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.

Comment Tagged: 2026 round, ICANN, new gTLDs, reveal day

.bank registry looking for new boss

fTLD Registry Services, which runs .bank and .insurance as restricted gTLDs for the financial services industry, is looking for a new president and CEO.

Craig Schwartz, a one-time ICANNer who has been leading the company for 16 years, said on social media he’s planning to retire to spend more time travelling, and has put out a call for his replacement.

While Schwartz said he won’t be leaving until the second quarter of next year, Perrett Laver, the headhunter firm leading the search for his replacement, has put an October 30 deadline on applications.

They’re naturally enough looking for a person with significant experience of the domain industry and ICANN ecosystem.

.bank and .insurance are pretty small in terms of domains in their zones — fewer than 2,500 in .bank and almost nothing in .insurance — but that’s largely because they’re some of the most tightly controlled gTLDs out there.

Comment Tagged: .bank, .insurance, ftld

Junk drop hits .my domains hard

.my domains slumped hard in September, apparently as a result of a junk drop a year after a largely successful promotion.

Local registry MYNIC is reporting 693,122 .my domains at the end of the month, down from 826,384 at the end of August. That’s a drop of 133,262 or about 16% over the 30 days.

It’s down from the ccTLD’s June peak of 846,688 names, but still more than double what it had before it liberalized its locality rules and partnered with Internet Naming Co and Tucows to market the TLD globally.

.my experienced a growth spurt in July 2025, adding a net 165,000 registrations over the course of one month. It seems most of these have now been allowed to expire and dropped.

Comment Tagged: .my, internet naming co, mynic, tucows

As GoDaddy loses .us to Identity Digital, some domains may be at risk

Identity Digital will replace rival GoDaddy Registry as manager of the .us ccTLD, but new contractual terms could put some registrants — and potentially even registrars — at risk.

The US National Telecommunications and Information Administration last week said it was giving the .us contract to Identity Digital after a lengthy bidding process.

No money is changing hands as a result of the deal, but the new registry will of course collect its wholesale fee whenever a domain is registered or renewed. That fee was $6.50 when GoDaddy’s current contract began in 2019.

There were 1.8 million registered .us domains at the end of July, according to the TLD’s web site. That’s down by about half a million names over the last 12 months.

That makes the contract worth roughly $11.7 million per year, based on the old renewal pricing. That’s immaterial to GoDaddy’s income statement, but

The new contract does not specify Identity Digital’s pricing, but it is longer and includes more detail than GoDaddy’s deal, especially when it comes to DNS abuse, which has been something of a focus for the US government of late.

There’s also much more focus on locality requirements, with Identity Digital now committed to audits to make sure .us registrants really do have a presence in the US as required by the rules.

.us is limited to US citizens and residents, and to businesses legally registered there. Identity Digital will now have to do a full audit of its current registration data, then monthly random spot-checks, to make sure registrants meet the rules.

The 256 current accredited .us registrars are also going to have to be re-accredited, and could lose their accreditations if they fail to meet the locality requirements, do not have the required security certifications, or even if they are insufficiently staffed to fully comply with their accreditation agreements. This could put a strain on smaller registrars.

The new contract was signed September 30 and runs for a maximum of seven years. There’s a nine-month transition period for the migration away from GoDaddy. The registrar re-accreditation program is expected to last a year.

Comment Tagged: .us, godaddy, identity digital, migration, ntia

“Time to lawyer up…” Anger grows over Verisign’s .name bloodbath

When Verisign said it wanted to unilaterally delete 22,000 .name domains from its registry, it assured ICANN that most of them were not in use and seizing them would not cause any security concerns.

But “most” is not “all”, and the chorus of voices demanding a U-turn and essentially accusing the company of trying to steal their domains to auction off to the highest bidder is growing, with one registrant openly mulling legal action.

ICANN has received two more Requests for Reconsideration, bringing the total to four, representing about a dozen more registrants of third-level .name domains that take the format firstname.lastname.name.

