On 7 October 2026 ICANN published the list of everyone who wants a new ending on the internet. 1,615 applications from 481 applicants. It sounds like a flood until you put it next to 2012, when ICANN received 1,930, according to webhosting.today. The 2026 round is smaller.
This is the second post in a series about domain endings. The first one asked whether the ending matters at all.
Four rounds
The first endings came in the eighties: .com, .net, .org, .edu, .gov, .mil, .int, plus the two-letter country codes. Everything since then arrived in rounds, where ICANN opens a window, takes applications and evaluates them.
The first round, in 2000, added .aero, .biz, .coop, .info, .museum, .name and .pro. The second, in 2003 and 2004, added .asia, .cat, .jobs, .mobi, .tel and .travel, with .xxx later. In 2012 ICANN opened the third round to anyone who could pay and pass the evaluation, and more than a thousand new endings followed. .xyz is one of them. 2026 is the fourth.
Who applied
ICANN’s window ran from 30 April to 12 August 2026. It received 1,663 applications, and 1,616 were paid and moved on, according to ICANN. By Reveal Day the count stood at 1,615.
Brand applications, where a company wants its own name as an ending, make up 333 of them. That is about a fifth, not the majority. The rest of ICANN’s breakdown is small numbers: 16 community applications, 15 geographic names, 21 internationalized domain names (IDN, endings in scripts other than Latin), 9 variants and 51 from applicants in ICANN’s Applicant Support Program, which reduces fees for applicants who qualify.
North America sent 864 applications, more than half of the total. Europe sent 506, Asia, Australia and the Pacific 218. Africa sent 16, and Latin America and the Caribbean 11.
What it costs
ICANN charges $227,000 per application for the evaluation alone. That buys a review, not an ending. If two or more applicants want the same string, they end up in a contention set.
Once an ending is approved, the operator, called the registry, has to run it for as long as the ending exists. That costs money on top of the fee.
What happens next
ICANN’s Replacement Period runs from 8 to 21 October. Until 27 November an applicant who walks away gets 65% of the fee back. String Confirmation Day is 17 November, and the same day opens Community Input and Objections, which runs until 16 March 2027. That is the window for public comments and formal objections. ICANN’s offices close from 19 December to 4 January. A Prioritization Draw follows in the first half of 2027.
So nothing from this round goes live in 2026. The comment window is where the next post starts, because some of these applications raise a question that has nothing to do with how many there are.