Second new gTLD contention set revealed

The first showdown between new gTLD application consultants D3 Global and Unstoppable Domains has emerged, with the announcement this week of a bid for a cartoons-themed gTLD by a D3 client.

D3 said in a press release it has partnered with outfits called Animecoin Foundation and Azuki to apply to ICANN for .anime, representing the Japanese art form, when the next application round opens a bit over a year from now.

Together, the two D3 partners provide a cryptocurrency designed to enable people to trade digital art NFTs, and the NFTs themselves.

But the expected .anime application is not the first to be publicly announced. Last June, Unstoppable said it’s planning to apply for .manga and .anime with a client called Kintsugi Global.

It’s the second likely contention set between publicly announced applicants. Freename.io and 3DNS have both separately announced bids for .chain, of course intended for blockchain-related usage.

The next application window is scheduled to open April 2026 or thereabouts. There are multiple ways contention sets can be resolved under the current rules, but the main one is expected to be an ICANN-managed auction.

ICANN wins IRP because complainant literally doesn’t exist

An Independent Review Process panel has thrown out a case filed by a failed new gTLD applicant because the applicant was found to have not existed for almost seven years.

A Bahrain-based company called GCCIX had applied to run .gcc, for Gulf Cooperation Council, in 2012. Its bid was rejected by ICANN the following year on the advice of the Governmental Advisory Committee because it had no affiliation with the actual GCC, a political grouping of nations in the Middle East.

GCCIX has been challenging the rejection ever since, filing an IRP against ICANN in 2021.

But it turns out GCCIX, which apparently had only one employee, has not legally existed in Bahrain since 2018, when it lost its corporate registration for reasons that still seem a mystery even to the IRP panelist.

This kinda scuppers the former company’s ability to do stuff like signing a contract to operate a top-level part of the internet’s infrastructure. Dismissing the case, the IRP panelist wrote:

The Tribunal determines that GCCIX’s status as company “deleted by law” precludes it from engaging in commercial activity under Bahrani law. Those commercial activities undoubtedly include entering into a Registry Agreement and providing the technical and other services required to operate a gTLD… GCCIX has not had the legal capacity to operate a gTLD since at least 2018 and has not revived its capacity despite having ample time to do so.

The question now is who has to pay for this debacle, which seems to involve somewhere between four and 12 years worth of legal fees and other costs. ICANN says it wants sanctions against GCCIX, too.

The panelist said that a decision on costs would have to be made by a full IRP panel, and it’s asked both parties to have a chat about whether they want one.

Another VW car dot-brand crashes out

Volkswagen’s patchy commitment to dot-brand gTLDs is in evidence again this week, as the company has told ICANN it no longer wishes to operate .bentley.

Bentley is one of VW’s luxury car brands, based in the UK. It’s exercised its option to unilaterally terminate its gTLD registry agreement, with no explanation given.

The gTLD had a single resolving domain, which redirected to a .com.

It’s the first dot-brand to terminate this year, thought the notice seems to have been filed with ICANN in December.

VW’s attitude to its original portfolio of dot-brands has been all over the place.

Its .volkswagen, which one might expect to be the flagship, was terminated four years ago, along with its Chinese version, but .seat and .audi each have thousands of active registrations.

.free domains to finally arrive as Amazon reveals three gTLD launches

Amazon Registry has revealed launch dates for three of its long-dormant gTLDs, and they have the potential to be the most popular of its patchy portfolio.

.free, .hot and .spot are to go to sunrise April 2, according to a notice on Amazon’s web site and paperwork filed with ICANN.

The Trademark Claims period, which pretty much always coincides with the start of general availability, is set for May 12.

Details of pricing and any possible registration restrictions have not been published.

All three gTLDs have been in the root since 2016, just sitting there doing nothing. Amazon has 54 gTLDs in total, 10 of which are dot-brands, but most of the generics remain stubbornly unlaunched.

Its half-dozen Japanese-script domains have been around the longest, but its biggest success to date has been .bot, which has about 14,000 names in its zone file.

Amazon launched .deal and .now last year but the former has yet to hit 10,000 names and the former still hasn’t hit 1,000.

Amazon had to pay off four other applicants for the right to run .free.

Could ICANN approve an R-word gTLD?

ICANN could be faced with the headache of approving or rejecting a new gTLD containing a term broadly considered a slur for the first time.

Unstoppable Domains has revealed that it is working with a client on an application for .retardio, which is linked to a memecoin cryptocurrency of the same name.

Unstoppable says the domain “symbolizes pride and a blend of brilliance with eccentricity”.

But the application could come up against significant challenges if it goes ahead, due to the various reviews and objection procedures all applications face.

The word “retard”, originally a medical term for people with mental disabilities, over the years morphed into a fun playground insult but is now considered offensive enough that, unless you’re Elon Musk, it’s often referred to as the “R-word”.

(I’m only typing it out in full here for the benefit of people who are reading this in their second language, who otherwise might not know what I’m talking about.)

Since 2009, the Special Olympics has held an annual Spread the Word to End the Word awareness day, which seeks to reduce usage of the word, which it describes as a form of “bullying”.

