This year, anyone can apply for a killer top-level domain on the internet. I’m talking about the part to the right of the URL dot, like .com or .org. Over a thousand of these already exist: .app for apps, .shop for shopping, .dev for software developers, .nyc for New Yorkers, .porn for porn, .horse for—who knows.
And in 2026, for the first time since 2012, anyone can invent a new .word (even, literally, .word).
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, is the governance body that makes the rules for domain names and IP addresses. These rules are ostensibly the kind of boring technical stuff that most people don’t know about, because the internet “just works.” You type in nike.com, you see the swoosh. But the rules solve hard problems that thousands of humans spend thousands of hours arguing over. When Ukraine asked ICANN in 2022 to shut down all traffic to Russian top-level domains, like .ru, ICANN declined. No censorship is one of the rules: Ensure the stability and security of the internet, but don’t police content.
It’s June, and I’m in Seville, Spain, for ICANN86, to learn about top-level domains and the people who make them. The 86 means it’s ICANN’s 86th IRL meeting since ICANN01 in Singapore, in 1999, just after ICANN was created to transition key internet infrastructure away from US control and toward independent management. The US government is here too—at least four representatives from the Department of Commerce—along with 1,000-plus people from 100-plus countries. And it’s not just bureaucrats. ICANN regulars include big tech companies like Google and Amazon, domain registrars like GoDaddy and Porkbun (domain companies have a penchant for wacky names), UN agencies like the World Intellectual Property Organization, nonprofits, academics, and lots of lawyers and glasses-and-beard computer guys. The crowd has a retro feel. When I hand people my old-fashioned paper-and-ink business card, they hand theirs right back.
ICANN86 is the second of three ICANN meetings this year. The same crowd spent a week in Mumbai in March and will spend another in Bali in October. After on-the-record policy forums and closed-door business meetings each day, the congregation of domain people will party-hop between tapas bars, courtesy of the corporates. One longtime attendee tells me it’s a “traveling circus.” This particular meeting is important because it’s the last face-to-face gathering before the window to apply for new top-level domains, or TLDs, closes on August 12.
Insiders call the words and acronyms that become TLDs “strings.” As in, “man, .app is a good string.” In 2012, .app was considered a good string, so good that Google paid $25 million for it in an ICANN auction, outbidding a dozen applicants, including Amazon. Owning the top-level domain means Google can sell .app domains, like cash.app, for a yearly registration fee. That makes Google a registry, not to be confused with a registrar. Registries sell domains through registrars to registrants—try to keep up. So when you buy jitterbug.app from a registrar like GoDaddy for $27.99, Google’s registry charges $14 wholesale, ICANN collects a 20-cent transaction fee, and GoDaddy pockets the difference. (Google also used to have a registrar, Google Domains, which it sold to Squarespace a few years ago.)
The registry that owns .com, Verisign, makes a billion and a half dollars every year just by keeping the lights on. To Verisign’s credit, the lights never go out: It reports 100 percent uptime over the past 28 years. It’s a pretty slick business model, watching over a database of words and collecting annual renewal fees. Warren Buffett thought so too, investing in Verisign in 2012, when its stock price was about one-eighth what it is today. This week I’ll also talk to smaller registry operators, people who run profitable TLDs as solopreneurs or with a small team. Being here, talking to applicants, I’m starting to wish I were the one applying for a shiny new top-level domain.
The whole thing is massively fueled by FOMO. We don’t know when ICANN will hold another round—it has been planning this one for over a decade—and once someone else owns a string, you can’t have it. When the application window closes in August, ICANN will announce that it received over 1,600 applications. And when it releases the public list on Reveal Day on October 7, we’ll know who applied for what. Until then, most organizations will be extremely secretive about their plans. One applicant from the last round tells me companies were flying around the world, meeting in person to avoid any risk of digital leaks, avoiding Gmail for fear of Google spying. Instead of email or video calls, she flew to London, then to Madrid. “We did it all in person. People got a little weird and scary, super paranoid.”
Many applicants won’t even say outright whether they’re applying, for fear of inviting competition. Not everyone is so discreet, though.
