Inside the Wild, High-Stakes Race to Invent New Internet Domain Names

This year, anyone can apply for a killer top-level domain on the internet. I’m talking about the part to the right of the URL dot, like .com or .org. Over a thousand of these already exist: .app for apps, .shop for shopping, .dev for software developers, .nyc for New Yorkers, .porn for porn, .horse for—who knows.

And in 2026, for the first time since 2012, anyone can invent a new .word (even, literally, .word).

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, is the governance body that makes the rules for domain names and IP addresses. These rules are ostensibly the kind of boring technical stuff that most people don’t know about, because the internet “just works.” You type in nike.com, you see the swoosh. But the rules solve hard problems that thousands of humans spend thousands of hours arguing over. When Ukraine asked ICANN in 2022 to shut down all traffic to Russian top-level domains, like .ru, ICANN declined. No censorship is one of the rules: Ensure the stability and security of the internet, but don’t police content.

It’s June, and I’m in Seville, Spain, for ICANN86, to learn about top-level domains and the people who make them. The 86 means it’s ICANN’s 86th IRL meeting since ICANN01 in Singapore, in 1999, just after ICANN was created to transition key internet infrastructure away from US control and toward independent management. The US government is here too—at least four representatives from the Department of Commerce—along with 1,000-plus people from 100-plus countries. And it’s not just bureaucrats. ICANN regulars include big tech companies like Google and Amazon, domain registrars like GoDaddy and Porkbun (domain companies have a penchant for wacky names), UN agencies like the World Intellectual Property Organization, nonprofits, academics, and lots of lawyers and glasses-and-beard computer guys. The crowd has a retro feel. When I hand people my old-fashioned paper-and-ink business card, they hand theirs right back.

ICANN86 is the second of three ICANN meetings this year. The same crowd spent a week in Mumbai in March and will spend another in Bali in October. After on-the-record policy forums and closed-door business meetings each day, the congregation of domain people will party-hop between tapas bars, courtesy of the corporates. One longtime attendee tells me it’s a “traveling circus.” This particular meeting is important because it’s the last face-to-face gathering before the window to apply for new top-level domains, or TLDs, closes on August 12.

Insiders call the words and acronyms that become TLDs “strings.” As in, “man, .app is a good string.” In 2012, .app was considered a good string, so good that Google paid $25 million for it in an ICANN auction, outbidding a dozen applicants, including Amazon. Owning the top-level domain means Google can sell .app domains, like cash.app, for a yearly registration fee. That makes Google a registry, not to be confused with a registrar. Registries sell domains through registrars to registrants—try to keep up. So when you buy jitterbug.app from a registrar like GoDaddy for $27.99, Google’s registry charges $14 wholesale, ICANN collects a 20-cent transaction fee, and GoDaddy pockets the difference. (Google also used to have a registrar, Google Domains, which it sold to Squarespace a few years ago.)

The registry that owns .com, Verisign, makes a billion and a half dollars every year just by keeping the lights on. To Verisign’s credit, the lights never go out: It reports 100 percent uptime over the past 28 years. It’s a pretty slick business model, watching over a database of words and collecting annual renewal fees. Warren Buffett thought so too, investing in Verisign in 2012, when its stock price was about one-eighth what it is today. This week I’ll also talk to smaller registry operators, people who run profitable TLDs as solopreneurs or with a small team. Being here, talking to applicants, I’m starting to wish I were the one applying for a shiny new top-level domain.

The whole thing is massively fueled by FOMO. We don’t know when ICANN will hold another round—it has been planning this one for over a decade—and once someone else owns a string, you can’t have it. When the application window closes in August, ICANN will announce that it received over 1,600 applications. And when it releases the public list on Reveal Day on October 7, we’ll know who applied for what. Until then, most organizations will be extremely secretive about their plans. One applicant from the last round tells me companies were flying around the world, meeting in person to avoid any risk of digital leaks, avoiding Gmail for fear of Google spying. Instead of email or video calls, she flew to London, then to Madrid. “We did it all in person. People got a little weird and scary, super paranoid.”

Many applicants won’t even say outright whether they’re applying, for fear of inviting competition. Not everyone is so discreet, though.

