ICANN published the 2026 new gTLD application list on October 7, and the first thing a hosting company or registrar will notice is how little of it is about hosting. The strings that defined the 2012 round for this industry, .web, .host, .cloud, .site, .app and .online, are delegated TLDs and cannot be applied for again, and among the 1,615 applications from 481 applicants the nearest things to them are .vps, .server, .dns and .cdn, with one or two applicants each. The strings that drew crowds are .agent, with thirteen applicants including Google, Meta and OpenAI, .bit with eleven, and .api, .brand and .hub with ten each. By our count of ICANN’s contention file, 891 applications, 55 percent of the total, sit in 263 contention sets, against 39 percent in 2012, a figure ICANN computed after string similarity review, which has not yet run this round.

The list is a snapshot, and ICANN says so: “This snapshot reflects primary string application data as of 7 October 2026. The final number and types of applications will be confirmed on String Confirmation Day.” Applicants can swap a contested string for a replacement until October 21 at 23:59 UTC, and the second-largest applicant did exactly that within a day. Until November 17 every contention count below is provisional.

Key facts

  • The list: 1,615 applications from 481 applicants, published on the Application Publication and Statistics site at 15:41 UTC on October 7. ICANN had reported 1,616 paid applications on September 22; the published total is one lower.
  • The mix: 333 brand applications, 16 community, 15 self-designated geographic, 21 IDN, 9 variant, 51 from Applicant Support Program applicants. By region: 864 from North America, 506 from Europe, 218 from Asia-Pacific, 16 from Africa, 11 from Latin America and the Caribbean.
  • The contention: 263 sets covering 891 applications in ICANN’s October 7 file. Largest: .agent 13, .bit 11, .api, .brand and .hub 10, .pop and .robot 9, .max, .official, .pod and .zen 8. In 2012, 234 sets covered 751 of 1,930 applications.
  • The portfolios: Link Freedom Group 158 applications, XYZ.COM 139, GoDaddy Registry (filing as Registry Services, LLC) 77, Intercap 71, Radix 46, ShortDot 40, Google’s Charleston Road Registry 39. Identity Digital, which does not appear under its own name, is credited with 216 applications by Domain Name Wire, across 28 filing entities by CircleID’s count.
  • The calendar: replacement strings October 8 to 21; String Confirmation Day November 17; community input and objections November 17 to March 16, 2027; $147,500 of the $227,000 fee refunded on withdrawal by November 27; prioritisation draw in the first half of 2027.

Half the Round Is a Fight, and the Fight Is Over AI Words

ICANN’s contention file, published alongside the list, groups applications for identical strings into sets. Of its 263 sets, 114 are two-way, 64 three-way, and only eleven have eight or more applicants. The top of the table reads like a product roadmap: .agent (13), .bit (11), .api (10), .brand (10), .hub (10), .pop (9), .robot (9), .max, .official, .pod, .zen (8 each), then .agi, .ask, .connect, .firm, .key, .lab, .mind, .therapy and .vibe at seven. Google, Meta and OpenAI all applied for .agent; OpenAI also filed for .agi, .gpt, .chatgpt, .codex, .mcp and .model, and Google for .gemini, .deepmind, .mcp and .intelligence. Simone Catania’s CircleID analysis puts the shift in one comparison: Google filed 39 applications this round against 101 in 2012, Amazon 8 against 76.

The crowd behind the AI names is the portfolio registries. XYZ.COM, with 139 applications, is in .agent, .bit, .api, .brand and .hub and, by Domain Name Wire’s count, 39 uncontested strings besides. Radix (46), ShortDot (40), Intercap (71, until now the operator of .inc, .dealer and .box) and GoDaddy Registry, which files as Registry Services, LLC (77), sit in most of the big sets. Link Freedom Group, with 158 applications, is the second-largest applicant and the first to use the replacement window: on October 8 Domain Name Wire counted nineteen primary strings it abandoned for replacements, among them .brand for .industry, .max for .phi and .official for .vvv. Every set it left is one applicant smaller than the file says.

