New gTLD application fee rises by thousands after collision call

ICANN has upped its expected new gTLD application fee after approving a costly new plan to tack name collisions.

The baseline price of applying for a single string, most recently pegged at $220,000, is now expected to go up by $5,000, according to a recent resolution of the ICANN board of directors.

The board earlier this month approved the Name Collision Analysis Project Study 2 Final Report, which proposed a way to prevent new gTLDs seriously interfering with existing non-standard TLD use on private networks.

Strings applied for successfully in the 2012 round had to agree to a 90-day post-launch period of “controlled interruption”, during which the entire gTLD was wildcarded with information to help affected parties fix their DNS configuration.

So if a company had been using .horse on its internal network, and a suddenly-delegated .horse gTLD started causing leakages to the public DNS, the company was quickly alerted to what the problem was.

Under the now-approved NCAP 2 plan, ICANN will take over responsibility for controlled interruption. Applied-for strings will be tested in the live DNS before a registry has even been contracted.

The results would be assessed by a Technical Review Team and applicants for strings considered at high risk of collisions would be able to submit mitigation plans for evaluation before having their registry contracts approved.

While approving NCAP 2 will generate more confidence that the Next Round will in fact go ahead in the second quarter of 2026, this extra stage of course will add friction and cost to the evaluation process.

ICANN estimates it will add $500,000 to its program implementation budget and $6.9 million to the application processing budget, increasing the application fee by $5,000 per application. That seems to assume 1,500 applications being submitted.

The likely increase has been flagged up for months, so is unlikely to surprise potential applicants, but will not appease those already grumbling that the fee has gone up so sharply from the $185,000 charged in the 2012 round.

It’s also bad news for companies that applied for .home, .corp or .mail in 2012, which were rejected due to the high risk of collisions.

The ICANN board rejected NCAP 2’s recommendation that these three gTLDs should be submitted to the new Name Collision Risk Assessment Process, potentially reawakening their applications from their Not Approved status.

Under the latest board action, anyone who applied for .home, .corp or .mail in 2012 will have no preferential treatment if they apply for the same strings again in 2026, according to the resolution.

Affected applicants were already offered a full refund for their rejected bids, with only deep-pocketed Amazon and Google so far not exercising that option. Now they have no excuse.

Straggler gTLD signs first ICANN contract for years

One of the outstanding contested gTLDs from the 2012 application round looks set to be delegated finally, after the winning bidder signed its Registry Agreement with ICANN.

Merck Registry Holdings Inc is now the officially contracted registry for .merck, and it appears the intent is to be a dot-brand jointly controlled by two unaffiliated chemical companies of the same name.

An American company and a German company, both called Merck and with common roots that were severed during World War I, now seem set to have equal ownership rights to .merck, after over a decade of legal wrangling.

Both companies applied for .merck, and according to the ICANN process the American one won because the German one withdrew its application.

However, the winning application was amended in 2021 to say that the registry intends to transfer its contract to a newly formed UK company called MM Domain Holdco Ltd.

Company records indicate that this shell firm is a 50:50 joint venture of the two Mercks, with over a million dollars cash in the bank.

It seems that the two firms intend to share the gTLD, and run it as a dot-brand for both of their benefit, which is pretty rare.

Big twist as ICANN bans new gTLD auctions

ICANN is to ban new gTLD applicants from paying each other off if they apply for the same strings, removing a business model that saw tens of millions of dollars change hands in the 2012 application round.

But, in a twist, applicants will be able to submit second-choice strings along with their main application, allowing them to switch if they find themselves in contention.

While ICANN’s board of directors has yet to pass a resolution on private resolution in forthcoming application rounds, chair Tripti Sinha said in a letter to the GNSO Council (pdf) and blog post that there’s agreement on three principles.

“Private resolution of contention sets will not be permitted during the Next Round,” Sinha told the Council. The idea of permitting joint-venture resolution was also ruled out as impractical and open to gaming.

This of course means that where contention sets do occur, they’ll be resolved with a “last resort” auction where ICANN gets all the cash from the winning bidder.

Funds raised this way in the last round, along with a decade’s worth of investment interest, have been used to replenish ICANN’s reserve fund, to fund the current Grant Program, and may be shortly used to subsidize the Applicant Support Program.

Second, applicants will be able to submit at least one alternate string with their applications, allowing them to avoid a contention set and last resort auction.

This potentially makes the cost of acquiring a gTLD cheaper for the applicant while increasing the number of gTLDs that go live. ICANN might also have to issue fewer refunds for withdrawn applications.

ICANN thinks this measure might make gTLDs more affordable for less well-resourced applicants from the Global South, where ICANN is keen to diversify the industry, although the applicants may not get their first-choice strings.

