John Matson recently published an insightful analysis highlighting how New gTLDs performed in 2025. His conclusions are particularly relevant as the industry prepares for the next ICANN application round expected to open in April 2026.

The next round of the ICANN New gTLD Program 2026 is approaching, and once again the domain industry is buzzing with conversations about who will apply, what strings will be submitted, and whether this is the right time to start your own TLD.

ICANN’s 85th public meeting kicked off in Mumbai this week, and for those of us closely following the New gTLD Program, this meeting delivered one of the most important updates we have been waiting for — the official timeline for the next application round. Despite travel uncertainties that affected some participants this week, a strong number of people still showed up in Mumbai, which clearly shows how much momentum has been building around the next round of new top-level do

One of the first questions almost every serious applicant asks me during a new gTLD consultation is surprisingly simple.

As the New gTLD Program: 2026 Round approaches, ICANN has shared important insights into how it is preparing the application infrastructure that will support thousands of potential applicants worldwide. In a recent update, ICANN outlined the work underway to ensure that the TLD Application Management System (TAMS) — the platform through which all 2026 new gTLD applications will be submitted and processed — is secure, stable, and usable from day one.

When ICANN designed the Applicant Support Program (ASP) for the 2026 New gTLD Round, it was positioned primarily as a financial assistance mechanism for applicants from underserved or developing regions. For a long time, I did not focus heavily on ASP in my consulting practice. Most of my work revolves around enterprise-grade DotBrand and generic TLD applicants who have allocated budgets for the standard USD 227,000 application fee. That perspective changed in October last ye

When most people think about domain names, they think about websites ending in .com, .org, or maybe a country code like .in or .uk. But over the last decade, a quieter shift has been taking place at the very top of the internet’s naming system.

For decades, the internet trained users—and machines—to trust one simple pattern: brandname.com. That pattern is now breaking. Not because users are confused, but because the way machines read the web has fundamentally changed. Search engines are no longer simple indexers. Large Language Models (LLMs) are no longer passive text predictors. Together, they increasingly act as interpreters of digital identity—evaluating not just content, but structure, provenance, and intent.

In today’s digital-first marketplace, global companies are looking beyond traditional domains like .com or .net and toward owning their own piece of the internet by getting their hands on DotBRAND domain names – custom top-level domains (TLDs) that match a company’s brand (think .microsoft or .apple).

A DotBRAND top-level domain (often written as “.brand” or “.brandname”) is the highest-possible ownership layer a company can have on the public internet naming system.