Vaughn Liley quit school at 15 to sell fax machines door to door. He refers to that time using the quaint long-form “facsimile machines” during our conversation in Seville. In his fifties now, Liley tells me he has the enthusiasm and work ethic of an 18-year-old. He’s been selling alternatives to .com since before the 2012 round, when there were fewer than two dozen gTLDs (a gTLD is a generic top-level domain, in contrast with ccTLDs, or country code top-level domains, like .us and .uk). Liley cut his teeth marketing the controversial porny—pardon me, adult content—top-level domain .xxx, colloquially known as “triple x.”

Liley hired porn stars Ron Jeremy and Stormy Daniels as brand spokespeople. “I actually got chased through LAX airport by TMZ.” He’d gone to Los Angeles to meet Daniels for a radio interview with Playboy about triple x. “I didn’t put two and two together, but that was when the original story was breaking about her and later-to-be president Donald Trump.” Years-long controversy over triple x is part of the history that led to ICANN’s no-censorship rule. The Bush administration did not want a red-light district for the internet. Liley tells me one government official tried to intimidate his boss: “We spend years like you spend dimes.” All that triple x trauma is a cautionary tale for Liley in the 2026 round, I gather.

On the night of the Palisades Fire in January 2025, Liley flew to LA again. This time, he was visiting ICANN headquarters on behalf of his company, Nova Registry (it has since rebranded to Link Freedom Group, or LFG). The visit was a precaution, to get the green light for a splashy announcement Nova would make the week before ICANN82 in Seattle: It was planning to apply for 200 top-level domains in 2026. He called it SuperNova200.

ICANN charges a $227,000 application fee for each string, to recover the cost of running the program. The $36 million or so that Nova will need to cover those fees—and plenty more for auctions, Liley adds—is coming from the personal bank account of Yoni Belousov, a reclusive domain investor (industry jargon: “domainer”) who’s been in the business since he was 14 years old. Belousov hired Liley to put Nova on the map. And he did. Before Seattle, next to no one had heard of Nova, which currently runs just one TLD, .link. “At that meeting we were invited to a closed-door session” held by the biggest players from the last round, Liley tells me. “We’ve never been invited to that.”

Liley calls the SuperNova200 announcement—his own idea—both a “masterstroke” and “an absolute stroke of genius.” Talking to me for this story, he spots a publicity opportunity and dials up the charm: repeating my name in conversation, telling old stories, being British. He knows what he’s doing, and I don’t mind. I like talking to him. But he still won’t tell me what strings he’s applying for, not until after the application window closes, anyway. (In August, Nova will steal ICANN’s thunder and announce the 316 strings it applied for, including .fart.)

There are other applicants who have announced their strings early, though. There’s the .agent community that wants AI agent identity to be governed by a consortium, not any one big lab. There’s crypto domain company D3 (website tagline: “Own & trade the internet”) partnering on TLDs for meme coins like .doge and NFTs like .ape like it’s 2023. There’s Salesforce, which quietly disclosed its plans to apply for .salesforce. There’s .self, a community-governed top-level domain for data sovereignty, and .furry, a hackerspace applicant for the furry community. There’s also .tree, a buy-a-domain-plant-a-tree registry that smells like greenwashing.

And then there’s .meow.

Aeryn Van Daele was joking when she first raised the idea of applying for .meow, a top-level domain for the queer community. Van Daele, CEO of the queer-owned and -operated dotMeow Foundation, is starting to tell me the founding story when Lauren Thomas, dotMeow’s project manager, cuts her off. “The reality of it was,” Thomas says, that Van Daele and her cofounder, TQ Hirsch, were “genuinely absolutely hammered.” Van Daele and Hirsch had met up for drinks. Later that night, Hirsch relayed the idea to Thomas, who told Hirsch to send Van Daele a message on Signal so that .meow wouldn’t be lost to a hangover. It was one of those rare drunk ideas that’s even better the next morning.

Van Daele has two nose rings, purple highlights to match her glasses, and no more space for stickers on her laptop. FIGHT THE CIS-TEM, NIEMAND IS ILLEGAL, FEMBOY HOOTERS, FUUT THE POLICE, HACKING 0100 FREEDOM, QUEERS BASH BACK, and of course, a .meow sticker. She and Thomas have the unmistakable rapport of good friends who also happen to work together.

