New TLDs

The Last gTLD Round Taught Us the Wrong Lessons

Fourteen years after ICANN's last gTLD expansion, registration figures offer an incomplete verdict. The next round will test whether applicants can build namespaces with enduring relevance, rather than merely generating impressive launch volumes and revenues.

DNS Abuse and Criminal Infrastructure: Beyond Definitions and Blocklists

Research suggests criminals may control a striking share of newly registered gTLD domains, raising questions about whether ICANN's definitions, contractual safeguards and enforcement mechanisms are keeping pace with the industrial scale of technology-facilitated harm.

Whose Precedent Gets Remembered? Selective Amplification Has Its Own Amnesia

DotConnectAfrica's landmark .AFRICA IRP victory established an ICANN accountability precedent later expressly invoked by Amazon. Selective amplification has since detached that precedent from its origins, distorting the historical record.

ICANN Should Immediately Clarify if Applicants for the Same String Can Communicate Before Reveal Day

With more than 1,600 applications filed for ICANN's 2026 new gTLD Round, self-revealing applicants face uncertainty over whether pre-Reveal Day communications and agreements about overlapping strings could violate strict rules against privately resolving contention sets.

Now That You’ve Applied for a New gTLD, Should You Reveal?

With applications closed, new gTLD hopefuls face a changed calculation: revealing strings early could expose contention while information remains financially valuable, helping applicants make better decisions before fees are paid and withdrawal becomes increasingly costly.

Beyond DUMs: The Case for Tracking What a Namespace Is Made Of

Domains Under Management (DUM) measures a namespace's size, but not its character. Structural composition could reveal whether growth reflects durable adoption, speculative holdings or noise, giving registries a richer view of namespace health and strategy.

The Role of Artificial Intelligence in ICANN’s 2026 Round of gTLD Applications

AI can help applicants navigate ICANN's complex new gTLD process, from business planning and financial modeling to drafting and reviewing applications, pointing towards faster, cheaper and increasingly automated domain-name rounds in the future.

Same Shape at Every Scale: What a Larger Domnain Namespace Confirmed - and What It Didn’t

A larger namespace confirms the same four-layer structural pattern found across nTLDs, while revealing wider operator-to-investor variation and distinctive noise signatures that expose different registration dynamics hidden behind headline registration totals.

The Business Value of dotBrand: Twelve Real-World Success Stories

Twelve real-world dotBrand success stories show how organizations strengthen trust, improve security, simplify customer experiences, and create measurable business value. From AI-driven innovation to global digital ecosystems, dotBrand domains are becoming essential infrastructure worldwide today.

What Zone File Analysis Reveals About the Gap Between nTLD Registration Volume and Namespace Reality

Registration totals reveal size, not composition. Structural analysis of major new gTLDs finds strikingly similar architectures but meaningful differences in operator adoption, speculative holdings, and noise, suggesting namespace health requires more than volume metrics alone.

The gTLD Registrar Market Is Uniform in Rules, Not in Structure

ICANN applies identical rules to every registrar, yet new research reveals a sharply unequal market where seven firms capture half of inflows, renewals dominate activity, and many accreditations barely operate at all in practice today.

The 2026 New gTLD Round: A Strategic Framework for Risk Management

The 2026 new gTLD round is less a domain application than a high-stakes contest for digital territory. Contention, objections, opaque evaluations and information gaps can derail applicants long before launch, demanding rigorous strategic preparation.

The UN Needs Its Identity in the Digital Space - a Case for .UN Top-Level Domain

As AI systems increasingly mediate trust online, the United Nations faces a closing opportunity to secure a sovereign .un domain, creating a machine-readable digital identity that strengthens authenticity, preserves institutional knowledge, and counters impersonation.

DOTZON Study: Digital City Brands 2026

DOTZON's Digital City Brands 2026 study crowns .tokyo as the first Asian cityTLD to top the rankings, ending .berlin's four-year reign, while highlighting the growing role of city domains in digital identity, commerce and development.

Cybercriminals are Driving Significant Domain Name Market Demand

Cybercriminals are becoming a major force in the domain-name market, driving an estimated one-fifth of new gTLD registrations in 2025 and exposing how commercial incentives, weak enforcement, and scale continue to fuel online abuse.