Most of the registrants have owned their domains for over two decades and are horrified to learn — registrars seemingly started notifying them around August 28 — that they were to be seized.

Software developer Neil Fraser told ICANN he was representing himself and nine others who would be “threatened with the risk of comprehensive identity theft” if Verisign is allowed to delete and resell their names.

The legacy unique structure of .name, when it launched 25 years ago, was that a customer could acquire firstname.lastname.name — the registry would take ownership of lastname.name, and the registrant would own the third-level domain only.

Verisign’s plan, which has been approved by ICANN, is to delete these 22,000 domains and make the second-level available via some unspecified mechanism at a later date, perhaps as early as next February.

Fraser says that the new registrant could set up an email address matching the one he has been using for 25 years.

“They would have access to banking, government, taxes, and other services,” he wrote. “There is no way to enumerate all the accounts that have been opened using this email address over the past quarter century.”

“I’m just one of 22,000 people who will lose their domains. This is going to be fun. Time to lawyer up…” Fraser wrote on his web site.

Another affected registrant, lawyer Troy Rollo, said in his RfR that he’s been trying to update the email address associated with his online accounts registered since 2002 and found it nigh-on impossible.

Verisign, for its part, says that it wants to standardize the .name registry around the industry-standard two-level gTLD naming structure, to simplify things technically for itself and the registrars that actually sell the names.

Both new RfRs, along with two others filed over the last couple of months, are asking for ICANN to reverse its decision to allow Verisign to delete these names and emails, or at the very least grandfather existing registrants.

ICANN and its independent Ombuds have so far shown little inclination to do so, and RfRs are almost uniformly unsuccessful historically, but the final decision will at some point soon have to be made by the full board of directors.

Comment Tagged: .name, ICANN, rfr, rsep, verisign

stupid.domain.name owner fights Verisign turn-off

The registrant of the domain name stupid.domain.name has become the second person to formally complain to ICANN about Verisign’s plan to delete his domain.

Patrik Fältström has filed a Request for Reconsideration, asking ICANN to reverse its decision to allow Verisign to shut down several services associated with its .name gTLD.

As I first reported back in May, Verisign wants to simplify .name by retiring its legacy three-level structure. This would mean about 22,000 domains and email addresses, many of which have been registered for decades, will be unceremoniously deleted.

Verisign asked ICANN for permission to do this via a Registry Services Evaluation Request, which ICANN approved in July. Verisign said that hardly any of the third-level domains are still in use.

But Fältström says he registered stupid.domain.name in August 2001 and still uses it today. His RfR says:

If the approved change is implemented, my registration will be terminated even if I want to continue renewing it. I cannot move stupid.domain.name to another registry operator, and I cannot solve the problem by changing registrar. The domain name will simply no longer be registered to me.

That is different from Verisign deciding not to accept new third-level registrations. I have no objection to Verisign stopping new registrations. I do object to the termination of domain names that are already registered and in use.

He’s the second affected registrant to file an RfR since Verisign’s RSEP was approved. Doytchin Spiridonov of Bulgarian registrar Dom.bg filed one in July, saying he would lose three .name domains that he still uses.

But it looks set to be rejected on procedural grounds, following reports from the Board Accountability Mechanisms Committee and the ICANN Ombuds, both of which confirmed that ICANN was well aware that 22,000 domains would be deleted but allowed Verisign to go ahead anyway.

The Ombuds noted, in essence, that this might be a pretty crappy customer service experience but it does not rise to the level of a significant security and stability or competition issue.

The full board of directors has yet to rubber-stamp BAMC’s ruling. It seems likely Fältström’s RfR will be addressed simultaneously.

And Fältström is not just some rando with a grievance. He’s head of security at Swedish registry back-end Netnod and he’s been deeply involved in the technical side of ICANN’s community since the very beginning, including a stint as chair of the influential Security and Stability Advisory Committee. He’s a member of the Internet Society’s Hall of Fame.