Vaughn Liley quit school at 15 to sell fax machines door to door. He refers to that time using the quaint long-form “facsimile machines” during our conversation in Seville. In his fifties now, Liley tells me he has the enthusiasm and work ethic of an 18-year-old. He’s been selling alternatives to .com since before the 2012 round, when there were fewer than two dozen gTLDs (a gTLD is a generic top-level domain, in contrast with ccTLDs, or country code top-level domains, like .us and .uk). Liley cut his teeth marketing the controversial porny—pardon me, adult content—top-level domain .xxx, colloquially known as “triple x.”
Liley hired porn stars Ron Jeremy and Stormy Daniels as brand spokespeople. “I actually got chased through LAX airport by TMZ.” He’d gone to Los Angeles to meet Daniels for a radio interview with Playboy about triple x. “I didn’t put two and two together, but that was when the original story was breaking about her and later-to-be president Donald Trump.” Years-long controversy over triple x is part of the history that led to ICANN’s no-censorship rule. The Bush administration did not want a red-light district for the internet. Liley tells me one government official tried to intimidate his boss: “We spend years like you spend dimes.” All that triple x trauma is a cautionary tale for Liley in the 2026 round, I gather.
On the night of the Palisades Fire in January 2025, Liley flew to LA again. This time, he was visiting ICANN headquarters on behalf of his company, Nova Registry (it has since rebranded to Link Freedom Group, or LFG). The visit was a precaution, to get the green light for a splashy announcement Nova would make the week before ICANN82 in Seattle: It was planning to apply for 200 top-level domains in 2026. He called it SuperNova200.
ILLUSTRATION: Rafaela MascaroWhich begs the question: Do we really need all these new extensions? The 2012 round brought us more than 1,200 new top-level domains, many of which flopped. Have you ever seen a .wedding website? Or a .plumbing business? I’ll say this: I can imagine a future where expressive top-level domains become our personal brands, identities on the internet. This is already true in some nerdy corners of the web, like on Bluesky, where your domain is your username. I don’t call my internet friends Neal and Luke, I call them neal.fun and luke.zip. Instead of joining the land rush to grab our username on each new social media site, we’ll carry our domain around the web with us.
ICANN charges a $227,000 application fee for each string, to recover the cost of running the program. The $36 million or so that Nova will need to cover those fees—and plenty more for auctions, Liley adds—is coming from the personal bank account of Yoni Belousov, a reclusive domain investor (industry jargon: “domainer”) who’s been in the business since he was 14 years old. Belousov hired Liley to put Nova on the map. And he did. Before Seattle, next to no one had heard of Nova, which currently runs just one TLD, .link. “At that meeting we were invited to a closed-door session” held by the biggest players from the last round, Liley tells me. “We’ve never been invited to that.”
Liley calls the SuperNova200 announcement—his own idea—both a “masterstroke” and “an absolute stroke of genius.” Talking to me for this story, he spots a publicity opportunity and dials up the charm: repeating my name in conversation, telling old stories, being British. He knows what he’s doing, and I don’t mind. I like talking to him. But he still won’t tell me what strings he’s applying for, not until after the application window closes, anyway. (In August, Nova will steal ICANN’s thunder and announce the 316 strings it applied for, including .fart.)
There are other applicants who have announced their strings early, though. There’s the .agent community that wants AI agent identity to be governed by a consortium, not any one big lab. There’s crypto domain company D3 (website tagline: “Own & trade the internet”) partnering on TLDs for meme coins like .doge and NFTs like .ape like it’s 2023. There’s Salesforce, which quietly disclosed its plans to apply for .salesforce. There’s .self, a community-governed top-level domain for data sovereignty, and .furry, a hackerspace applicant for the furry community. There’s also .tree, a buy-a-domain-plant-a-tree registry that smells like greenwashing.
And then there’s .meow.
Aeryn Van Daele was joking when she first raised the idea of applying for .meow, a top-level domain for the queer community. Van Daele, CEO of the queer-owned and -operated dotMeow Foundation, is starting to tell me the founding story when Lauren Thomas, dotMeow’s project manager, cuts her off. “The reality of it was,” Thomas says, that Van Daele and her cofounder, TQ Hirsch, were “genuinely absolutely hammered.” Van Daele and Hirsch had met up for drinks. Later that night, Hirsch relayed the idea to Thomas, who told Hirsch to send Van Daele a message on Signal so that .meow wouldn’t be lost to a hangover. It was one of those rare drunk ideas that’s even better the next morning.
