Fourteen Years Later, the Root Opens Again — and 1,616 gTLD Applicants Are Waiting to Be Named by ICANN

By /

The second opening of the domain-name root in fourteen years is already closed. What remains is the fight over which of the 1,616 paid applications become real registries.

On 30 April 2026, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers opened the application window for the New gTLD Program: 2026 Round. For the first time since 2012, corporations, communities, cities, and other organizations could apply to operate their own generic top-level domain — the string to the right of the final dot. The window ran fifteen weeks and closed at 23:59 UTC on 12 August 2026. ICANN has since confirmed that 1,616 applications, out of 1,663 submitted, paid the evaluation fee and will proceed. Tomorrow, 7 October 2026 at 18:00 UTC, Reveal Day will publish who applied, for which strings, and which of those strings are already in direct contention.

That sequence — a long policy rebuild, a short filing window, a still-sealed list, and a multi-year evaluation — is the story of the round.

What a new gTLD actually is

A top-level domain is an entry in the DNS root zone. The familiar ones (.com, .org, .net) and the country codes (.uk, .jp, .br) have been joined, since 2013, by more than 1,200 strings delegated from the 2012 round: .app, .shop, .london, .bank, .google, and dozens of internationalized names in non-Latin scripts. A successful applicant does not “buy a domain.” It becomes a registry operator. It signs a contract with ICANN, engages a technical backend, sets registration policy, and is responsible for the stability of every name under that extension.

The strategic uses fall into a few durable categories.

A brand or closed registry keeps the namespace inside one organization. Microsoft’s cloud.microsoft and Barclays’ home.barclays are the sort of URL this model is built for: the registry controls who may register, which removes an entire class of lookalike domains and lets the company treat the extension as infrastructure rather than marketing inventory. A community application claims to serve a defined group and can seek priority over purely commercial bids for the same string. A geographic application — a city, region, or other place name short of a country or territory — needs documented support or non-objection from the relevant government or public authority. An open generic is the commercial bet: operate .something as a public registry and sell second-level names. Internationalized domain names extend the same choices into Arabic, Chinese, Devanagari, Thai, and other scripts.

Country and territory names remain off limits as new gTLDs. That boundary is deliberate. The 2026 Applicant Guidebook keeps geographic and reserved-name review as a separate gate, not a formality.

How the window opened

The dates were fixed well before the first application could be filed. ICANN published version 1 of the 2026 Round Applicant Guidebook on 16 December 2025, satisfying the requirement that the rules be public at least four months before submissions began. Version 2, dated 24 April 2026, became the authoritative English text days before the window opened. Applications went in through the TLD Application Management System. The submission period ran from 30 April to 12 August 2026 — 104 days. A parallel Registry Service Provider Evaluation Program ran on the same calendar and closed the same day.

Payment was not automatic with the click of submit. ICANN invoices only after due diligence, and on 7 August 2026 it adjusted the fee deadline so that payment was due by the later of 23:59 UTC on 19 August 2026 or seven days after the invoice was sent. On 13 August, ICANN said it had received more than 1,600 primary applications, of which more than 1,100 included a replacement string — a pre-declared second choice. Most filings arrived in the final days, the same last-minute pattern as 2012. On 22 September, ICANN confirmed the number that matters: 1,616 applications had paid and would proceed. Forty-seven submitted applications never became paid applications.

The rules themselves are the product of the GNSO’s Subsequent Procedures policy work and years of implementation with an Implementation Review Team. The 2012 round was a one-time experiment that became permanent infrastructure. The 2026 round is the first attempt to run expansion as a repeatable program, with a predictability framework, a pre-vetted pool of technical operators, a larger applicant-support track, and an explicit path for later rounds. No date for a third round has been set. The fourteen-year gap between the first two windows is the practical warning: organizations that sat out 2026 may wait a long time for another chance.

What 2012 taught, and what it did not settle

The 2012 round received 1,930 applications for roughly 1,409 unique strings. About 1,241 have been delegated. Hundreds were withdrawn — ICANN’s program statistics put withdrawals at 646 — and a smaller number were not approved. Contention was the defining commercial fact: 234 contention sets, some resolved by private deal, a handful by ICANN auction. Portfolio applicants dominated the open generics. Donuts filed 307 applications, Google’s Charleston Road Registry 101, Amazon 76. North America and Europe supplied the large majority of filings. Community applications numbered 84, geographic 66, internationalized 116. Of the delegated set, 56 were community, 53 geographic, and 97 IDNs.