So when he points out in his RfR that, yes, unilaterally turning off somebody’s 25-year-old domain and potentially reselling it to somebody else does cause security concerns, he’s not just grasping at straws.

Comment Tagged: .name, ICANN, rfr, rsep, verisign

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.

Comment Tagged: .xihuan, new gTLDs, qihoo 360, termination

.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.

2 Comments Tagged: .phone, dish registry, new gTLDs

Domainer AI slop crackdown on the cards in Oz

Startling rule changes have been proposed for Australia’s .au domain, potentially making it much tougher and more expensive to register names to monetize or resell.

If implemented, the proposed new rule “effectively limits a registrant to registering a domain name that matches its name, business name or trade mark” in the .com.au and .net.au namespaces.

The recommendation, one of 10 to come out of a yearlong Policy Advisory Panel review, would remove the part of .au’s eligibility rules that currently acts essentially as a catch-all allowing people to register domains for any purpose.

The change seems to be squarely aimed at making it harder for domain investors to populate the namespaces with large amounts of low-quality monetized domains, particularly now that generative AI has trivialized the practice.

Local registry auDA said its board of directors has approved the panel’s recommendations and will create an implementation plan that will be published for public consultation before coming into effect.

The decision to restrict who can register what domains was the most controversial of the recommendations, with four of the seven-person panel voting in favor of the change, with two votes against and one abstention (who later sided with the minority view).

The panel unanimously voted against the idea of banning domain monetization outright, but said it “reached a different majority view on the use of monetisation to satisfy the allocation rules”.

The panel found that allowing registration purely for monetization “may disproportionately benefit domain investors and weaken trust in the allocation framework”.

The current rule was “viewed either as a legitimate source of flexibility or as a self-fulfilling loophole enabling monetisation”, the panel wrote.

It noted: “The consumer harm identified in submissions was most acute where monetisation was used to achieve allocation. Advances in artificial intelligence have also made it easier to create payper-click websites for this purpose.”

A minority of the panel issued a 10-point rebuttal to the majority view, saying they had failed to identify any harms created by the current rules and that the change could make it harder for the likes of schools or charities to register domains.

The panel attempted to measure how many .au domains are currently in the hands of investors, by assuming that anyone owning more than 50 names was a likely domainer, and found that well over half a million of .au’s 4.4 million domains could be in domainer hands.

It said: “auDA data shows that 3,386 registrants hold more than 50 Domain Name Licences across com.au, net.au and .au direct, out of 1,702,174 registrants in those namespaces. Together, those registrants hold 582,895 domain names.”

The full report of the panel can be read here (pdf).

Comment Tagged: .au, auda

Team Internet still expects over $160 million for domains business

Team Internet is continuing talks to sell off its domain name business and seems confident it could close a deal worth $160 million or more before the end of the year.

The company has been talking all year about disposing of its Domains, Identity & Software (DIS) division, recently saying it expected to be able to announce a deal “in the first half of Q3”.

With the rough deadline now passed, Team Internet said yesterday:

The strategic review is at an advanced stage, with discussions ongoing with a view to reaching a transaction in the near term, while the Board remains engaged with multiple parties interested in all or parts of the division. The Board reaffirms its expectation of a valuation materially exceeding USD 160 million; any agreed transaction is expected to complete around the year end. There can be no certainty that a transaction will be agreed.

“The deal will happen when we get the right value,” CEO Michael Riedl told analysts yesterday. “We can sell DIS only once, and that is why we are optimizing for price and not for timeline.”

The $!60 million figure is used because it was the company’s market capitalization on the London Stock Exchange when it first announced the strategic review almost a year ago. Today, its market cap is the GBP equivalent of roughly $140 million today.

From Riedl’s commentary, it sounds rather like the company has multiple parties interested in all or parts of DIS, but that selling off one chunk for a high valuation may scupper bids for the remaining chunks.

DIS operates in the registry, registrar and registry services provider parts of the domain industry.

Comment Tagged: acquisition, team internet