The British comedian Rosie Jones, who has cerebral palsy, faced a barrage of criticism from her own community when she provacatively titled her 2023 documentary about online ableist bullying “Am I a R*tard?” (asterisk in original).

There can be little doubt that it’s an offensive term in most of the Anglophone world, but does that mean it cannot be included in a gTLD string?

The current draft of ICANN’s Applicant Guidebook says that applicants “should be mindful of limitations to free expression” and there are multiple avenues through which a .retardio application could be killed off.

The most obvious way would be via the Governmental Advisory Committee, which has broad powers to instruct ICANN to reject applications on public policy grounds.

The AGB says the GAC Advice objection is for applications that are “problematic” or “potentially violate national law or raise sensitivities”, but that’s a pretty wide net.

If a couple of governments decided to champion an objection to .retardio, it’s easy to imagine they’d be able to rustle up enough support to meet the “consensus” threshold for formal GAC Advice.

ICANN’s board of directors is able to reject such advice, but in the 2012 application round it pretty much did what it was told.

Another way .retardio could fail is through the Limited Public Interest Objection, which can be filed against strings that are “contrary to generally accepted legal norms of morality and public order that are recognized under principles of international law”, such as:

Incitement to or promotion of discrimination based upon race, color, gender, ethnicity, religion or national origin, or other similar types of discrimination that violate generally accepted legal norms recognized under principles of international law

Literally anybody can file a LPI Objection, and they presumably could use the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities to tick the “principles of international law” box.

If successful, such objections force the applicant to withdraw.

The International Olympic Committee has never been shy about participating in ICANN, so if the affiliated Special Olympics, or the IOC, or indeed any disability rights advocacy groups, wanted to make a point by objecting to .retardio, the LPI Objection would be the way to do it.

These are the TLD growers and shrinkers of 2024 (part two)

Following on from the annual ccTLD growth statistics DI published last week, today we’ll look at the gTLDs, where .shop was by far the biggest volume winner and .com was by far the biggest loser.

GMO Registry’s .shop added 1,315,000 names to its zone file in 2024, ending the year with 3,470,000 domains. It’s now the second-largest of the 2012 batch of gTLDs, after .xyz.

The growth seems to have been pretty consistent across the year and is presumably due to the low first-year prices offered by many registrars. At least 10 registrars offer .shop for under a dollar currently, one as low as $0.27, though around $25 appears to be the floor for renewals.

.xyz, .lol, .bond and .sbs recorded similar growth stats, up 495,000, 487,000, 468,000 and 459,000 domains to end the year with 3,801,000, 601,000, 710,000 and 824,000 respectively.

Of the 750-odd gTLDs (excluding dot-brands) for which I have stats, only about 200 grew by more than one domain per day. About 60 grew by five-figure amounts. About 280 shrank. The rest were either still unlaunched or recorded negligible growth.

Only about 80 currently have over 50,000 names in the zones which, if the number matched domains under management, would be the threshold for triggering ICANN’s per-transaction fees.

At the other end of the table, .com was by far the biggest volume loser, down 3,769,000 zone file domains to end the period at 153,856,000. Verisign has blamed economic factors in China and price increases at American registrars for the decline. Verisign’s .net lost 424,000 names to end with 12,485,000.

ShortDot’s .cfd, a stable sister to .sbs and .bond at the top end of the table, lost over three quarters of its domains over the course of the year, ending December down 782,000 at 238,000 names, showing that domains sold for pennies tend not to stick around very long.

The next five shrinkers were .click, .space, .buzz, .live and .bio, which were down 94,000, 72,000, 43,000, 41,000 and 30,000 to end the year with 471,000, 310,000, 316,000, 545,000 and 48,000 domains respectively.

.social, .gay, .win, .mobi, .monster, .website and .biz all saw declines in the low five figures in the period.

Figures in this article are sourced from domain counts in zone files collected on January 1 2024 and 2025, rounded to the nearest thousand.

New gTLD use cases not much use

ICANN has come in for periodic criticism over the last decade or so for not being sufficiently enthusiastic in public about its new gTLD program, but this time around it’s trying to do something about it.

New gTLD program participants have said that ICANN should have thrown more of its substantial resources into marketing the program, raising the profile of both the application period and the availability of new gTLDs when they go live.

But, under community guidance for the 2026 application window, Org started promoting the program earlier this year, with the publication of a “Next Round Champion’s Toolkit” web site containing ready-made marketing materials that consultants and gTLD service providers are free to use to reach out to their respective communities or sales prospects.

The latest component of this effort is a batch of 13 “use case” documents, each covering a specific gTLD from the 2012 round, compiled by ICANN, “each providing a compelling example of how different types of organizations use gTLDs”.

ICANN was wise to avoid calling them “case studies”. They’re pretty lightweight, with not [m]any particularly useful insights or actionable nuggets of advice. A cynic might summarize the 13 documents thus:

Hey, did you know .CEO/.SECURITY/.BANK exists? It really does! Here’s barely 500 words of elevator-pitch fluff from the registry’s PR folk, presented in the format of one of those glossy, double-sided, one-page inserts you find in a conference schwag bag and toss into your hotel room trash can unread when trying to reduce the weight of your carry-on.