Two lessons travel directly into 2026. First, a filed application is not a delegated TLD. Evaluation, objections, contention, contracting, and pre-delegation testing consumed years, and many applicants exited when the auction price or the operating cost exceeded the strategic value. Second, brand applications and open generics are different businesses that happened to share a form. A .brand can succeed with almost no public registrations if it is wired into the company’s own sites and mail. An open generic fails if the aftermarket and the registrar channel never adopt it. Several 2012 extensions became genuine platforms. Many others remain thin.

The 2026 design tries to avoid re-litigating the technical backend for every applicant. Registry service providers — the operators of DNS, RDAP, and DNSSEC — are evaluated once and then selected by applicants from that vetted list. String evaluation is separated from the evaluation of the applicant’s financial and operational fitness. Replacement strings, singular/plural notifications, and a defined objection window are meant to make contention visible earlier than it was in 2012. Whether those mechanisms reduce auctions or merely relocate the bargaining is one of the questions Reveal Day will start to answer.

Who the round was built for

ICANN’s own framing is broad on purpose: corporations, communities, and geographic entities, plus the open-registry entrepreneurs who defined the last round. The practical filters are narrower.

A standard application requires a legal entity, a viable financial model, a selected evaluated RSP, and a string that survives similarity, reserved-name, geographic, and name-collision review. Brand applicants can seek a .brand eligibility evaluation and, later, a registry-operator code-of-conduct exemption so the TLD can be closed to the public. Community applicants can pay for Community Priority Evaluation, a comparative review that can award the string without an auction if the community case holds. Geographic applicants must arrive with the right letters from the right authorities; the Geographic Names Panel, awarded to Analysys Mason, checks that documentation. Governments and intergovernmental organizations have their own verification track.

Internationalized applications are a stated priority of this round rather than an edge case. Reporting around the close of the window noted that ICANN was accepting applications across 27 non-Latin scripts. Universal Acceptance — the unglamorous work of making mail systems, browsers, and applications treat non-ASCII TLDs as first-class — will decide whether those delegations are usable or symbolic. ICANN has continued to publish reference label-generation rules for second-level names in additional scripts, including, this week, Javanese and Unified Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics. The root can add a string long before the rest of the software stack treats it as ordinary.

The Applicant Support Program is the clearest break with 2012. In the first round, three entities applied for support and one qualified. For 2026, the support window closed on 19 December 2025. A subsequent report to the Subsequent Procedures Implementation Review Team put the result at 78 ASP applications submitted and 56 fully approved, above the planning assumption of roughly 40 to 45. Qualified applicants receive a 75 to 85 percent reduction on evaluation fees, access to pro bono advisers and an applicant counselor, a bid credit if they reach a contention auction, and reduced base registry-operator fees if they are delegated. Support is not approval. Every supported application still has to survive the same string and applicant evaluations as a fully priced one.

The price of a string

The base gTLD evaluation fee is 227,000 US dollars. It covers the required evaluations and one primary string with up to four allocatable variant strings. Conditional reviews sit on top of that:

  • .brand eligibility evaluation: 500 dollars
  • Registry Operator Code of Conduct Exemption evaluation: 400 dollars
  • Community Priority Evaluation: 52,936 dollars
  • Geographic Names Review: up to 12,000 dollars
  • Registry Commitments Evaluation: 15,000 dollars per application
  • Name-collision high-risk mitigation plan evaluation: estimated at 100,000 to 150,000 dollars where a string is flagged

Supported applicants’ net evaluation fees were expected to land roughly between 34,500 and 56,750 dollars, depending on the final reduction and after a deposit used to confirm financial viability. Industry estimates of the all-in cost to apply and launch a single private brand TLD commonly run from the mid-hundreds of thousands of dollars upward once counsel, RSP fees, and internal integration are counted. A public commercial TLD costs more, because demand has to be built.

