Blockchain startup gets $5 million to apply for gTLDs

A company backed by some familiar industry names has raised $5 million in seed funding to apply to ICANN for new gTLDs and, it says, bridge the gap between the traditional DNS and blockchain alternate roots.

Las Vegas-based D3 Global is being led by Fred Hsu, one of the founders of aftermarket pioneer Oversee.net. Among its listed founders are Paul Stahura, one of the triumvirate that launched Donuts, now Identity Digital, to apply for hundreds of gTLDs in 2012.

Also listed as founders are Shayan Rostam, who’s currently building Internet Naming Co into a prominent new gTLD portfolio player, former Network Solutions engineer Shay Chinn and investment banker Michael Ho.

These are people with domain industry experience going back in some cases to the 1990s and track records of building successful disrupters, so it’s worth paying attention no matter what you think of blockchain stuff.

D3 says it plans to apply to ICANN for traditional TLDs but will also introduce interoperability with blockchain-based “Web3” naming systems.

Hsu said in a press release: “We are committed to driving forward the convergence of the traditional DNS system and Web3 to make domain names more versatile, secure, and universally accessible.”

It also talks of introducing a marketplace that combines traditional DNS names with blockchain to “significantly reduce the friction traditionally seen in domain name transactions, such as low transparency, high broker fees, transfer delays, and escrow services.”

The funding round was led by Shima Capital with participation from Lightshift, Dispersion Capital, VentureSouq, Infinite Capital, MZ Web3 Fund, Kestrel0x1, Nonagon, C² Ventures, Arthur Hayes’ Maelstrom, Stahura himself.

Closed generics ban likely to remain after another policy group failure

Closed generic gTLDs are likely off the table for ICANN’s next application round, after a secretive policy development working group failed to reach a consensus on how they could be permitted.

The chairs of the ALAC-GAC-GNSO Facilitated Dialogue on Closed Generic gTLDs have put their names to a draft letter that essentially throws in the towel and recommends ICANN sticks to the status quo in which closed generics are not permitted.

The chairs of the three committees write that they “believe that it is not necessary to resolve the question of closed generic gTLDs as a dependency for the next round of new gTLDs, and we plan to inform the ICANN Board accordingly.”

In other words, whatever latency related to needing a closed generics policy that was built in to ICANN’s recent April 2026 target for opening the next application round could be eliminated from the timeline.

The three chairs added (emphasis in original PDF):

We agree with the ICANN Board (in its original invitation to the GAC and the GNSO to engage in a facilitated dialogue) that this topic is one for community policy work, rather than a decision for the Board. As such and based on our collective belief that there is neither the need nor the community bandwidth to conduct additional work at this stage, we also plan to ask that, for the next round, the Board maintain the position that, unless and until there is a community-developed consensus policy in place, any applications seeking to impose exclusive registry access for “generic strings” to a single person or entity and/or that person’s or entity’s Affiliates (as defined in Section 2.9(c) of the Registry Agreement) should not proceed. Finally, we also plan to inform the Board that any future community policy work on this topic should be based on the good work that has been done to date in this facilitated dialogue.

But that position — still a draft — is already facing some push-back from community members who disagree about what the current status quo actually is.

The 2012 application round opened up with the assumption that closed generics were A-okay, and it received hundreds of such applications.

But the governments of the GAC, no doubt stirred by competition concerns, balked when they saw big companies had applied for gTLD strings that could enable them to dominate their markets.

The GAC demanded that closed generics must service the public interest if they were to be permitted, so ICANN Org — in what would turn out to be an Original Sin injected into the destiny of future rounds — retroactively changed the rules, essentially banning closed generics but allowing applicants to withdraw for a refund or open up their proposed registration policies.

The third option was to defer their applications to a future application round, by which point it was assumed the community would have established a closed generics policy. No applicant took that option.

But making that policy was the job of a committee called SubPro, but when turned its attention to the issue, entrenched positions among volunteers took hold and no consensus could be found. It couldn’t even agree what the status quo was. The group wound up punting the issue to the ICANN board.

The discussion moved on last year when ICANN decided to launch the “Facilitated Dialogue”, forcing the GAC and the GNSO to the negotiating table in last-ditch attempt to put the issue to bed for good.