Six out of the 13 use cases are generics run by XYZ Registry. Five are big-C “Community” gTLDs (including the geographic/linguistic niche offerings .gal, .lat and .bzh). Microsoft is the only dot-brand registry represented.

Notably, given how much emphasis ICANN has been putting on its goal to expand outreach efforts in under-served regions (op-eds and press releases have started popping up in places like India and Nigeria recently), there are no IDN gTLD use cases yet. And all the use cases are in English.

Still, I expect the use cases could be useful to Next Round “Champions” in some scenarios, certainly not as later-stage decision support but rather as part of an arsenal of foot-in-the-door introductory materials aimed at prospects utterly unaware that new gTLDs exist.

ICANN confirms two bans on new gTLD gaming

ICANN’s board of directors has just voted to approve two bans on practices in the new gTLD program that could be considered “gaming”.

It’s banned applicants for the same string from privately paying each other to drop out of contention, such as via private auctions, and has banned singular and plural versions of the same string from coexisting.

The plurals ban means that if, for example, one company applies for .podcast and another applies for .podcasts, they will go into the same contention set and only one will ultimately go live.

It also means that you can’t apply for the single/plural equivalent of an already-existing gTLD. So if you were planning to apply for, oh I dunno, .farms for example, you’re out of luck.

The move should mean that lazy applicants won’t be able to rely on piggybacking on the marketing spend of their plural/singular rivals, or on purely defensive registrations. I will also reduce end-user confusion.

The ban on private contention resolution means that contention sets will largely be resolved via an ICANN-run “auction of last resort”, in which ICANN gets all the money.

In the 2012 application round, private resolution was encouraged, and some companies made tens of millions of dollars from their rivals by losing auctions and withdrawing their applications.

Both bans had been encouraged by ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee and received the unanimous support of the board (excluding conflict-related abstentions) at the Org’s AGM in Turkiye this afternoon.

Chinese say internet not ready for single-letter gTLDs

Several major Chinese tech organizations have urged ICANN not to lift its ban on single-character gTLDs, saying the risk of confusion is too great.

Allowing single-character gTLDs in Han script was the most objected-to part of the draft Applicant Guidebook in ICANN’s just-closed public comment period, with the objections all coming from China.

Han script is used in Chinese, Japanese and Korean languages. A single character can convey the same semantic impact as a whole multi-character word in European languages.

But the commenters warned that a single character can have multiple meanings, increasing the risk of confusion.

Rui Zhong of the Internet Society of China said for example that the Han character “新” can mean “new” but is also the abbreviation for the Chinese province of Xinjiang and the nation of Singapore.

Lang Wang of CNNIC warned: “the similarities in pronunciation, form, and meaning of Han script single-character gTLD could lead to the risks of phishing, homophone attacks, intellectual property disputes, etc”.

It seems the issue may be a bit more complex than visually identical words having multiple definitions in other languages, with multiple commenters saying that single-character words do not reflect the reality of modern Chinese usage.

Unloved INTA slams ICANN over new gTLDs

The new gTLD program is an existential threat to ICANN if it continues to ignore the concerns of IP interests, according to the International Trademark Association.

Trademark owners are becoming disillusioned with the ICANN process and “instead have opted to pursue more balanced outcomes through regulators, legislatures, and courts”, INTA said in comments on draft new gTLD program rules yesterday.

INTA warned that there has been “a decline in interest in the work of ICANN as otherwise engaged members have determined that there is very little return on the thousands of hours of time that they have devoted to ICANN’s continuous improvement”. It said:

The ICANN Board, Org and review team members would do well to consider the consequences of continuing to ignore the input of non-contracted parties especially when it comes to addressing ongoing harms within the domain name system. At a time when governments are vying to assume more policy oversight over the DNS, ICANN is well positioned to double down on the multistakeholder model by giving serious consideration and adjusting proposed policies in a balanced manner.

ICANN’s refusal to take on board the IP lobby’s suggestions when it added new DNS abuse requirements to its registry and registrar contracts earlier this year seems to be at the root of the outburst.

INTA said that it is “opposed to new [gTLD application] rounds” until “substantial reforms are made to ICANN’s approach to domain abuse and contract compliance”.

The comments were by far the angriest filed in response to the ICANN public comment period, just closed, that sought input on several draft sections of the new gTLD program’s Applicant Guidebook.

Pre-rant, INTA substantively said that the AGB needs to give brand owners and potential dot-brand applicants more clarity on when subsequent application rounds will launch.

Currently, ICANN expects the Next Round’s first wave to kick off in the second quarter of 2026, but subsequent application windows are subject to a checklist of triggering events that on the face of it is a little confusing.

Threats of government intervention undermining the legitimacy of the ICANN multistakeholder model are of course far from new. I’ve been writing about them for 20 years or more.

But the latest INTA threat may ring a little hollow given that ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee also filed comments on exactly the same issues, so we know exactly what governments think: they’re totally cool with how the AGB is being drafted, and just seem happy to be involved.