Telegram Applies for .gram After a Sanctions Listing Took Down t.me

Telegram has applied for the .gram top-level domain, its founder Pavel Durov said on August 18. The reason traces to a Monday evening five weeks earlier, when the whole of t.me went dark for around nineteen hours because one Telegram channel address appeared in a United States sanctions filing.

Two things make it more than a product announcement. Telegram is not the only applicant for the string. And running your own registry moves where a decision like that gets made, without moving it out of the jurisdiction that made it.

Key facts

• What Telegram says: the company has applied for .gram, and if ICANN approves it, a billion users “could get their own second-level domains” in the form yourname.gram, with websites hosted by Telegram. Durov posted this on X; the application itself is not public.
• What took t.me down: the domain was placed on serverHold on July 13 and restored roughly nineteen hours later. Millions of short links returned NXDOMAIN in between.
• Why: OFAC listed t.me/FirstVPNService as one of five website identifiers for a sanctioned entity. The other four were domains the entity itself controlled.
• Who runs .me: doMEn, described by trade press as a partnership between GoDaddy and Identity Digital, both United States companies.
• The contention: Link Freedom Group has published a list of 316 strings it says it applied for. We checked that list, and .gram is on it.
• Not confirmed: ICANN has published nothing applicant-specific and will not until Reveal Day, whose date it says it will announce in mid-September.

One Line in a Sanctions Filing

On July 13 the US Treasury designated First VPN Service, a Ukraine-based VPN provider selling services to ransomware groups, along with its administrator Dmytro Rashevskyi and a Belarusian supplier of malware cryptors. The designations were made under Executive Order 13694, and followed a takedown of the company’s infrastructure by European law enforcement in May, supported by the FBI’s Boston field office.

The interesting part is not the designation but the identifiers attached to it. The entry on the sanctions list carries five website addresses: 1vpns.com, 1vpns.net, 1vpns.org, 1jabber.com and t.me/FirstVPNService. Four of those are domains the sanctioned company registered and controlled. The fifth is a page on someone else’s platform.

The .me registry responded by placing the apex domain on serverHold, which removes it from the zone entirely. Every t.me link stopped resolving: channel addresses, username handles, invite codes, bot addresses, mini-app URLs and the TON wallet addresses that Telegram formats as t.me links. The domain came back roughly nineteen hours later.

The chain of control matters here. The .me namespace belongs to Montenegro, but the registry that operates it is doMEn, reported by domain trade press as a partnership between GoDaddy and Identity Digital, with Identity Digital holding authority over changes to the zone. Both are American companies.

The registry said the domain was on hold for OFAC compliance, and whether it acted on a direct instruction or on its own reading of the rules has not been made public. Either way, a listing aimed at a Ukrainian VPN seller reached a Montenegrin ccTLD and switched off a messaging platform its founder says has a billion users.

Someone Else Wants .gram, and Not for Telegram

Link Freedom Group, an infrastructure company built on Nova Registry, the operator of .link, applied for more than three hundred strings in this round and took the unusual step of publishing its portfolio before ICANN reveals anything. Its own release calls this the largest TLD submission on record.

We pulled the published list rather than relying on the summary. It runs to 316 strings, and .gram is among them. The company files it under lifestyle, with the suggested uses photo.gram, dia.gram and weight.gram. In other words the second applicant wants the string as a unit of measurement and a word ending, with no reference to Telegram at all. Two companies have asked for the same four letters for entirely unrelated reasons.

That collision now has to be settled in public. Private resolution of contention sets, the route that ended most 2012 contests through side deals and private auctions, is prohibited in the 2026 round under Section 5.2.3 of the Applicant Guidebook. What remains is Community Priority Evaluation for community applications and, failing that, an ICANN auction, run on the ascending-clock, second-price method the 2012 round also used.

There is one exit, but it had to be chosen in advance. Applicants could name a replacement string inside the application itself, and ICANN says more than 1,100 of the 1,600-plus primary applications did. Those replacements are published on Reveal Day alongside the originals, and applicants then have a fourteen-day Replacement Period to tell ICANN they are switching.

Whether either .gram applicant named a replacement is not public. What is clear is the difference in exposure: Link Freedom Group is spread across 316 strings, while Telegram asked for one word that happens to be the back half of its own name.

Nothing Here Has Been Confirmed

ICANN said the application window closed on August 12 with more than 1,600 primary applications, roughly three hundred fewer than the 2012 round drew. That is the entire body of official information. The organization has published nothing about which applicant asked for which string, and will not until Reveal Day, whose date it says it will announce in mid-September. Even the final count is not fixed until fees are paid, which applicants have seven days from invoice to do.

Everything currently circulating about this round comes from applicants describing their own filings. Around 367 strings have been announced that way, out of more than 1,600. The .gram contention is an inference from two of those self-disclosures, one of them a post on X and the other a marketing page. Both are probably accurate. Neither is a public record, and there will not be one until Reveal Day, which ICANN has committed to holding no later than nine weeks after the window closed.

A Registry of Your Own Does Not Change the Jurisdiction

The lesson Telegram appears to have drawn is that depending on someone else’s namespace is a risk. That reading is correct as far as it goes, and it is a reasonable lesson for anyone whose business runs on a domain they do not control.

Owning the registry would fix the specific failure that took t.me down. That outage happened because someone else’s channel sat under Telegram’s domain and the whole apex went dark over it. Under a registry Telegram controlled, a listing of that kind would land on the individual name rather than on everything above it.

What it would not do is remove the exposure one level up. A generic top-level domain is operated under contract with ICANN, a California corporation, and registry operators are bound by that contract and by the law that reaches them. The decision would move to a different desk. It would not move outside the same legal system.

There is a second question in Durov’s wording. He says users would get their own second-level domains, and technically yourname.gram is exactly that. But if Telegram operates the registry, what a user holds is a name inside a namespace that Telegram controls, and nothing published so far says whether those names could be transferred to another registrar or moved elsewhere. The competing applicant makes the same point without meaning to: Link Freedom’s chief executive, Vaughn Liley, justified his own bid by saying that users “still don’t truly own their place on the internet”.

About the Data

The sanctions details come from OFAC’s published action of July 13, 2026 and the accompanying Treasury release. The 316 strings attributed to Link Freedom Group were read from the company’s own published portfolio rather than from coverage of it. The contention rules and the auction method come from ICANN’s 2026 Applicant Guidebook. Durov’s statement was posted on X, which we could not retrieve directly; we rely on domain trade press that reported it. Telegram, doMEn, GoDaddy, Identity Digital and ICANN have made no public statement on the .gram application.