Domain Names

The Last gTLD Round Taught Us the Wrong Lessons

Fourteen years after ICANN's last gTLD expansion, registration figures offer an incomplete verdict. The next round will test whether applicants can build namespaces with enduring relevance, rather than merely generating impressive launch volumes and revenues.

DNS Abuse and Criminal Infrastructure: Beyond Definitions and Blocklists

Research suggests criminals may control a striking share of newly registered gTLD domains, raising questions about whether ICANN's definitions, contractual safeguards and enforcement mechanisms are keeping pace with the industrial scale of technology-facilitated harm.

DNSSEC Doesn’t Need a Better Story - It Needs a Better Tuesday

DNSSEC adoption is stronger than headline figures suggest, yet uneven across industries. New data indicate the bigger obstacle is not reputation but operational friction, especially key rollovers, registrar coordination and automation still missing across major domains.

Whose Precedent Gets Remembered? Selective Amplification Has Its Own Amnesia

DotConnectAfrica's landmark .AFRICA IRP victory established an ICANN accountability precedent later expressly invoked by Amazon. Selective amplification has since detached that precedent from its origins, distorting the historical record.

ICANN Should Immediately Clarify if Applicants for the Same String Can Communicate Before Reveal Day

With more than 1,600 applications filed for ICANN's 2026 new gTLD Round, self-revealing applicants face uncertainty over whether pre-Reveal Day communications and agreements about overlapping strings could violate strict rules against privately resolving contention sets.

Now That You’ve Applied for a New gTLD, Should You Reveal?

With applications closed, new gTLD hopefuls face a changed calculation: revealing strings early could expose contention while information remains financially valuable, helping applicants make better decisions before fees are paid and withdrawal becomes increasingly costly.

Beyond DUMs: The Case for Tracking What a Namespace Is Made Of

Domains Under Management (DUM) measures a namespace's size, but not its character. Structural composition could reveal whether growth reflects durable adoption, speculative holdings or noise, giving registries a richer view of namespace health and strategy.

The Role of Artificial Intelligence in ICANN’s 2026 Round of gTLD Applications

AI can help applicants navigate ICANN's complex new gTLD process, from business planning and financial modeling to drafting and reviewing applications, pointing towards faster, cheaper and increasingly automated domain-name rounds in the future.

The Web Has Become a Content Delivery Network

Cyberattacks, AI scraping and relentless bot traffic have transformed CDNs from performance tools into the Web's defensive gatekeepers, reshaping Internet architecture, governance and control as private intermediaries increasingly determine which requests reach origin servers first.

Phantom Squatting: When LLMs’ Hallucination Becomes an Attacker’s Best Friend

As AI reshapes cybersecurity, attackers are exploiting a fundamental weakness in large language models. Phantom squatting turns hallucinated domain names into trusted attack vectors, creating a new class of DNS abuse that defenders cannot solve by eliminating hallucinations alone.

Same Shape at Every Scale: What a Larger Domnain Namespace Confirmed - and What It Didn’t

A larger namespace confirms the same four-layer structural pattern found across nTLDs, while revealing wider operator-to-investor variation and distinctive noise signatures that expose different registration dynamics hidden behind headline registration totals.

Call for Participation: DNSSEC and Security Workshop at ICANN87 (21 October 2026)

ICANN is inviting proposals for its DNSSEC and Security Workshop at ICANN 87, offering experts and practitioners a platform to share insights on DNS security, routing security, browser security, and emerging Internet infrastructure challenges.

From Human Trust to Machine Cryptography: The Infrastructure Deficit in AI Interoperability

As AI agents begin collaborating across the open internet, the absence of trusted identity, authorization, and accountability frameworks threatens interoperability, making cryptographic trust infrastructure essential to building a secure and scalable agentic economy.

ICANN Wiki, SHE.africa, AI, and the Integrity of Digital Platforms

As AI increasingly relies on digital archives, the quiet revision of ICANNWiki entries raises broader questions about platform accountability, historical integrity, and whether institutions can reshape the records that future researchers and machines will treat as fact.

The Phishing That Hasn’t Happened Yet: MX Records as Bad-Faith Evidence in UDRP Proceedings

Inactive cybersquatted domains may conceal active email infrastructure. MX records can corroborate bad faith in UDRP disputes when weighed with other evidence, helping panels address fraud risks before harm occurs without conflating capability with misconduct.