Applicants would only be able to switch to an alternate string, which they will have to have pre-selected, if doing so would not create a new contention set or make the applicant join a different existing contention set.

They’d also only be able avoid a contention set of exact-match strings, and not sets subsequently created by the String Similarity Review or String Confusion Objection results.

So, to take an example from 2012, any of the seven .hotels applicants would have been able to switch to a second-choice string immediately after Reveal Day, but not after the similarity review placed them in contention with .hoteis.

The third point of agreement from the board is that the last resort auctions should keep the ascending-clock second-price method used for the 2012 round, deciding against lotteries or the Vickrey auction method.

The ascending clock method sees bids filed in rounds until all bidders but one had dropped out. The last applicant standing then pays ICANN the last price offered by the runner-up.

A Vickrey auction would have seen applicants submit their maximum bids at the time of application, not knowing who they were bidding against. Lotteries are legally problematic under California gambling law.

Sinha said the board intends to pass a resolution embodying these three principles “in the coming weeks”.

This is going to create some extra work for the GNSO, as ruling out joint ventures as a means to private resolution goes against community policy recommendations (and the board’s adoption of those recommendations).

The GNSO Council is set to discuss Sinha’s letter at its regular monthly meeting this Thursday.

The new gTLD next, next and next round

“The goal is for the next application round to begin within one year of the close of the application submission period for the initial round.”

Believe it or not, that sentence appears in the new gTLD program’s Applicant Guidebook that ICANN published in June 2012, 12 years of seemingly interminable review and revision ago.

Ah, 2012…

Obama was reelected for his second term. The final of the Euros took place in Kyiv. Gangnam Style topped the charts. Harvey Weinstein won an Emmy. Microsoft released Windows 8. Jedward sang for Ireland in Eurovision. Everyone had an opinion on Joseph Kony and Grumpy Cat.

Naturally enough, a lot of people aren’t very happy about the massive delay between the close of the last application window and the opening of the next one, currently penciled in for the second quarter of 2026.

So the community has done something about it, placing language in the draft of the next AGB that commits ICANN to open subsequent, post-2026 rounds without all the mindless navel-gazing and fannying around.

The intent is pretty clear — make application rounds more frequent and more predictable — but there’s still plenty of wiggle-room for ICANN to exploit if it wants to delay things yet again.

Here’s what the proposed AGB language (pdf) says:

ICANN works towards future rounds of new gTLDs taking place at regular and predictable intervals without indeterminable periods of review and, absent extraordinary circumstances, application procedures will take place without pause. A new round may be initiated even if steps related to application processing and delegation from previous application rounds have not been fully completed.

The ICANN Board will determine the timing of the initiation of a subsequent application round of the New gTLD Program as soon as feasible, but preferably not later than the second Board meeting after all the following conditions have been met:

1. The list of applied-for strings for the ongoing round has been confirmed and the window for string change requests has closed. This will provide applicants in a subsequent round with an understanding of which strings can be applied for.

2. ICANN org has not encountered significant barriers to its ability to receive and process a new batch of applications.

Absent extraordinary circumstances, future reviews and/or policy development processes, including the next Competition, Consumer Choice & Consumer Trust (CCT) Review, should take place independent of subsequent application rounds. In other words, future reviews and/or policy development processes must not stop or delay subsequent new gTLD rounds.

If the outputs of any reviews and/or policy development processes has, or could reasonably have, a material impact on the manner in which application procedures are conducted, such changes will apply to the opening of the application round subsequent to the adoption of the relevant recommendations by the ICANN Board. Once adopted by the Board, the implementation of that policy or review recommendation(s) will then become a dependency for the timing of that subsequent round of applications.

The language is among several draft sections of the 2026 AGB that ICANN this week opened for public comment.

An intriguing question now arises: will this commitment on subsequent round timing have any impact on the number of applications submitted in 2026?

People in the know tell us that there’s a decade-long backlog of wannabe applicants, particularly in the dot-brand world, but will any of them decide to slow down their ambitions if they know they only have an extra year or two to wait for another round?

Or will they trust ICANN’s record of delay over the somewhat flexible promises of the AGB?

It’s not just an academic question. How much applicants will ultimately pay ICANN in application fees, after rebates, will depend on how may applications are filed.

Russia calls for ICANN to split from US

The Russian government has called on ICANN to further distance itself from US legal jurisdiction, complaining that the current war-related sanctions could prevent its companies from applying for new gTLDs.

In recent comments, Russia said that “no single state or group of states should have the right to interfere in the operation of critical Internet infrastructure and/or the activities of ICANN, including the mechanisms for legal regulation of ICANN’s operations”.

It added that it is “necessary… to prepare by the ICANN community and stakeholders proposals for measures or mechanisms that can make ICANN less dependent on one state”.

