On 7 October 2026 ICANN published the list of everyone who wants a new ending on the internet. 1,615 applications from 481 applicants. It sounds like a flood until you put it next to 2012, when ICANN received 1,930, according to its own statistics. The 2026 round is smaller.
This is the second post in a series about domain endings. The first one asked whether the ending matters at all.
Four rounds
The first endings came in the eighties: .com, .net, .org, .edu, .gov, .mil, .int, plus the two-letter country codes. Everything since then arrived in rounds, where ICANN opens a window, takes applications and evaluates them.
The first round, in 2000, added .aero, .biz, .coop, .info, .museum, .name and .pro. The second, in 2003 and 2004, added .asia, .cat, .jobs, .mobi, .tel and .travel, with .xxx later. In 2012 ICANN opened the third round to anyone who could pay and pass the evaluation, and more than a thousand new endings followed. .xyz is one of them. 2026 is the fourth.
What the old endings promised
.info was the only ending in the 2000 batch that anyone could register for any purpose. The US Department of Commerce put it into the root zone on 27 June 2001, and the registry, Afilias, launched afilias.info the same day.
In 2002 Global Name Registry, the first registry behind .name, sold it to people, not companies. It offered peter@morgan.name as “Email for life” and www.peter.morgan.name as a “Web address for life”, as an archived copy of its site shows. At first only the third-level form, first.last.name, was on offer. Verisign bought Global Name Registry in 2008, and in July 2026 ICANN cleared Verisign’s request to end those third-level names. More on that in the next post.
Google, Microsoft, Nokia and Vodafone were among the backers of .mobi, an ending meant for phones. Tim Berners-Lee argued against it in 2004. A separate ending for mobile devices, he wrote, “breaks the Web architecture of links, and attacks the universality of the Web”, and he closed with “I urge ICANN not to create the ‘.mobi’ top level domain” (W3C). ICANN approved it in 2005. Responsive design, where one page adapts to any screen, later did the job without a separate ending. In 2024 security researchers at watchTowr found that an old .mobi WHOIS domain had been left to expire. They registered it for $20 and saw more than 135,000 systems still sending it queries, certificate authorities among them.
Daniel Negari’s company XYZ.com applied for .xyz in the 2012 round. It paid a $185,000 application fee, had no competing applicant and opened the ending to the public in June 2014. In August 2015 Google used abc.xyz as the address of its new parent company, Alphabet. “I just got 250 names registered in the last 60 seconds,” Negari told Entrepreneur after the announcement.
Who applied
ICANN’s window ran from 30 April to 12 August 2026. It received 1,663 applications, and 1,616 were paid and moved on, according to ICANN. By Reveal Day the count stood at 1,615.
Brand applications, where a company wants its own name as an ending, make up 333 of them. That is about a fifth, not the majority. The rest of ICANN’s breakdown is small numbers: 16 community applications, 15 geographic names, 21 internationalized domain names (IDN, endings in scripts other than Latin), 9 variants and 51 from applicants in ICANN’s Applicant Support Program, which reduces fees for applicants who qualify.
North America sent 864 applications, more than half of the total. Europe sent 506, Asia, Australia and the Pacific 218. Africa sent 16, and Latin America and the Caribbean 11.
In a February 2026 article in dotmagazine, Ben Crawford, CEO of the brand-protection company Markmonitor, gave four reasons for a company to apply. His industry sells this service, so read them with that in mind. A brand ending is intellectual property that can only be had in a short window. It lets a company create as many names as it wants at almost no cost. It gives the security team control without depending on another registry. And it tells customers that a name is genuine, because only the company can register under its own ending. The same article notes why many earlier brand projects failed: leadership lost interest, and the people who pushed for them left. In the 2012 round, 494 registry agreements included Specification 13, the contract terms for brand endings, according to ICANN.
What it costs
ICANN charges $227,000 per application for the evaluation alone. That buys a review, not an ending, and nothing guarantees the ending at the end of it. If two or more applicants want the same string, they end up in a contention set, and only one of them can run the ending. In 2012 there were 234 contention sets, and ICANN settled 16 of them by auction. An application can also be withdrawn, fail the evaluation or lose to an objection.
The 2012 round shows how that adds up. Of 1,930 applications, 1,241 became live endings, 653 were withdrawn, 32 were not approved or were terminated, and 4 are still in the process, according to ICANN. About a third never became an ending.
The fee is only the entry ticket. The dotmagazine article lists attorney fees, consultants, registry operations and marketing on top of it. Once an ending is approved, the operator, called the registry, has to run it for as long as the ending exists. That costs money on top of the fee too.
What happens next
ICANN’s Replacement Period runs from 8 to 21 October. Until 27 November an applicant who walks away gets 65% of the fee back. String Confirmation Day is 17 November, and the same day opens Community Input and Objections, which runs until 16 March 2027. That is the window for public comments and formal objections. ICANN’s offices close from 19 December to 4 January. A Prioritization Draw follows in the first half of 2027.
So nothing from this round goes live in 2026. The comment window is where the next post starts, because some of these applications raise a question that has nothing to do with how many there are.