Ironically, it was the 2013 GAC advice — made at time when the governments drafted their advice in secret and were deliberately ambiguous in their output — that killed off closed generics for a decade that ICANN used to reopen the issue. The GAC hadn’t wanted a blanket ban, after all, it just wanted to mandate a “public interest” benefit.

The assumption was that the Facilitated Dialogue would come up with something in-between a ban and a free-for-all, but what it actually seems to have come up with is a return to the status quo and disagreement about what the status quo even is.

It really is one of those situations where ICANN, in its broadest definition, can’t see to find its ass with two hands and a flashlight (and — if you’ll indulge me — a map, GPS coordinates, and a Sherpa).

April 2026 is the date for the next new gTLD round

ICANN has given itself an April 2026 target for accepting the next round of new gTLD applications.

Board chair Tripti Sinha wrote yesterday that ICANN expects the next Applicant Guidebook — the Book of Mormon for the program — to be completed in May 2025 “which enables the application round to open in Q2 2026 (with the goal of April 2026)”.

She noted, as if it needed note, that there could be delays.

Back in May, ICANN had indicated May 2026 as the likely date. That was in a fairly obscure Inside Baseball document. The newly revealed date is an official ICANN announcement.

Other key dates come in the fourth quarter 2025, when ICANN will start accepting applications for its Applicant Support Program and registry service provider pre-evaluation program.

Sinha said the board last week approved an Implementation Plan that lays out the work — and costs — for the next three years.

ICANN expects the program to cost it $70 million between Q2 2023 and Q2 2026. It’s assuming it gets roughly 2,000 applications, in with its experience in 2012. It will hire 29 new staff.

A second new gTLD has FAILED and will be sold off

A second commercial, non-branded new gTLD has thrown in the towel after failing to sell many domains and ICANN will seek out a new registry operator to take over.

Desi Networks has told ICANN it wants to unilaterally terminate its contract to run .desi, which as of the end of March had 1,425 domains under management after almost a decade in the root. It peaked at 4,330 domains in December 2018.

ICANN said it will invoke its Registry Transition Process to find a new registry operator. That’s essentially an auction, though if Desi Networks has so far failed to find a buyer privately one wonders how much attention it will attract.

The term “desi” broadly refers to people of South Asian residence or descent, usually Indians and the Indian diaspora. With over 1.5 billion potential registrants, on paper it looks like a winner.

But a Google search for .desi sites reveals just a handful of active domains, all related to porn sites.

The registry seems to have given up on approving zone file requests some time last year, so I have no insight into the kinds of domains currently registered, but ICANN says they are registered to third parties.

None of the registry’s own web sites, save nic.desi, appear to be working, and its Twitter account has been dormant since 2018.

The failure of the business doesn’t appear to be from a lack of channel opportunities. The gTLD is available through most of the major registrars, according to transaction reports, and runs on CentralNic’s back-end.

ICANN said it may transition .desi to an Emergency Back-End Registry Operator while it sorts everything out.

The Registry Transition Process has been invoked just once before, in 2021, after Atrgon’s .wed failed. That gTLD has been using an EBERO, Nominet, for six years.

Most registries that have terminated their gTLD contracts have been dot-brands with no third-party registrants. ICANN just removes those from the root.

Next round of gTLDs could come much sooner than expected

ICANN’s next new gTLDs application round may be closer than we thought, after a policy working group dramatically reduced the timetable for completing its work.

The Internationalized Domain Names Expedited Policy Development Process team has managed to shave a whopping 13 months off its schedule, potentially leading to a similar period being shaved off the runway to the next application window.

The IDNs EPDP had expected to deliver its final deliverables — policy recommendations on how IDNs are handled in gTLD applications — in November 2025, meaning the earliest they could be adopted by the ICANN board would be March 2026.

Because the IDNs policy is seen as a critical gating factor to the next round commencing, the date ICANN penciled in for the next application window was May 2026.

But now the IDNs EPDP group has revised its deadline down to October 2024, member Donna Austin told the GNSO Council last Thursday. This could mean the board could approve its work in early 2025.

The new target means that IDNs are no longer the biggest delaying factor on the critical path to the next window — that honor now falls on the “closed generics” problem, which a “small team” of the GNSO and Governmental Advisory Committee have been working on in private all year.

