In 2012, the most contested new gTLD was .app. In 2026, it is .agent. Between the two Reveal Days, the internet moved from smartphones and app stores to AI agents, APIs and machine-verified trust, and the strings now competing for a place in the root follow that shift.

On October 7, ICANN published the applications submitted for the 2026 round of the New gTLD Program: 1,615 applications from 481 applicants, filed between April 30 and August 12. The figures in this article reflect the applications as published on Reveal Day.

From .app to .agent

When ICANN revealed the first round on June 13, 2012, the string with the most applications was .app, with 13. In 2026, that position goes to .agent, also with 13.

The names behind .agent say a lot about the moment. Google, OpenAI and Meta are on the list, together with an entity that gives Alibaba Cloud as its website, the portfolio registries Radix, XYZ and Intercap, an Identity Digital subsidiary and a community applicant called Open Agent Registry. A check against the 2012 application list adds a second detail: none of the five most contested strings of 2026 (.agent, .bit, .api, .brand and .hub) was applied for by anyone in 2012.

Each Reveal Day captures what companies expect the internet to look like over the following decade. Set side by side, the two lists describe two different networks.

Two Internets, Two Application Rounds

One element is new in this round: the replacement string. When applying, a company could name a second-choice string to fall back on if its first choice ends up in contention, meaning that other applicants want the same or a confusingly similar string. In the two weeks after Reveal Day, an applicant in contention can switch to its replacement string if it meets ICANN’s eligibility conditions. Of the 1,615 applications, 1,169 include one.

This explains a coincidence in the headline numbers. The 2026 round has 315 fewer applications than 2012, but primary and replacement strings together add up to 1,430 unique strings, almost exactly the 1,409 applied for fourteen years ago. Demand is also more concentrated: 55% of 2026 applications sit in a contention set, compared with 39% in 2012.

2012: A Web of Apps and Destinations

In 2012, a little more than a third of the world’s population was online. The smartphone was becoming the default device, and the app store had become the main door to services. Facebook went public in May with investors questioning whether it could make money on mobile, then announced its billionth user in October. Around 240 million domain names were registered worldwide, almost all of them in .com, the handful of legacy gTLDs and ccTLDs.

The applications fitted that environment. The most contested strings (.app, .home, .inc, .art, .blog, .book and .shop) were labels for places people visit and businesses they look for. Google applied for 101 strings and Amazon for 76, most of them generic categories such as .search, .cloud, .shop, .book and .app. The logic was to control the shelf labels of a consumer web that people navigated through browsers and apps, a logic visible in CircleID’s coverage of the first Reveal Day.

Strings aimed at software rather than at people were rare. One of the few exceptions was .bot, applied for by Amazon.

The First Round’s Legacy: New gTLDs as an Established Segment

The second round opens on a track record. Of the 1,930 applications filed in 2012, 1,241 ended up delegated. Many brand TLDs were later terminated, several open generics struggled, and the round left lessons that the community spent a decade turning into policy, from evaluation delays to the long work on Universal Acceptance.

The segment as a whole, however, grew up. According to the Global Domain Report 2026 by InterNetX and Sedo, new gTLDs reached 47 million registrations in 2025, about 12.4% of all registered domain names, with year-on-year growth of 29.9% while the global market grew 2.2%. Verisign’s DNIB counted 52.9 million new gTLD registrations by the end of June 2026. The report describes new gTLDs as an established part of the market next to .com and the ccTLDs, in an industry that has reached a phase of maturity driven by AI and security.

That track record explains part of the appetite for 2026. The report’s industry survey, summarized by DNJournal, found that revenue opportunities were the most cited reason for joining the new round, mentioned by 40% of respondents, with other motivations close behind.

2026: An Internet of Agents, APIs and Trust

The internet the 2026 applicants are betting on is larger and works differently. ITU estimates that about 6 billion people used the internet in 2025, roughly 74% of the world’s population. The registered domain base passed 400 million names in mid-2026.

The deeper change concerns how people reach information and services. Search engines and apps still matter, but a growing share of answers comes from AI systems that read the web on the user’s behalf and decide what to show. Gartner expects 40% of enterprise applications to integrate task-specific AI agents by the end of 2026, up from less than 5% in 2025. Frost & Sullivan argues that as agents become the main interface, traditional apps risk being reduced to execution layers. Developers connect models to tools through protocols such as MCP, and a growing number of sites and services are built in conversation with AI coding tools.

