A .horse by any other name

Executive briefing

ICANN closed the application window for its latest gTLD expansion on 12 August: more than 1,600 applications at $227,000 each, with the list published mid-October. The round’s entry cost is roughly half a billion dollars — at least $363m in fees invoiced by ICANN plus an estimated $100m in preparation — before contention auctions that, under 2026 rules, can only be run by ICANN itself, for proceeds whose destination the guidebook does not specify.

The 2012 expansion was formally audited under ICANN’s bylaws. The reviewers could not demonstrate competition or consumer benefit, added chapters on abuse, trademark costs and parking, and set prerequisites for any next round; the pricing data they required remained uncollected as late as July 2024. The market’s own verdict was consolidation: ten registries hold 90 per cent of new-gTLD names, and Verisign, the incumbent the programme was meant to discipline, runs a 68 per cent operating margin.

Independent measurement finds 10–20 per cent of 2025 registrations were bought by actors whose domains were blocklisted — the first full year under the 2024 abuse obligations — while a majority of European ccTLD domains carry no substantial content and about 18 per cent of Dutch-market registrations resolve to an actual site. Registration and use have decoupled; the reliable revenue is defensive registration, which trademark law compels.

The one demonstrated counter-model is the registry as checkpoint: zone-wide encryption preload, TLD-level certificate constraint (CAA), verified identity at registration — .bank’s regime, Google’s 45 preloaded strings. Nothing in the 2026 guidebook asks an applicant whether it intends any of this. The piece argues the applications should be read as claims requiring evidence: purpose declared, not graded — and notes that when the community process last declined to produce accountability, parliaments produced it instead.

Watch: Reveal Day (mid-October) grades the disclosed queue’s speculative skew; the objection window (104 days from String Confirmation) tests whether anyone asks the three questions; the Independent Objector office — still being recruited at midsummer — is funded from the auction money whose destination remains unstated.