Ongoing fees are contractual, not application fees. Successful applicants sign the 2026 Round base Registry Agreement before delegation. Secondary summaries of that agreement have cited a base annual registry fee on the order of 25,750 dollars plus a small per-domain component above a registration threshold. The binding figures are those in the agreement an applicant actually signs. Withdrawal is the financial safety valve: applicants can still exit for a 65 percent refund of the evaluation fee if the request is in by 23:59 UTC on 27 November 2026, the end of the ten-day window that opens on String Confirmation Day.

What happens after the list is public

Reveal Day is a disclosure, not a decision. At 18:00 UTC on 7 October 2026, the Application Publication and Statistics site will publish every proceeding application’s primary string, any variant or replacement strings, the applicant’s identity, the public portions of the application, and initial contention sets for identical strings. Those contention sets are not final. String similarity review, singular/plural notifications, and objections can add or reshape them.

From 00:01 UTC on 8 October through 23:59 UTC on 21 October, an applicant with an eligible replacement string may switch to it. A replacement cannot be used if it is identical to another primary or replacement string already in the pool. Switching is one-way. On 17 November, String Confirmation Day publishes the chosen strings and an updated contention list, and opens the Community Input and Objections Period, which runs to 16 March 2027. During that window, third parties can file application comments, governments can issue GAC member early warnings, and parties with standing can lodge objections, including string-confusion objections. ICANN’s year-end office closure, from 1:00 UTC on 19 December 2026 to 16:00 UTC on 4 January 2027, is already built into that calendar so the objection period is not quietly shortened.

String evaluation itself is expected to take about 180 days and runs concurrently across the set: similarity, geographic and reserved names, IDN and variant rules, name collision, and related checks. A prioritization draw in the first half of 2027 will set the order in which applications and contention sets move into applicant evaluation and contention resolution. Contention can end in a community priority win, a voluntary arrangement, or an auction. Contracting and pre-delegation testing come after that. Counsel tracking the program have described the full path, for complex or contended applications, as stretching toward the end of the decade. Uncontended, technically straightforward applications should move faster. Nothing in the 2012 record suggests the median case is fast.

What the volume does and does not tell us

Sixteen hundred paid applications is a large round by any ordinary measure and slightly smaller than 2012’s 1,930. It is not yet possible to say whether the mix has shifted toward brands, whether portfolio applicants again account for a few hundred strings, or whether community and geographic filings finally match the rhetoric of a more global DNS. More than 1,100 replacement strings suggest that many applicants already priced in the risk of contention and bought an option to step sideways. The 56 supported applicants are a real expansion of access relative to 2012, but they are still a small share of 1,616. The GNSO’s longer-term success measure for the support program was modest on purpose: supported applicants accounting for at least ten delegated gTLDs, or 0.5 percent of successful delegations.

The geographic and linguistic composition will matter more than the headline count. The 2012 round was heavily transatlantic. A round that produces large numbers of IDN and Global South applications, and then actually delegates them into a Universal-Acceptance-aware internet, would be a different outcome from a round that again concentrates in U.S. and European holding companies. Reveal Day is the first date on which that comparison can be made with names attached.

Trademark owners who did not apply have a concrete job in the next six months. The public application file is the moment to look for strings that collide with a mark, a product line, or a regulated industry, and to decide whether a comment, an early warning request to a GAC representative, or a formal objection is warranted. Waiting for delegation is waiting too long. Applicants, meanwhile, will spend the replacement window deciding whether a second-choice string is worth more than a fight over the first.

The stakes past the auction

If even a substantial fraction of the 1,616 applications are delegated, the root zone grows again, and the commercial map of the DNS shifts with it. Closed brand registries tighten a company’s control over its namespace and, at the margin, shrink the phishing surface that depends on unrelated registrars selling lookalike names. Open generics will live or die in the registrar channel, as they did after 2013. Cities and regions that win a geographic string inherit both a civic identity project and a permanent compliance obligation. Communities that win priority evaluation inherit a registration policy they must actually enforce.

The risks are equally concrete. Contention auctions can transfer large sums for strings whose registration revenue never justifies the price. Name-collision and similarity disputes can block or delay strings that look safe in a slide deck. IDN TLDs can be delegated into an ecosystem that still mishandles them. And a long evaluation tail can freeze business plans that were written against a 2026 filing date and a hoped-for 2028 launch.

ICANN has described the round as the implementation of community policy, not a land rush it invented. The filing period that opened on 30 April 2026 is already over. The public argument over what was filed starts tomorrow.

Sources

Scroll to Top