In this environment, the domain name takes on an additional job. It remains an address, and it also serves as a trust signal that machines read before they cite a source, call an endpoint or complete a transaction. Governance has moved in the same direction: the IANA stewardship transition in 2016, GDPR in 2018 and the end of the open WHOIS, the move to RDAP, and DNS abuse obligations written into registry and registrar contracts in 2024. Today the namespace is treated as regulated infrastructure.

What the Contested Strings Reveal

Number of applicants per string at Reveal Day. Sources: ICANN 2012 application list; ICANN 2026 Reveal Day contention sets.

An obvious objection is that many of 2012’s favorites are already in the root: .app, .shop and .blog have been live for years, so the 2026 list partly reflects what was left. That explanation does not cover .agent, .api, .mcp, .agi or .llm. Nobody applied for them in 2012 because the markets behind them did not exist yet.

Grouping the 2026 primary strings by theme makes the pattern clearer (classification by the author):

• AI and agents: 71 applications across 21 strings, led by .agent (13), .robot (9), .agi (7), .asi (5), .mcp (5) and .robotics (5), plus .gpt, .llm, .model, .intelligence, .prompt and a Chinese IDN meaning “artificial intelligence.”
• Crypto and Web3: about 67 applications across 33 strings, from .bit (11) and .crypto (5) to .wallet, .token, .dao and ecosystem names such as .sol, .sui, .avax and .ethereum.
• Trust and identity: 40 applications across 13 strings, including .official (8), .key (7), .sign (5), .auth, .identity, .verified, .did and .pki, the last one applied for by Verisign.
• Developer infrastructure: 64 applications across 22 strings, such as .api (10), .hub (10), .deploy, .config, .server, .node, .stack, .dns and .cdn.

A growing share of the most contested strings now describes functions inside software: protocols, endpoints, credentials and the agents that use them. Two smaller sets point to the cultural side of the same change. .vibe drew seven applicants, a nod to AI-assisted “vibe coding,” and .human drew six, among them Aruba, Hostinger and Automattic’s registry arm.

Platforms, AI Labs and Website Builders Enter the Registry Business

The largest applicants are still the portfolio registries that emerged from fourteen years of consolidation. Identity Digital, successor to the largest applicant of 2012, Donuts, filed 216 applications through 28 entities. The Maltese newcomer Link Freedom Group, built around the .link registry, filed 158 and describes its submission as the largest on record once replacement strings are counted. XYZ, GoDaddy Registry and Intercap follow. Together, the five largest groups account for 41% of all applications.

The more telling story, however, sits further down the list, among companies whose core business has nothing to do with running registries.

Google applied for 101 strings in 2012, almost all of them generic. In 2026 it filed 39, twenty of them brands, many named after AI models and products that did not exist a few years ago: .gemini, .gemma, .deepmind, .veo, .waymo. Its generic applications point to the same place: .agent, .api, .intelligence and .mcp, the last one filed as a community application, which could matter if the string reaches Community Priority Evaluation.

OpenAI, with no history in the program, filed 15 applications. Next to its brands (.openai, .chatgpt, .codex), it went after the vocabulary of its own industry: .agent, .agi, .asi, .gpt, .mcp, .model, .skill and .deploy. Meta filed 18, from .llama, .metaai, .instagram and .whatsapp to .agent and .superintelligence; its application for .meta is self-designated as geographic, since Meta is also the name of a department of Colombia. Anthropic applied for .anthropic and .claude, Microsoft for .copilot and .msft, Alibaba for .qwen and .wan, and ByteDance entities for .tiktok, .douyin, .doubao and .capcut. Amazon, which applied for 76 strings in 2012, filed 8, all of them brands.

