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.

Unliked — Chinese gTLD calls it quits

Chinese technology giant Qihoo 360 is abandoning one of its portfolio of gTLDs, a Latinized version of the Chinese word for “to like”.

The company has asked ICANN to terminate its registry contract for .xihuan, which never launched despite being in the root since 2016. No reason was given.

It also has the gTLDs .anquan, .yun and .shouji, (“security”, “cloud” and “cellphone”), but to date only .yun has been launched. It went on sale last year and so far has about 2,700 names in its zone.

Qihoo 360 is primarily a security software company. The US Department of Defense officially classifies it as a “Chinese military company” due to its links to the Chinese information ministry.

.phone domain gets launch dates

The rush to get long-dormant gTLDs on to the market before the 2026 cohort starts to come online continues apace, with Dish Registry announcing launch plans for .phone.

The company intends to run its mandatory sunrise period from October 6 to January 4, with a 14-day premium-priced Early Access Period following the next day. General availability will begin January 19.

There are no eligibility restrictions. Pricing information has not been published, but Dish says some names will carry premium pricing.

Having sat on its portfolio of 2012-round gTLDs for over a decade, Dish has recently started rolling them out, starting with .mobile and .latino, with .dot coming soon.

Helsinki throws in the towel on city gTLD

Helsinki has become the third of the world’s capital cities to decide that it doesn’t want to run its city gTLD after all.

The City of Helsinki has notified ICANN that it wants to terminate its registry contract for .helsinki, which it had experimented with but never fully embraced with gusto.

Curiously, the termination notice was filed in May, but the city specifically requested that ICANN not end the contract before the August 12 cut-off date for new gTLD applications.

Presumably, Helsinki was keen that nobody else applied for .helsinki in the current round — if it was still in the DNS root zone, an applicant would have to be mad to apply for it.

Helsinki becomes the third capital, after Budapest and Doha, to terminate their city gTLD contract.

Fifty-six orgs get 85% off their gTLD fees

ICANN has revealed the final statistics for its Applicant Support Program, the deal that sees non-profits and others get up to 85% off their $227,000 new gTLD application fees.

The number of qualified, fully confirmed applicants topped out at 56, from 78 submitted applications. Four were withdrawn, three were found ineligible for support, and 15 were “terminated” for failing to pull the final trigger before the August 12 cut-off date.

The major question arising from the final stats is whether ICANN met its ambition of bringing in more applicants from less-developed economies, particularly those in the Global South or indigenous peoples.

Only one application was approved from the Latin America and Caribbean region — which includes every nation in the western hemisphere south of the US-Mexico border. That applicant fit into the “Micro/Small Business From a Less-Developed Economy” category.

That’s the kind of statistic likely to raise eyebrows when ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee meets to dissect the results of the program.

There was also only one approved applicant in the “Indigenous/Tribal People’s Organization” category. That applicant came from the Asia-Pacific region, which could indicate any number of minority ethnic groups in dozens of countries.

Africa fared a little better, with six small businesses and one non-profit getting approved for the discounts. Asia-Pac had a total of 30, split almost evenly between for-profit and non-profit.

North America, a region covering not much more than the USA and Canada, accounted for 14 approved applications, while Europe accounted for four.

The final stats of the ASP can be found here. The full details of the applicants and their strings will come on Reveal Day in October.

Texas will object to .texas gTLD

The US State of Texas has become the first government to publicly object to any gTLD applications matching its name.

Anthony Sauerhoff, state chief information officer, wrote to ICANN earlier this month to unambiguously state that Texas does not support any applications for .texas.

“At the Governor’s direction, I hereby inform you that the State of Texas does not support and does object to the application for the gTLD string “.texas,” and any derivative thereof,” he wrote (pdf).

“Delegating this string to an entity other than the State of Texas risks misuse, reputational harm, and potential confusion among residents and businesses,” he added.

The letter does not confirm that Texas itself has applied for the string.

No applicant has yet gone on-record with an announcement that .texas is among their submitted applications, so it’s quite possible that any plans were withdrawn, pre-armed with the knowledge of Texas’s lack of consent.

“Texas” is a protected string under the rules in ICANN’s Applicant Guidebook, so government support is required.

WordPress hints it applied for more new gTLDs

WordPress.com owner Automattic has dropped some pretty major hints that it applied for a modest portfolio of new gTLDs in ICANN’s just-closed application window.

In a blog post, the company all but confirmed that it has applied for at least one gTLD, probably more, to sit alongside its currently owned .blog.

“We’re not trying to find the next .com,” Automattic wrote. “We’re not trying to collect as many extensions as possible.”

The post reads:

The people using WordPress today are building far more than blogs. They’re creating businesses, stores, portfolios, communities, publications, restaurants, services, and just about everything else you can imagine. So we’re not looking for one domain extension that can somehow describe all of them.

We’re asking which additional TLDs could give more of those people an address that genuinely makes sense for what they’re building. That doesn’t mean applying for dozens of extensions.

It means thinking carefully about a small number of meaningful options that could complement .blog and better reflect the different ways people use WordPress today.

Annoyingly, no strings are listed in the post, but it’s worth noting that the killer gTLDs for many of the categories it enumerates — stores, restaurants, services and so on — are already taken.

.blog had over 363,000 domains in its zone file at the last count and is generally not considered a bigh-abuse budget extension, making it one of the more successful gTLDs from the 2012 application round.

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.

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.