New TLDs

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.

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.

The Business Value of dotBrand: Twelve Real-World Success Stories

Twelve real-world dotBrand success stories show how organizations strengthen trust, improve security, simplify customer experiences, and create measurable business value. From AI-driven innovation to global digital ecosystems, dotBrand domains are becoming essential infrastructure worldwide today.

What Zone File Analysis Reveals About the Gap Between nTLD Registration Volume and Namespace Reality

Registration totals reveal size, not composition. Structural analysis of major new gTLDs finds strikingly similar architectures but meaningful differences in operator adoption, speculative holdings, and noise, suggesting namespace health requires more than volume metrics alone.

The gTLD Registrar Market Is Uniform in Rules, Not in Structure

ICANN applies identical rules to every registrar, yet new research reveals a sharply unequal market where seven firms capture half of inflows, renewals dominate activity, and many accreditations barely operate at all in practice today.

The 2026 New gTLD Round: A Strategic Framework for Risk Management

The 2026 new gTLD round is less a domain application than a high-stakes contest for digital territory. Contention, objections, opaque evaluations and information gaps can derail applicants long before launch, demanding rigorous strategic preparation.

The UN Needs Its Identity in the Digital Space - a Case for .UN Top-Level Domain

As AI systems increasingly mediate trust online, the United Nations faces a closing opportunity to secure a sovereign .un domain, creating a machine-readable digital identity that strengthens authenticity, preserves institutional knowledge, and counters impersonation.

DOTZON Study: Digital City Brands 2026

DOTZON's Digital City Brands 2026 study crowns .tokyo as the first Asian cityTLD to top the rankings, ending .berlin's four-year reign, while highlighting the growing role of city domains in digital identity, commerce and development.

Cybercriminals are Driving Significant Domain Name Market Demand

Cybercriminals are becoming a major force in the domain-name market, driving an estimated one-fifth of new gTLD registrations in 2025 and exposing how commercial incentives, weak enforcement, and scale continue to fuel online abuse.

dotBrand Domains as Trust Infrastructure in the Age of AI

As AI agents automate phishing, impersonation and domain abuse at machine scale, the Brand Registry Group argues that dotBrand domains are evolving from marketing assets into trust infrastructure underpinning cybersecurity, identity and interactions across the internet.

The Domain Universe in 2026: AI, Security, Market Maturity, and the New gTLD Frontier

Domains enter a mature phase as AI reshapes discovery, security sharpens, and new gTLDs expand. Once simple addresses, they are becoming critical infrastructure for identity, trust, and automated commerce in the evolving web.

Securing Digital Brand Borders in a Fragmented World

GlobalBlock's expansion into China and Germany signals a shift from reactive brand protection to centralized prevention, as firms seek scalable, cost efficient defences against proliferating AI driven domain abuse worldwide amid a fragmented digital landscape.

The Vibe-Coding Revolution: How AI is Reshaping Domain Registration

AI-powered "vibe-coding" is transforming domain registration from manual search into automated, conversational infrastructure, embedding domains directly into software workflows while elevating them into machine-verified trust anchors in an increasingly AI-mediated internet.

The AI Naming Gap - and Why the Legacy Namespace Won’t Wait for ICANN to Fill It

A surge in AI startups has exposed a domain-name shortage as premium .ai addresses vanish. With ICANN's next round years away, legacy TLDs and repurposed namespaces are racing to capture unmet demand.