The Brand Registry Group (BRG) is the global association of companies and organizations working together to champion the use of .brand top-level domains and includes some of the world’s most recognized consumer and B2B brands. In advance of the ICANN81 meeting in Istanbul Türkiye next week, the BRG is providing an update on ICANN’s new gTLD program in several sessions that may be of interest to prospective .brand applicants.

Relevant Sessions

BRG representatives are participating in two sessions that should provide valuable insight for prospective applicants. The first session, occurring on Monday morning local time, is entitled The Potential of New TLDs: Challenges and Opportunities. This is a panel discussion of registry operators comprising different registry business models. Crews Gore, BRG President and Director of Domain Names and Brand Protection at Fox, will provide the perspective of .brand registry operators. This session may benefit corporate applicants considering applying for a generic string in addition to a string corresponding to their trademark. This was a strategy that several large multinational companies followed in the last round.

The second session, occurring on Monday afternoon local time, is an interactive fireside chat comprised of the following BRG members: Crews Gore (BRG President/Fox); Cole Quinn (Microsoft); Mark Wilson (AXA); Nisha Parkash (Sky); and Martin Kuechenthal (LEMARIT). This session addresses any questions that current or future .brand applicants may have. To enable participation from attendees in person and remotely, the BRG has created a Slido link for this event so that participants can anonymously post questions to the panel. Attendees are invited to post anonymous questions on Slido ahead of time to give other registries & applicants a chance to review and upvote any of those questions they feel are important to them.

For those individuals interested in either of these sessions but are unable to attend, ICANN will be publicly providing Zoom recordings of this session on the ICANN website, as is standard practice for all ICANN regional meetings.

Recent Developments

The BRG remains cautiously optimistic that ICANN Org will hit its Q2 2026 target for opening the next TLD application window after its most recent update during the ICANN81 prep week session. There have been several recent signs that ICANN Org is on track to meet this target including:

• Publication of the revised expected application costs.
• Publication of the draft Registry Agreement, including relevant provisions for Specification 13 that are applicable to .brand TLDs;
• ICANN finalizing the New gTLD Registry Service Provider Evaluation Program Handbook; and
• Progress on ICANN’s internal system integrations to facilitate the processing of applications

BRG members are actively engaged with other community members as part of ICANN’s Implementation Review Team (IRT) to help resolve those outstanding issues necessary for ICANN to launch the next round in a timely manner. The BRG continues to provide public and private updates to the community and its members on this important work.

Suggested Next Steps

For those individuals finalizing their 2025 budgets, 2026 may seem a distant way off. However, there are several essential steps that prospective applicants need to take before submitting their application during the tentative 12-15 week application window beginning in 2026.

The BRG strongly recommends that prospective applicants start identifying key stakeholders within their organization and discuss whether applying for a dotBrand aligns with your corporate strategy. A common trend that the BRG has found among successful dotBrand registry operators from the 2012 round is those companies that employed a whole-of-company approach in applying and launching their respective TLDs.