Van Daele has two nose rings, purple highlights to match her glasses, and no more space for stickers on her laptop. FIGHT THE CIS-TEM, NIEMAND IS ILLEGAL, FEMBOY HOOTERS, FUUT THE POLICE, HACKING 0100 FREEDOM, QUEERS BASH BACK, and of course, a .meow sticker. She and Thomas have the unmistakable rapport of good friends who also happen to work together.
Aeryn Van Daele, CEO of the dotMeow Foundation.Photograph: Marguerite Bornhauser.meow wouldn’t be the first queer top-level domain. But unlike .gay and .lgbt from the 2012 round, .meow is a more oblique nod to the queer community. Their website calls it “a subtle signal of solidarity, a wink to those in the know.” (For those not in the know, meowing can be a queerness tell.) Of course, anyone would be able to register a .meow domain. The internet is really just “tubes full of cats,” as Van Daele puts it. All domain sale profits would fund queer people and projects, whether it’s deliberate queer support or unwitting cat people doing the buying. It’ll be like selling Subarus to lesbians, when the car company ran a subtle, if-you-know-you-know ad series (“It loves camping, dogs, and long-term commitment. Too bad it’s only a car.”).
Choosing a string that isn’t overtly queer is strategic in other ways too. If dotMeow had applied for .trans, it might face competition from for-profit registries, say, targeting the transportation industry. The conventional wisdom is to keep your string a secret, but Van Daele and Thomas think competition is unlikely because it would be a “terrible PR move” to be the registry that yoinked the queer community’s TLD. “We’re good at boycotting,” Van Daele adds. Also, .meow is less likely to be challenged in ICANN’s public comment process. In the last round, Saudi Arabia filed an objection against .gay on moral and religious grounds. In its words, promoting homosexuality would be “offensive” to some societies and cultures. But Van Daele and Thomas have done their homework: The ICANN rules are written such that an objection must relate to the string itself, not to the organization and its values. “We are promoting meowing on the internet, which is definitely a queer hobby, but it is not inherently queer,” Thomas says, half serious.
To raise enough money to apply for and launch .meow, Van Daele and Thomas’ team ran a Kickstarter campaign. With the financial aid they received through ICANN’s Applicant Support Program, Thomas estimates that dotMeow will pay around $55,000 to apply. Crowdfunding was “the most internet-brained thing you could do,” Thomas says. The campaign raised about $137,000—150 percent of its goal. In exchange for pledges of $32 or more, backers received a voucher for the first year of their .meow domain registration (much of which will turn into renewal revenue in year two). The Kickstarter doubled as word-of-mouth marketing and a demand signal for registrars evaluating whether to sell .meow domains. In that respect, dotMeow has a head start on other registries who’ll be rushing new domains to market around the same time.
Lauren Thomas, dotMeow’s project manager.Photograph: Marguerite BornhauserIn contrast to registries that have “exited” by selling their TLDs (.gay changed hands in 2023), Van Daele and Thomas emphasize that .meow is a lifetime investment. They’re clearly having fun, too. “It’s the weird internet that we do miss a bit and want back,” Van Daele says. They dream of .meow domains being used for joyful small websites, like a silly personal blog no one reads. Now, again, I’m daydreaming about running my own top-level domain and wondering if they’ve thought of other strings. I consider myself both a cat person and a dog person, so I ask if they’ve thought about .woof. I’m not the first, apparently—it’s the most requested string after .meow. Per Van Daele, “as many catgirls as exist, there’s at least as many puppygirls.”
Van Daele and Thomas think that, philosophically, ICANN wants more projects like .meow populating the internet—a less corporate and more inclusive, cozy web. Following the money corroborates this. In 2012, only one applicant received financial aid through ICANN’s Applicant Support Program. This year, 56 have qualified, including many from the global south. DotMeow’s Kickstarter drew nearly 2,000 backers in 40 countries, across every continent with more people than penguins. That support includes “a lot of people in a lot of places where their governments would not appreciate it,” Thomas calls out, including Russia. The geographic diversity validates ICANN’s goal of supporting one unified, global internet and avoiding a fragmented “splinternet” of walled-off networks, like Russia’s RuNet.
