautique, according to ICANN records.

.aero was one of the original “test-bed” new gTLDs that prevailed in the 2000 application round.

It’s a little different to a normal gTLD acquisition — .aero is a sponsored gTLD designed to serve a specific community, and there are registration restrictions in place.

The main barrier to registration is the requirement to be a member of the industry and have a SITA Membership ID, obtainable from the registry web site, before you can go to a registrar to get your name.

As such, SITA is not washing its hands entirely of the TLD. It will continue as .aero’s “Sponsor”, responsible for setting policy, with Identity Digital now contractually designated as “Registry Operator”.

.aero is cheaper to run that your typical gTLD. The registry contract calls for annual payments to ICANN of just $5,000, rather than the standard $25,000, as long as it has fewer than 50,000 domains under management.

It currently has about 13,000 domains in its zone file and renewals retail starting at about $40 per year.

The fact that .aero is currently sponsored and restricted doesn’t necessarily mean it will stay that way. There’s plenty of precedent, from .xxx to .med, of sponsored registries casting off their roots to broaden their appeal.

It’s the sixth gTLD contract Jolly Host has taken over so far this year after, .safety, .dot, .jot, .circle and .onl.

ICANN throws a bone to its most stubborn new gTLD applicant

ICANN has offered an olive branch to a new gTLD applicant that refuses to accept defeat well over a decade after it was rejected.

The Org has offered one last chance for Indian applicant Nameshop to get some of its money back for an application that fell at the first hurdle back in the 2012 application round.

Nameshop applied for .idn, apparently not understanding the rule that strings matching protected three-letter country codes are banned under ICANN rules. IDN is the code for Indonesia.

The company filed a request to change its applied-for string to .internet, using a process ICANN had put in place to allow applicants to correct typos (such as correcting .dotafrica to .africa).

When it was explained to Nameshop that it was trying to misuse the process and its only option was to request a refund of its application fee, the company decided instead to fight fruitlessly for the best part of a decade and a half to get ICANN to change its mind.

ICANN has not changed its mind.

The Org informed all remaining failed 2012-round applicants late last year that they had 90 days to withdraw their applications and get a partial refund or lose their money.

Nameshop evidently chose to reject or ignore that offer, missing the deadline for requesting the refund. Because it used ICANN’s Applicant Support program, its refund would be of the lower $47,000 fee.

But ICANN has offered the company one final attempt to leave the process with at least something. It’s given Nameshop until May 15 to withdraw its application and get its money back.

This appears to be special treatment. Eleven other unsuccessful applications, including those for .hotel, .shop, .africa and .salon, were recently flagged as “Terminated” — as opposed to “Withdrawn” — by ICANN.

I would be remiss if I did not point out that applicants in the current application round, which is open until August, can avoid making silly string selection mistakes by using DI’s free Stringtel tool.

Over 100 new gTLD bids have already been announced

With the 2026 ICANN new gTLD application window now officially open, one striking difference compared to the 2012 round is the number of organizations that have broken cover to announce that they will apply.

Back in 2012, consultants excitedly pointed to Canon, the Japanese electronics firm, as the convincer. It had openly revealed it planned to apply for the dot-brand .canon two years earlier.

A handful of gTLDs related to communities, cities or causes — such as .gay, .nyc and .eco — had also been announced. Several had multiple announced applicants and were ultimately contested.

But today, with the application window now five days open, DI’s free risk analysis tool, Stringtel, currently has more than 100 announced applications in its database.

With dot-brands expected to make up a sizeable chunk of 2026 applications, very few major brands have actually put their heads above the parapet. Salesforce seems to be the most well-known, though its revelation came via an ICANN director’s conflict disclosure rather than a full-throated formal announcement.

The biggest cohort of announced applications seems to come from applicants representing an if not entirely then certainly uncommon type of gTLD — which you could call the non-dot-brand-dot-brand, or perhaps more simply “open dot-brand”.

By this I mean organizations, typically in the blockchain or cryptocurrency space, that have said they will apply for gTLDs matching their brand but make second-level domains available to their users, rather then keeping the whole namespace in-house.

There are dozens of such announced bids. Some are already selling domains that resolve on blockchains rather than DNS. Due to cost, complexity, or risk, I don’t expect every announcement in this space to translate into an eventual application.

We’ve also seen announcements of applications for generic strings, often in hot industries such as AI, crypto or podcasting. Stringtel already has records for the likes of .crypto, .agi, .podcast and .blockchain, for example. A couple, such as .chain and .anime, are already contested.

While we’ll likely discover how many applications ICANN has received not long after the application window closes in August, we won’t find out what strings have been applied for until October at the earliest.

2026 new gTLD round has actually opened

As of today, you can now apply to own a piece of the internet’s root zone for the first time since 2012.

Almost unbelievably, given some of its relatively recent history, ICANN has hit its deadline and opened up its systems for companies and organizations to file applications for new gTLDs.