The call came in comments filed in ICANN’s public comment period on the terms and conditions of the new gTLD program’s Applicant Support Program and Registry Service Provider Evaluation Program.

The Ts&Cs contain a clause requiring applicants to abide by all US economic sanctions, such as those overseen by the Office of Foreign Assets Control, which has sanctioned Russian entities since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

Russia’s comment was filed late and has not been published or analysed by ICANN in the usual way. Instead, it was appended to the summary report (pdf) prepared by ICANN staff.

It’s not the only war-related beef Russia has with ICANN right now. The government has also complained (pdf) that about 400 domains registered by Russian entities, including airports and airlines, in the .aero gTLD have been suspended.

The .aero registry, aerospace industry IT service provider SITA, is headquartered in Switzerland but the contracting entity is a US-based subsidiary.

According to OFAC, domain registration services are exempt from the US sanctions. That has not stopped several domain registries and registrars ceasing business with Russians on moral grounds.

ICANN told Russia to file a complaint about SITA with its Compliance department. SITA has not yet responded to a request for comment.

Calls for ICANN to distance itself from the US have been coming for over two decades, usually from America’s opponents, and did not stop when the Org severed its formal ties with the 2016 IANA transition.

ICANN homes in on new gTLD application fee

ICANN has narrowed down the expected application fee for the next round of new gTLDs, and while it’s towards the lower end of previous guidelines, it’s still much higher than in 2012.

The bog-standard base application fee is now expected to be $220,000, according to a draft document circulated by ICANN.

That’s up on the $185,000 applicants paid in 2012, but it’s at the less-pricey end of the $208,000 to $293,000 range ICANN outlined at its meeting in Rwanda this June.

But the base fee is simply to get your foot in the door. It’s accompanied by an à la carte menu of additional services incurring additional fees, some of which were part of the base fee in 2012.

Because the new gTLD program is being run on a cost-recovery basis, the fee is set according to how many applications ICANN expects to receive, which is rather speculative and based largely on anecdotal evidence.

That predicted number is now 1,500, down on the 1,930 actual applications received in 2012.

The $220,000 fee is the lowest up-front fee that applicants would have to pay, and does not include extra payments they would have to make in the event of contention, additional evaluations or objections.

There are 10 different additional fees that could be incurred by applicants, including one that’s new to me — an “Occupancy fee” which the document says is “for lingering applications”.

I can’t help but think that this is an attempt to avoid a repeat of Nameshop, which applied for the banned string .idn in 2012 and continues to refuse to admit defeat, withdraw its application, and get its refund.

The new ICANN document notes that this proposed squatters’ rent is still open to discussion, but other fees, while not given a price tag yet, appear more likely to become a reality.

It seems dot-brand applicants will have to pay extra fees for their Spec9 and Spec13 exemptions, which allow them to work outside the usual registrar channel and allocate names only to themselves.

Applicants for community gTLDs and geographic strings would also pay extra fees.

There’s also the chance that the base fee could go up before the application window opens, depending on the outcome of some still-unconfirmed parts of the application process, such as the mechanism to address name collision risk. This alone could add thousands to each applicant’s bill.

The good news is that if the next round is significantly over-subscribed and ICANN makes back the $70 million it reckons the program cost, it plans to offer rebates to applicants dependent on how much extra cash it has received.

The draft document also includes estimates for the cost of the Registry Service Provider Evaluation Program, which enables RSPs to get the ICANN seal of approval before pitching their services to new gTLD applicants.

Also priced on a cost-recovery basis, this program is still expected to cost a maximum of $92,000 per RSP, with the costs potentially falling if more than 50 RSPs apply to be accredited.

ICANN has a pretty good idea that the roughly 45 companies currently providing back-end registry services for gTLDs will probably use the RSP program. If a large number of startups or ccTLD registries want to get involved too, that would bring the price down.

Four more dot-brands switch back-ends

Four dot-brand gTLDs have recently changed their back-end providers, according to the latest records, three moving away from Verisign.

US insurance company American Family Insurance has moved its .americanfamily and .amfam from Verisign to GoDaddy, as has AARP, a US interest group representing retired people, with .aarp.

Aquarelle.com Group, a French flower delivery company, has meanwhile switched from French ccTLD operator Afnic to London-based CentralNic (which is still Team Internet’s registry brand).

The AmFam moves are notable because while Verisign has for some time been getting out of the dot-brand back-end business, most of its clients have been migrating to Identity Digital.

I count seven gTLDs making the Verisign-GoDaddy switch, compared to 60 going Verisign-Identity Digital over the last couple years. Verisign is now down to a few dozen dot-brands.

The Aquarelle.com move is notable because it’s rare for a dot-brand to use a back-end in a different time zone that predominantly uses a different language, but Team Internet does have a footprint in France and other Francophone countries so it’s perhaps not wholly weird.