It’s not just Russia that the two have an eye on. “The way it’s looking,” Van Daele says, it’s possible the US “might have an issue with us being available there, at which point we have no more say if their ISPs don’t offer routing to our TLD.” Thomas points out that .gay and .lgbt, both owned by American companies, would have the same problem. One of the policy debates this week is about requiring registries to fulfill urgent requests from law enforcement for registrant data within 24 hours. If a criminal were using a .meow domain to commit crimes, the police in that jurisdiction might want to know who’s behind the website. But what if that person weren’t a criminal, and the police asked anyway? DotMeow plans to run a “thin” registry that collects contact information but not personally identifying information and to keep data in the EU, protected under GDPR. Van Daele has asked both Belgian and American lawyers whether GDPR would protect registrants if the FBI or CIA came knocking, for example. The dotMeow Foundation is based in Belgium, and it’s deliberately staying out of US jurisdiction—to the extent possible. Many .meow Kickstarter backers live in the US, and ICANN itself is a nonprofit incorporated in California.
As the only American at the table, I have a pang of guilt and sadness that Van Daele and Thomas don’t feel welcome in my home country. It also reminds me of something I heard Thomas say on the Queerocracy Now! podcast: “This is the internet, not America.”
The US government officially ceded control of the Domain Name System on September 30, 2016. Yes, ICANN was formed in 1998, but for almost 20 years the Department of Commerce had a contract with ICANN to run what’s called the Root Zone Database, or simply “the root.” The root is an alphabetized list of all the top-level domains: .aaa for AAA, the roadside assistance company; .aarp for AARP, the retiree assistance nonprofit; and so on. Whoever controls that database has the power to remove a TLD from it, hence Ukraine’s request for ICANN to shut down Russia’s .ru.
I’m careful not to say the US gave up control of the internet because, despite what Ted Cruz will tell you, ending the direct US government relationship to ICANN did not mean giving away the internet to Russia, China, and Iran. After Edward Snowden discredited the idea of the US as a neutral steward of internet freedom, many in the internet governance community pushed for an actually independent ICANN. Ironically, “giving away” US control of the root might be what allows a globalized internet to last. Esther Dyson, ICANN’s first board chair, has said that ICANN’s purpose was to preserve a vacuum of internet power—controlled diffusely by everybody rather than one government or company.
Domain governance does retain residual ties to the US. The fact that ICANN is registered as a California nonprofit attracted a spotlight in 2019 when the nonprofit that runs .org agreed to sell it for $1.1 billion to a private equity firm cofounded by a former ICANN CEO. California’s attorney general called for ICANN to reject the deal, and ICANN did. (That same private equity firm later acquired the registry that owns the most TLDs, Donuts, which has since rebranded to the more corpospeak Identity Digital.) But, largely, the US government is just another ICANN stakeholder.
To truly understand ICANN, you must understand that there are really two ICANNs: the ICANN Org—about 450 staff on payroll—and the ICANN Community, the thousands that travel around the world for these meetings. The Org’s purpose is to bring the Community together to reach consensus on policy. The uppercase-C Community is supposed to be a mirror for the lowercase-c internet community—all of us. Metaphorically, ICANN is like open-source software where the code is written by the Community, then compiled and run by the Org.
Like open source and the internet itself, ICANN is open to anyone. As the Org wrote in a briefing before ICANN86, “the Internet functions for everyone because everyone is invited to help make it work.” It’s free to register for these meetings, and anyone can dial in on Zoom. (That means anyone, including the hacker who joined a webinar I attended last year and seized screen-sharing privileges to blast explicit, full-volume pornography.) Unlike the United Nations, where each sovereign gets a vote, ICANN is what they call multistakeholder, meaning governments have just another seat at the table—on equal footing with corporates, nonprofits, and the technical community. It’s a bottom-up consensus process, rather than top-down. Of course, as with any democratic system, you end up with imperfect representation. It’s easier for corporations to lobby for their special interests than it is for smaller fish, like internet end users in countries with authoritarian governments. Still, it’s a small miracle that the ICANN multistakeholder model works at all.
There’s a fair bit of eye rolling at these meetings about how slow and bureaucratic the ICANN process is. Newcomers drown in acronyms and metajargon. There are three separate meetings scheduled this week for the “Review of Reviews,” an evaluation of the evaluation mechanism written into ICANN’s bylaws. For transparency, most ICANN meetings are recorded and available to the public, along with an astonishing volume of community resources. In its effort to be legible, ICANN may accidentally make itself illegible at times. But you can’t have the miracle without the bureaucracy. You’ll hear the same people who complain about ICANN’s inefficiency one minute marveling at ICANN’s internet-scale human collaboration the next.