The application window opened late April 30 and will close August 12. Many applicants will have been working on their bids for some time, but may hold out until later in the window to actually commit.

ICANN CEO Kurt Lindqvist said in a press release: “Whether building a brand for a company, spotlighting a geographic region or city, strengthening a community, or launching a business to offer domain names under a new registry, a new gTLD can be an innovative tool for commerce, security, and communication.”

ICANN noted that it’s expecting to receive applications for gTLDs in non-Latin scripts — 27 are available — to broaden the linguistic diversity of the DNS. Whether the Org has done enough awareness-raising outreach in non-Anglophone regions is an open question, however.

The cost of applying begins at $227,000. That’s the base application fee, but it will likely often be bumped up by thousands for applicants that need special extra evaluation services.

There’s also going to be an auction of last resort for competing applications for the same strings, where ICANN pockets the proceeds. Unlike the 2012 round, there’s no ICANN-endorsed pathway to privately resolving contention sets for cash.

As many as 75 organizations around the world may have qualified for the Applicant Support Program, which will subsidize application fees by as much as 80%.

We won’t know who has applied for what until probably around mid-October. Applicants then get two weeks to change their strings to their back-ups if they find themselves in unwelcome contention sets. Final strings are confirmed in November.

That’s all assuming the 2026 room is more or less the same size as the 2012 round, in which there were 1,930 applications. A larger batch of applications may delay things a little.

Applications can be filed via ICANN’s new TLD Application Management System (TAMS). The Org has also made a great number of documents and archived webinars available that talk prospective applicants through the process.

Applicants, or simply the curious, can also use DI’s free Stringtel tool to investigate the risks and opportunities associated with their chosen gTLD strings.

Is a .tree gTLD very cool or very silly?

.tree is one of the first-ever publicly announced gTLD applications, predating even the 2012 application round, and it seems to have been proposed for a second time.

A web site using dottree.org, registered a week ago, is saying there’s a plan to apply for .tree in the forthcoming ICANN application round, with a charitable goal.

The project says it will donate a dollar from every .tree domain registration and annual renewal to a charity that plants trees in Dubai, with each $1 donation putting one tree in the ground.

At first glance, it seems like a nice idea, but I’m not sure it holds up to closer inspection.

There may be virtue-signalling advantages to running a site on a .tree domain if you’re in the environmental game or lumber business.

But if a registrant’s primarily interest is getting trees planted, why not just donate a buck to a reforestation charity directly? Why not donate the full amount you would otherwise have spent on the domain? Or more?

And how much demand would there be for .tree domains on their own merits?

Fortunately, DI’s new Stringtel tool has some data there. According to Stringtel, about 47,000 current .com/.net/.org domain names end in the substring “tree”, which may give an indication of potential registrations. About 2,000 of those end in “familytree”.

That’s the same frequency as we see domains end in “wine”, “dog”, or “paris”, and the three gTLDs matching those strings each have 17,000 to 18,000 domains under management, which is not terrible.

Should .tree perform just as well, envelope-based calculation suggest it would create the equivalent of a smallish forest that could be traversed on foot in minutes and not really suck much CO2 out of our increasingly fragile atmosphere.

But the .tree proposal would have a second forest of the same size planted in the second year (assuming 100% domain renewals) and so on. The effect would stack up over time, so maybe the idea does have merit.

The internet just got its first new TLD since 2022

There’s a new gTLD in the root, the first time ICANN has added a string in over four years.

Don’t get too excited though: it’s a dot-brand, kinda.

As of the weekend, .merck is live and resolving, though only the mandatory nic.merck registry domain exists right now.

The gTLD is interesting because it seems to be a rare example of two companies with the same name sharing a dot-brand.

The only other such arrangement I’m aware of is .sas, which is shared by the SAS Institute and SAS Airline, neither of which actually use it.

.merck seems to be jointly controlled by two pharmaceutical companies, one American and one German, both called Merck, which were under common ownership until World War I split them apart.

After they both applied for .merck in ICANN’s 2012 application round, over a decade of lawyering followed before they finally came to an arrangement.

There’s no Specification 13 in the .merck Registry Agreement, so it’s not technically an exclusive-use dot-brand at this time.

The back-end registry services provider, perhaps surprisingly, is South Africa-based DNS Africa, in what seems to be the company’s first deal outside its home continent.

Kid-friendly domains could be reborn

With governments around the world increasingly looking at reducing the harmful effects on the internet on children, it seems child-friendly domain name projects may see a resurgence.

The US government’s new hunt for a registry operator for .us, launched this week, contains a fairly explicit call for whichever company wins the contract to “revitalize” the long-dormant .kids.us space.

And I’m aware of one potential new gTLD applicant that wants to apply for a regulated kid-friendly gTLD when ICANN opens up its application window at the end of the month.