The latest thinking on closed generics is that another EPDP would be formed with an estimated run-time of 96 weeks (22 months) — a mid-2025 end date, in other words.

But there are even question marks over that optimal timeline now, following a less than supportive informal public comment period that closed last week. The closed generics small team has apparently taken a week off to ask itself some fundamental questions.

One possibility that has been suggested to speed things up is to take closed generics out of the critical path by retaining the current de facto ban for the next round.

If that were to happen, we could be looking at an application window in 2025.

But nobody ever won money betting on ICANN hitting deadlines, so take this speculation with a pinch of salt big enough to give an elephant hypertension.

No $8 million discount for dot-brands, says ICANN

ICANN has rejected a request for a 80% discount on registry fees paid by dot-brand gTLD operators.

The Brand Registry Group had asked ICANN in May for a reduction in the annual fixed fee from $25,000 to $5,000, largely on the basis that they have essentially no abuse and require very little Compliance oversight.

But interim CEO Sally Costerton has now responded to “respectfully decline” the request, which would have wiped out about $8 million of ICANN’s annual budget, about 5% of its total revenue.

“The cost to support New gTLDs is not merely based on the number of domains under management or the level of abuse. Regardless of the size of the TLD, registry operators must still comply with the Registry Agreement and associated policies, and ICANN must monitor that compliance,” Costerton wrote.

Dot-brands already have lower fees because they uniformly don’t pass the 50,000 domains limit at which transactional fees kick in, she said.

There are mechanisms in the Base Registry Agreement that all amendments to be made, she said.

GoDaddy takes over .health

GoDaddy Registry has added .health to its growing stable of TLDs.

According to ICANN records, the company has taken over the contract from original registry DotHealth.

GoDaddy was already the back-end registry services provider for the gTLD, and as registrar is responsible for roughly half of the roughly 35,000 domains registered there.

Judging by ICANN documentation, GoDaddy has also acquired DotHealth.

Governments call for ban on gTLD auctions

Governments are calling for a ban on new gTLD contention sets being settled via private auctions, a practice that allowed many tens of millions of dollars to change hands in the last application round.

ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee said in its ICANN 77 communique that it formally advises ICANN: “To ban or strongly disincentivize private monetary means of resolution of contention sets, including private auctions.”

Private auctions typically see the losers split the winner’s winning bid among themselves. The GAC endorsed the At-Large Advisory Committee’s recommendation that applicants should be forced to ICANN-run “last resort” auctions, where ICANN gets all the money, instead.

The concern is that companies with no intention of actually operating a gTLD will file applications purely in order to have a tradeable asset that can be sold to competing applicants for a huge profit.

In the 2012 round, 224 contention sets were settled in private, often via auctions. ICANN not only allowed but encouraged the practice.

For example, publicly listed portfolio registry Minds + Machines disclosed tens of millions of income from losing private auctions, some of which was reinvested into winning auctions for gTLDs that it did intend to run.

Another applicant, Nu Do Co, did not win a single auction it was involved in, with the exception of the ICANN-run “last resort” auction for .web, where its winning $135 million bid was secretly funded by Verisign.

In the case of .web, rival bidders urged NDC to go to private auction until almost the last moment, eager to get a piece of the winning bid. It remains the subject of legal disputes to this day.

The current GNSO “SubPro” policy recommendations do not include a ban on private settlements, instead saying that applicants should affirm that they have a “bona fide” intent to operate the TLD, under penalty of unspecified sanctions if they lie.

The recommendations include a set of suggested red flags that ICANN should look out for when trying to determine whether an applicant is game the system, such as the number of applications filed versus contention sets won.

It’s pretty vague — the kind of thing that would have to be ironed out during implementation — and the ICANN board of directors has yet to formally approve these specific recommendations.

The GAC’s latest advice also has concerns about the “last resort” auctions that ICANN conducts, which see ICANN place the winning bid in a special fund, particular with regards non-commercial applicants.

The GAC advised ICANN: “To take steps to avoid the use of auctions of last resort in contentions between commercial and non-commercial applications; alternative means for the resolution of such contention sets, such as drawing lots, may be explored.”

Some previous ways to mitigate contention gaming include Vickrey auctions, where every applicant submits a high bid at the time of application and the applicant with the highest bid pays ICANN the amount of the second-highest bid.