Three of the dot-brands are not heavily used — .aarp has three resolving domains that redirect to aarp.org, while .amfam has about 10 names in its zone that do not publicly resolve and .americanfamily has none.

You might infer from the name “Aquarelle.com” that the company is not a big believer in the dot-brand concept, but you’d be surprisingly wrong — .aquarelle has more than 50 domains that resolve to web sites without redirecting to traditional TLDs.

Unstoppable reveals gTLD bid doomed to fail

It’s finally happened. Somebody has announced an application for a new gTLD that will almost certainly fall foul of ICANN’s rules and be rejected.

The would-be applicant is Farmsent, a United Arab Emirates startup that is building a blockchain-based marketplace for farmers and buyers of farm produce, and its domains partner is Unstoppable Domains.

Unstoppable said last week that the two companies are launching .farms domains on Unstoppable’s alternative naming system, and that an ICANN application for a proper gTLD is in the works.

The company said it “will be collaborating with Farmsent to plan and strategize for the next ICANN gTLD application, further solidifying .farms in the wider domain ecosystem”.

The problem is that .farms will likely be banned under the rules set out in ICANN’s Applicant Guidebook for the next round, unless the current draft recommendations are completely rewritten or rejected.

ICANN is to be told to reject applications for the plural and singular variants of existing gTLDs in the next round, and .farms is of course the plural of .farm, which is one of the few hundred names in Identity Digital’s stable.

The draft recommendations would merely require for ICANN to be informed that an applied-for string is a single or plural variant of an existing gTLD in the same language and check in a dictionary to confirm that is indeed the case.

In the case of .farm and .farms, I doubt the dictionary verification would realistically even be needed — though I’d bet checking that box would be at least one billable hour for somebody — as it’s a pretty clear-cut case of a bannable clash.

The ICANN staff/community working group drafting the recommendations has spent a huge amount of time arguing about the language of the plurals rule. It’s a surprisingly tricky problem, especially when ICANN is terrified of being seen as a content regulator.

AI and games among July’s interesting dot-brand domains

A domain hosting a fun little video game for Lidl staff was the highlight dot-brand domain registration in July.

There were 210 registrations in dot-brands in July 2024, spread across 34 individual TLDs. As usual, the largest registrant was German financial services firm Deutsche Vermögensberatung, which gives .dvag domains to its agents, with 90 new regs.

Just like in the non-brand space, not all dot-brand regs immediately resolve publicly. Some never will. Others, technical indicators show, are only designed for private corporate purposes.

These are the new domains that caught my eye in July.

levelup.lidl (also level-up.lidl) — These domains leads to a surprisingly polished, cutesy-cutesy browser game where the player, presumably a new hire at the German supermarket giant, controls a cartoon potato (?) character as they wander around a 3D landscape interacting with other characters to learn about Lidl’s corporate values. Okay, I admit I only gave it five minutes, but it surely beats a PowerPoint.

gemini.google — Gemini is Google’s AI chatbot. The brand has been around since last December, but it took until July for the matching .google domain to be registered. It currently resolves to gemini.google.com, the official Gemini site. Google also registered another of its brands, fitbit.google, in the month, but it does not currently publicly resolve.

sustainability.bostik (and 27 others) — Adhesives maker Bostik registered 28 .bostik domains in July, all related to product categories (paper.bostik, tape.bostik), customer verticals (transportation.bostik, construction.bostik) or corporate purposes (history.bostik, careers.bostik). The company only has 36 active .bostik domains, registering none for over a year, so the new regs suggest a possible rethink of the dot-brand, even though the domains don’t yet publicly resolve.

escapegames.bnpparibas — Why would BNP Paribas, a large French bank, be interested in “escape games”? Is it planning on locking people in its massive safes? The domain doesn’t currently resolve, so I couldn’t tell you.

sellersinyourcommunity.amazon (and variants) — Amazon also registered the likes of sellersofthecommunity.amazon and sellersinthecommunity.amazon, but the registration of siyc.amazon suggests “Sellers In Your Community” is to be the correct brand for whatever localized e-commerce initiative the online retailer has in mind.

It’s official, .internal is blocked forever

ICANN has formally confirmed that the gTLD .internal will never be delegated.

Its board of directors resolved earlier this week that it “reserves .INTERNAL from delegation in the DNS root zone permanently to provide for its use in private-use applications.”

It went on to recommend “that efforts be undertaken to raise awareness of its reservation for this purpose through the organization’s technical outreach.”

The idea is to give organizations a gTLD that they can use behind their firewalls that they can be sure will never become a public-DNS gTLD in future, which would carry the risk of name collisions and data leakage.

The string “internal” was picked in January over .private and put out for public comment to murmurs of approval.

The move means nobody will be able to apply for .internal in future new gTLD application rounds.