The rose keeps its name. The question is who owns the garden.
In the first post of this series I checked whether the ending of a domain matters. In the second I looked at who applied for new endings in 2026. Both assumed that a name you register stays yours. Two cases from this year show that this depends on whoever runs the ending.
The .name addresses
.name was added in 2000 as an ending for personal names. Next to the usual smith.name, you could register john.smith.name, a name one level deeper, called a third-level name. People often used them for email.
Verisign, which runs .name, asked ICANN on 15 April 2026 to stop offering third-level names, and in a separate request to end the email forwarding that goes with .name. ICANN’s letter on the change is dated 28 July. According to Domain Incite and InfoQ, about 22,000 third-level names are affected, out of about 95,487 .name domains in May 2026. Verisign says most of them are unused. Second-level names stay. No deletion date has been published, and two registrants are contesting the change.
Whoever does use one loses the address with it. They registered the name, but the level it sits on belongs to Verisign, and Verisign decided to close it.
The .wordpress application
On 8 October Kellie Peterson published an article on Medium claiming that Knock Knock WHOIS There, LLC, the Automattic subsidiary that runs .blog, applied for .wordpress in the 2026 round. According to her, the application asks for an exemption from ICANN’s registry Code of Conduct and states that WordPress is not a generic word. Peterson used to run domains at Automattic, and she says herself that she may have an axe to grind. I have not seen the application. For now this is her account.
ICANN’s list of contested strings, the ones with two or more applicants, shows Knock Knock WHOIS There for eleven of them: craft, hire, human, make, mesh, pod, pop, robot, soul, story and vibe. So the company is an active applicant, whatever else it applied for.
ICANN’s 2026 Applicant Guidebook (section 7.4.4) sets the conditions for that exemption. Only the registry and its affiliates may use the names, none may be transferred to anyone else, and the Code must not be needed to protect the public interest. The ending also must not be a closed generic, a common word reserved for one company. Trademark ownership is not one of the conditions, so the application does not depend on who owns WordPress.
In a separate case, WP Engine v. Automattic, a federal judge in Northern California held on 24 September 2026 that Automattic and its founder Matt Mullenweg are “neither owners nor registrants” of the WordPress marks and lack a truly exclusive license, as webhosting.today reports. It is an early ruling about who may bring certain claims, and it does not say who owns the marks.
If Peterson’s account is right and ICANN grants the exemption, every name under .wordpress would belong to Automattic and its affiliates. Nobody else could register one.
What you can do
From 17 November 2026 to 16 March 2027, ICANN takes community input and objections on the 2026 applications. If an application touches a name you depend on, that is the time to read it and comment. For your own names, register at the second level, not under someone else’s name, and read the registry’s rules once, because it writes them and it can change them.
The name smells the same. Who holds it is a different question.