I’m walking down a sterile, white-walled hallway to meet Marika Konings and Theresa Swinehart for an interview. We joke about being stuck in the Lumon offices of Severance before they each introduce themselves: Konings is ICANN’s program lead for the new TLD round, and Swinehart leads global domains and strategy. They’ve each spent nearly 20 years at ICANN (the Org, that is). Much of their work over the past 10 has been to produce a single document.
ILLUSTRATION: Rafaela MascaroAt 439 pages, the English-language version of ICANN’s Applicant Guide Book is the rule book for new top-level domains. There are a lot of rules. For one, all two-letter extensions are off the table. Those belong to countries, like .co in Colombia and .me in Montenegro and .ai in Anguilla. (The small island nation made nearly half its revenue last year selling domains.) Three-letter country codes are also blocked, like .eth for Ethiopia (sorry, Ethereum). You can also apply for internationalized domain names (acronym: IDN) in non-Latin scripts like Arabic, Chinese, Cyrillic, and Devanagari. (In Arabic, top-level domains are to the left of the dot.) The rules go on: If you want to run a geographic TLD, like .nyc or .paris, you need approval from that municipality; your string can’t be too similar to an existing one (.corn is a no-go; looks too much like .com); you can’t own another brand’s trademark; and certain special strings are off limits, like .icann and .www (wouldn’t that be a trip).
A decade to create the rulebook isn’t very long “in ICANN years,” Konings says. “Have we had difficult conversations? Sure.” But there’s also “a lot of mutual respect and appreciation,” she tells me. ICANN’s bottom-up process may take a while, but it’s cathartic for participants to get their two cents on the record, even if they don’t get their way. The process is imperfect, Swinehart concedes, but she thinks the end result is good for the internet. Konings and Swinehart seem eminently patient. In fact, everyone I meet on the ICANN Org staff seems to trust the process. They are a kind and understated bunch, here at the domain layer of the internet. It feels literally and philosophically far from the application layer where big tech companies operate.
I ask Konings and Swinehart about ICANN’s stance on another rule: What happens when multiple applicants want the same string? In 2012, ICANN held auctions, like how I told you Google paid $25 million for .app. The high-water mark at an ICANN auction was a $135 million bid for .web by Nu Dot Com, underwritten by Verisign, the .com people. You’ve seen all those websites with .web URLs, right? No, of course you haven’t, because .web was stalled by legal rifts between the bidders for a full decade and is only now being rolled out. ICANN held 16 auctions last round. But it also allowed applicants to settle things themselves, whether by auction or some other negotiated arrangement. There were about 10 times as many private auctions as ICANN auctions, and importantly, most private auctions paid out the winner’s bid evenly among the losers (whereas ICANN collects the proceeds in its auctions). If, for example, Google, Amazon, and Verisign all wanted .banana, and Verisign was the winning bidder at $2 million, Google and Amazon would each walk away with $1 million. You lost, but really, you won. ICANN collected about $240 million from auctions in the past round. By comparison, the largest third-party provider facilitated about $650 million in private auctions, with most of that money going back into applicant bank accounts.
ICANN will hold its own auctions again this round, but the rule book now bans private resolution after Reveal Day. “What happens before, that’s not our business,” Konings says. In fact, Konings and Swinehart can’t even see who has applied, and for what, until October—just like the rest of us.
The final session of the week is better attended than I’d expected. Becky Burr is here to moderate. Burr helped form ICANN during her tenure in the Clinton administration (she jokes that “ICANN is all my fault”) and is a skilled moderator. She knows when to ask a follow-up question or respectfully push back on a comment. The topic this afternoon is backend database providers for organizations in ICANN’s Applicant Support Program, like dotMeow. And despite how exhausted people are after the long week, this session is not perfunctory or mailed in. I take down three pages of notes during an hour of discussion that includes some contentious but civil debate. The work goes on.
One of the bullet points I write down is that same daydream, this time in writing: Would I enjoy running a TLD? The work is both technical and creative, and it involves two things I am most interested in: words and the internet. But there’s something else about it that appeals to me. It would be a reason to keep coming back to these meetings. ICANN84 in Dublin was my first in-person meeting, and here in Seville at my second, I already feel a tug toward this Community. If I had a quarter of a million dollars, I might risk it all on .woof.
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