Bidding before one even knows whether the gTLD string will be subject to contention is seen as a way to dissuade applicants from applying for strings they don’t really want.

ICANN directors said repeatedly at ICANN 77 last week that the Org will be hiring an auctions expert to investigate the best way to handle auctions and reduce gaming.

Closed generics and IDNs debates are big drag on new gTLDs

As ICANN 77 officially kicks off in Washington DC today, the issues of closed generics and IDNs have already emerged as big drag factors on the launch of the next new gTLD application round.

During a day-long “day zero” session yesterday, the community heard that the absolute fastest the GNSO will be able to make policy on closed generics is 96 weeks — over 22 months — using its “expedited” Policy Development Process.

Meanwhile, making policy on internationalized domain names — mainly, how to handle string similarity conflicts in non-Latin scripts — is not expected to be done until March 2026 at the earliest. And that’s through an “expedited” PDP that has already been running for over two years.

The predicted closed generics timetable (on page 16 of this PDF presentation) is actually relatively aggressive compared to the two previous EPDPs (on post-GDPR Whois policy) that the GNSO has previously completed.

It only calls for 36 weeks — about eight months — for the actual working group deliberations, for example, compared to the 48 weeks the equally controversial Whois EPDP took a few years ago.

But the expected duration prompted some criticism yesterday from those wondering why, for example, a “call for volunteers” needs to take as long as three months to carry out.

The timetable was written up prior to the publication over the weekend of a draft framework for closed generics (pdf), which lays out a few dozen principles that should be taken into account in subsequent EPDP work.

With what looks like a certain amount of wheel-reinvention, the document describes a points-based system for determining whether an applicant is worthy of a closed generic. It seems to be based quite a lot on the process used to assess “Community” applications in the 2012 round.

The framework was created in private over the last six months by a cross-community group of 14 people from the GNSO and Governmental Advisory Committee. Chatham House rules applied, so we don’t know exactly whose opinions made it into the final draft. But it exists now, and at first glance it looks like a decent starting point for a closed generics policy.

The major issue is that the work, at its core, is about predicting and preemptively shutting down all the ways devious corporate marketing people might try to blag themselves a closed generic for competitive or defensive purposes, rather than for the public interest, and I’m not sure that’s possible.

Discussion on closed generics will continue this week at ICANN 77, including a session that starts around about the same time I’m hitting publish on this article.

ICANN just put a date on the next new gTLD round

ICANN has just penciled in a date for the next round of new gTLD applications for the first time, but it’s already upsetting some people who think it’s not aggressive enough.

Org has released its draft Implementation Plan for the next round, which would see it launch in May 2026, three years from now.

The date seems to have been set from the top. The plan refers to “the Board’s desire to launch the next round by May 2026”.

The plan sets out the timeline by which community members will work with staff to turn the community’s policy recommendations into the rules and procedures for accepting and processing gTLD applications.

This cross-community Implementation Review Team will write the next Applicant Guidebook — the new gTLD’s program’s Holy Quran.

The plan covers the 98 policy recommendations already approved by the ICANN board of directors, it will be updated when or if the board approves the 38 recommendations currently considered “pending”.

The work would be split into eight “modules”, corresponding to the sections of the AGB, and the IRT would tackle each in turn, meeting mostly via Zoom for a couple hours once a week.

The modules would be split into about 40 topics, each covering a group of related recommendations, and each topic would be discussed for two meetings, with Org-drafted text undergoing first and second “readings” by the IRT.

The first module would take seven months to complete, timed from this month, and each subsequent module would take three to four months after the completion of the preceding module, according to the draft plan.

Above and beyond that timetable, the IRT has certain external dependencies, such as the work being done with governments on the “closed generics” issue, the plan notes.

After the AGB is published, ICANN would need to carry out other work, such as subjecting the AGB to public comment, then marketing the program for four months, before an application window would open.

The timeline has been received negatively by pretty much everyone on the IRT expressing a view on mailing list or Zoom chatter so far, with some asking why the modules have to be tackled sequentially rather than in parallel work tracks.

Some have also pointed out that an IRT lasting over two years risks participant attrition, a frequent problem with ICANN’s interminable policy-making work.

The IRT comprises dozens of volunteers from all sections of the community, though the most-engaged tend to be the lawyers and consultants who stand to make money advising large enterprises on their dot-brand applications.