Squarespace shows how far the program has moved beyond the classic registry model. The website builder filed 15 applications, none of them brands: .brand, .firm, .gym, .hub, .lab, .learn, .skill, .venue and others that match the small businesses it serves. Automattic, through the company that operates .blog, filed 16, including .wordpress, .tumblr and .woo alongside .robot, .vibe and .human. Coinbase applied for .base, Bluesky, whose network uses domain names as user handles, for .bsky, and developer platforms such as Vercel, Lovable and Railway for their own brands, as did infrastructure providers like Cloudflare and Okta.

In 2012, the big platforms bid for categories. Their 2026 applications protect product identities and claim the language of protocols. For agents that call endpoints on a user’s behalf, a top-level label that can only resolve to one company works as a security feature as much as a branding exercise. For registrars, which turn new extensions into live inventory, it means negotiating with a new type of registry owner, one whose priorities are set by product and security teams.

Brands Return With Clearer Plans

The 2026 round counts 333 brand applications, about 21% of the total, filed by 246 different brand owners. The United States leads with 151, followed by Japan with 61 and China with 18. The list covers banking (Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, MUFG, Mizuho, Swedbank), financial infrastructure (SWIFT), pharma (Novartis, Gilead, BioNTech), retail (six fashion brands from Inditex) and platforms such as Airbnb, Uber, eBay and Zillow.

Many of these companies watched dot-brands from 2012 being terminated, so this second generation applies with a better idea of what running a TLD costs. For brands that did not apply, Reveal Day is the time to check the list for strings that conflict with their trademarks, since the window for formal objections opens after String Confirmation Day.

Where the Round Does Not Mirror the Internet’s Growth

Most of the internet’s growth since 2012 came from Asia, Africa and Latin America. The 2026 applications point the other way. North America’s share rose from 47% to 53.5%, applications from Latin America and the Caribbean fell from 24 to 11, and Africa went from 17 to 16. Europe’s 506 applications also need context: 306 of them come from Malta, the Cayman Islands and the British Virgin Islands, and ICANN’s regional mapping places the two UK overseas territories in Europe. Without them, the rest of Europe filed about 200.

Language and place tell a similar story. IDN applications dropped from 116 to 21, and 20 of the 21 are in Chinese script; the other is .québec. Geographic applications fell from 66 to 15, among them Vienna, Budapest, Bremen, Lugano, Campania, Roma, Beijing and Bali. Dotlocal points to the extra rules and fees for geoTLDs, timelines longer than a city government’s term and, in some countries, national governments discouraging applications.

Community applications fell from 84 to 16, and several represent crypto ecosystems such as .sol, .sui, .avax and .ada. The others range from Google’s .mcp and Open Agent Registry’s .agent to .src from the Dutch NLnet foundation, .indigenous and .aio from the Māori data trust Te Kāhui Raraunga.

The clearest improvement concerns access. In 2012, the Applicant Support Program received three requests and approved one. In 2026, 51 applications came from supported applicants in 21 countries, including the Nepal Internet Foundation (.dns), Open Development Cambodia (.api), the Internet Society’s Hawaii chapter (.aloha) and AI Safety Asia (.agt).

Read as a whole, the 2026 list says more about the companies building the internet’s next layer than about the six billion people who use it.

Five Strings to Watch Before String Confirmation Day

• .agent, where a community applicant faces Google, OpenAI, Meta and the largest portfolio registries.
• .mcp, a protocol name claimed through a community application by Google and contested by OpenAI, Radix, ShortDot and Identity Digital.
• .bit, with eleven applicants for a suffix that Namecoin users have resolved outside the ICANN root for years, which makes it a likely name-collision discussion.
• .corp and .mail, both applied for by Identity Digital entities after the 2012 round set them aside over name-collision risk.
• Replacement strings, held by 1,169 of the 1,615 applications: how many of today’s 263 contention sets survive until November 17 will show how much of the round is strategy and how much is real competition.

What Comes Next

Applicants in contention have until October 21 to switch to their replacement strings. On November 17, String Confirmation Day, ICANN will publish the final list of strings moving forward, which opens the period for public comments and formal objections. The prioritization draw is expected in the first half of 2027, and the first uncontested TLDs could go live in late 2027 or early 2028.

The 2012 program was about giving people more places to go online. The 2026 applications point to a different task for the root: providing domains that software can resolve, verify and rely on. Whether the same namespace will also serve the next billion users, in their languages and from their regions, is a question this list leaves open.