The US National Telecommunications and Information Administration said in its .us RFP:

The Contractor shall offer one or more innovative approaches to revitalize the use of the kids.us domain that are consistent with its objective of providing a safe space on the internet for children age 13 or younger, as intended by the Dot Kids Act. In the event a decision is made to reactivate the kids.us domain without any changes to the Dot Kids Act or selection of alternative uses, the Contractor shall be prepared to maintain and operate the second-level kids.us domain as specified by the Dot Kids Act.

It’s not the first time NTIA has tried to get the .us registry operator — now GoDaddy, formerly Neustar — to exhume the .kids.us project, which was closed down in 2012 after fewer than 1,000 registrations and half a dozen active web sites. Prior attempts were unsuccessful.

.kids.us was created by US legislation in 2002, largely as a way for legislators could feel good about themselves in an era when the web was still quite new and frightening and a lot wilder than it is today.

But that was before the dawn of social media and smartphones, the two technology trends driving much of the political focus on child online safety in the 2020s.

At least one new gTLD applicant intends to apply for a child-friendly gTLD this year, known as The Reservoir Project or (preliminarily) the Child Online Safety Association, run by lawyer S Harrison Knudson. The gTLD in question would be .haven.

The early-stage concept would see the registry work patent-pending technology and with ISPs, which would charge customers service fees and split the profit with the registry.

There are already two kid-oriented gTLDs out there — .kids itself and the Russian-language .дети (“.children”).

DotKids launched .kids in late 2022 and has so far accumulated 6,368 domains in its zone file. That’s actually not bad for a niche new gTLD, and based on some of the most uncomfortable Google searches I’ve ever done it looks like the registry is doing a pretty good job of keeping the namespace clean.

.дети has been around longer but has sold fewer domains, with just 1,358 names in its zone file today.

Amazon sells three gTLDs to Identity Digital

Amazon appears to have offloaded three of its dormant gTLDs to Identity Digital, judging by ICANN records.

While no formal notices of registry contract reassignment have yet been posted, elsewhere ICANN shows the official registry for .circle, .got, and .jot is now Jolly Host LLC.

Jolly Host is a new Identity Digital affiliate that appeared last year and already took over the .onl gTLD contract from iRegistry a couple months ago.

.circle, .got and .jot are all greenfield namespaces. Unlaunched, they have no registered names beyond the mandatory nic.example domain. They are unencumbered by legacy dot-brand restrictions, which should make for smoother launches.

Amazon appears to have originally intended .circle to play somehow with its Circle brand of home parental control technology, but the 2012 applications for .got and .jot don’t give much of a description of its plans beyond boilerplate text.

The transfers are likely slightly bad news for Nominet, which is Amazon’s primary back-end registry services provider. Identity Digital runs its own back-end (appropriately, on Amazon’s AWS).

.radio’s new owners might have a fight on their hands

Should gTLD registries that avoid costly auctions by promising to serve special limited communities be allowed to later change their business models to improve sales?

That’s the question being asked of .radio, which recently was taken over by a new owner and might be on track to liberalize its registration policies in the near future.

.radio is what is called a “Community” or “Spec 12” gTLD, meaning it has Specification 12 — which imposes eligibility and content rules on registered domains — in its ICANN registry contract.

Four organizations applied for .radio in 2012, but the European Broadcasting Union prevailed, avoiding a potentially expensive auction, by filing a Community application and winning a Community Priority Evaluation.

Afilias, Donuts and BRS Media — all commercial, non-Community applicants — lost out on their chances to run .radio, or make money losing a private auction, because of this successful CPE.

While .radio launched in 2017, it’s never had more than about 3,000 domains under management and earlier this year the EBU sold its contract to Digity, an emerging registry operator with ties to Sav.com.

The suspicion is that Digity is planning to abandon .radio’s community roots and make it more of a mass-market proposition.

That concern was recently expressed by Craig Schwartz, president of fTLD Registry Services, which runs the Spec 12 gTLDs .bank and .insurance, in a letter (pdf) to ICANN’s chair.

Schwartz noted that Digity, unlike the EBU, “appears to have no existing relationship with the originally stated radio community” and said that registries should not be allowed “to game ICANN by preferentially acquiring these assets under one premise and then blindsiding Registrants at a later date.”

ICANN should audit Spec 12 registries for community compliance and open to public comment any attempt to transfer ownership of the contracts, he wrote.

Schwartz reiterated these concerns during a call of the ICANN At-Large community yesterday, adding that ICANN should come up with a way to “wind down” failing Spec 12 gTLDs, rather than transferring them to a liberalizing successor.

He — saying he is supported by other community registries — appears concerned that if ICANN allows registries to play fast and loose with their original commitments, it could not only enable gaming but also tarnish the reputation of other Spec 12s such as .bank.

Consultant Michael Palage, on the same At-Large call, said the the “cheat code” for registries is to get their Spec 12 removed during bilateral negotiations with ICANN Org at the time of contract renewal. He pointed to the liberalization of GoDaddy’s .xxx as an example.

Probably not coincidentally, the current 10-year .radio Registry Agreement is due to expire this July and is currently up for renewal.

ICANN has yet to publicly respond to Schwartz’s letter.