The largest applicant is not on the list by name. Domain Name Wire reported on October 7 that Identity Digital applied for 216 strings across thirteen categories, and CircleID puts the filings at 28 entities. The export we pulled from ICANN’s site shows 480 named applicants, 343 of them with a single application, and a long run of limited liability companies with whimsical names (Fore Course, Paws Button, Toddler Logic, Hair Apparent, Oyster Dream) with between eleven and nineteen applications each. Not every odd name is a shell: Knock Knock WHOIS There, LLC is Automattic’s .blog registry, and its sixteen applications include .wordpress, where it is the sole applicant, .woo, .tumblr and .matt.

The Hosting Strings Went in 2012. What Is Left Is .vps and .server

In 2012 the strings that defined the round for hosts were .web, .app, .cloud, .site, .online, .host and .hosting, and all of them, with .dev, .data, .email, .shop, .store and .domains, are in the root zone today, so none of them could be applied for; .web itself was delegated only in July 2026. The unclaimed neighbours, .domain for one, drew no applicant. What the 2026 file holds for this industry is thin. Aruba PEC is the sole applicant for .vps, one of twenty strings the Italian host filed that also include .pec, .lab, .gen, .human, .bit and .easy. Pirin Tablet, LLC and XRegistry Incorporated contest .server. Suffix Inc. and the Nepal Internet Foundation contest .dns. Ethos Digital is alone on .cdn, Tidal Case, LLC on .admin, TLD King on .saas. Mystic Hammer, LLC is alone on .mail, which is less an opportunity than it looks: the Applicant Guidebook names .mail, with .corp and .home, as one of the three strings assessed high-risk for name collision in 2012, and every string must clear a Name Collision Initial Assessment before temporary delegation. Two applicants want .vpn and one .proxy. The ten-way .api set and the five-way .sys set are the closest thing to an infrastructure fight.

Hostinger UAB filed four: .gen, .hub, .human and .lab, every one of them contested, .hub ten ways and .lab seven. Squarespace Registry, the registrar that bought Google Domains in 2023, filed fifteen (.brand, .chef, .class, .firm, .goods, .gym, .hub, .lab, .learn, .member, .planner, .pod, .skill, .trainer, .venue), which Domain Name Wire headlined as Squarespace “gets into the domain registry business.” The brand column is where the infrastructure names went: Cloudflare applied for .cloudflare, Wix for .wix, Shopify for .shopify, XServer for .xserver and a Singapore company, Cloud Intelligence Assets Holding, for .alicloud. Among the 333 brand applications, filed by 246 owners by CircleID’s count, Amazon’s eight are .alexa, .echo, .eero, .kgs, .kuiper, .leo, .ring and .twitch, Microsoft’s two are .copilot and .msft, and Meta’s eighteen run from .facebook and .whatsapp to .superintelligence. Gen Digital, which we last wrote about for its approach to GoDaddy, is one of six applicants for .gen.

What Changes on October 21, November 17 and November 27

The round’s next three dates each move the numbers. The replacement window, open from 00:01 UTC on October 8 to 23:59 UTC on October 21, lets any applicant that filed replacement strings in August trade its primary string for one of them. A replacement can be used only if no other applicant chose it as a primary or replacement string, which is why Link Freedom could not move to .fart, so swaps can only shrink contention sets, never create them. ICANN’s export lists 1,169 replacement strings, 442 active and 727 marked deactivated without a stated reason, and it does not yet reflect Link Freedom’s October 8 swaps. String Confirmation Day, November 17, fixes the list of strings, though string similarity review can still merge sets after it, and opens the community input and objection period that runs to March 16, 2027. Withdrawal before November 27 at 23:59 UTC, ten days after String Confirmation Day, returns $147,500 of the $227,000 fee; ICANN’s fee FAQ then drops the refund to $79,500 until application evaluation begins and to $45,400 until the registry agreement is signed. The prioritisation draw, which sets the evaluation order for 1,600-odd applications, comes in the first half of 2027.

For a registrar the practical list is short. The hosting TLDs registrars already carry are unaffected by this round. The strings a registrar’s customers will ask about are the ones with the most applicants, and those are the ones least likely to be delegated soon: a thirteen-way set resolves by private settlement or ICANN auction, and of 2012’s 234 sets ICANN’s statistics page still lists one unresolved. The brand applications, a fifth of the round, will never be sold at retail. The strings that could reach a registrar’s catalogue early are the uncontested generics: the export’s 986 unique primary strings less the 263 contention sets leave 723 strings with a single applicant, and 315 of those are brand applications, so the pool of uncontested generic strings is about 408. Aruba’s .vps is one of them.