.meow wouldn’t be the first queer top-level domain. But unlike .gay and .lgbt from the 2012 round, .meow is a more oblique nod to the queer community. Their website calls it “a subtle signal of solidarity, a wink to those in the know.” (For those not in the know, meowing can be a queerness tell.) Of course, anyone would be able to register a .meow domain. The internet is really just “tubes full of cats,” as Van Daele puts it. All domain sale profits would fund queer people and projects, whether it’s deliberate queer support or unwitting cat people doing the buying. It’ll be like selling Subarus to lesbians, when the car company ran a subtle, if-you-know-you-know ad series (“It loves camping, dogs, and long-term commitment. Too bad it’s only a car.”).

Choosing a string that isn’t overtly queer is strategic in other ways too. If dotMeow had applied for .trans, it might face competition from for-profit registries, say, targeting the transportation industry. The conventional wisdom is to keep your string a secret, but Van Daele and Thomas think competition is unlikely because it would be a “terrible PR move” to be the registry that yoinked the queer community’s TLD. “We’re good at boycotting,” Van Daele adds. Also, .meow is less likely to be challenged in ICANN’s public comment process. In the last round, Saudi Arabia filed an objection against .gay on moral and religious grounds. In its words, promoting homosexuality would be “offensive” to some societies and cultures. But Van Daele and Thomas have done their homework: The ICANN rules are written such that an objection must relate to the string itself, not to the organization and its values. “We are promoting meowing on the internet, which is definitely a queer hobby, but it is not inherently queer,” Thomas says, half serious.

In contrast to registries that have “exited” by selling their TLDs (.gay changed hands in 2023), Van Daele and Thomas emphasize that .meow is a lifetime investment. They’re clearly having fun, too. “It’s the weird internet that we do miss a bit and want back,” Van Daele says. They dream of .meow domains being used for joyful small websites, like a silly personal blog no one reads. Now, again, I’m daydreaming about running my own top-level domain and wondering if they’ve thought of other strings. I consider myself both a cat person and a dog person, so I ask if they’ve thought about .woof. I’m not the first, apparently—it’s the most requested string after .meow. Per Van Daele, “as many catgirls as exist, there’s at least as many puppygirls.”

Van Daele and Thomas think that, philosophically, ICANN wants more projects like .meow populating the internet—a less corporate and more inclusive, cozy web. Following the money corroborates this. In 2012, only one applicant received financial aid through ICANN’s Applicant Support Program. This year, 56 have qualified, including many from the global south. DotMeow’s Kickstarter drew nearly 2,000 backers in 40 countries, across every continent with more people than penguins. That support includes “a lot of people in a lot of places where their governments would not appreciate it,” Thomas calls out, including Russia. The geographic diversity validates ICANN’s goal of supporting one unified, global internet and avoiding a fragmented “splinternet” of walled-off networks, like Russia’s RuNet.

It’s not just Russia that the two have an eye on. “The way it’s looking,” Van Daele says, it’s possible the US “might have an issue with us being available there, at which point we have no more say if their ISPs don’t offer routing to our TLD.” Thomas points out that .gay and .lgbt, both owned by American companies, would have the same problem. One of the policy debates this week is about requiring registries to fulfill urgent requests from law enforcement for registrant data within 24 hours. If a criminal were using a .meow domain to commit crimes, the police in that jurisdiction might want to know who’s behind the website. But what if that person weren’t a criminal, and the police asked anyway? DotMeow plans to run a “thin” registry that collects contact information but not personally identifying information and to keep data in the EU, protected under GDPR. Van Daele has asked both Belgian and American lawyers whether GDPR would protect registrants if the FBI or CIA came knocking, for example. The dotMeow Foundation is based in Belgium, and it’s deliberately staying out of US jurisdiction—to the extent possible. Many .meow Kickstarter backers live in the US, and ICANN itself is a nonprofit incorporated in California.

As the only American at the table, I have a pang of guilt and sadness that Van Daele and Thomas don’t feel welcome in my home country. It also reminds me of something I heard Thomas say on the Queerocracy Now! podcast: “This is the internet, not America.”

The US government officially ceded control of the Domain Name System on September 30, 2016. Yes, ICANN was formed in 1998, but for almost 20 years the Department of Commerce had a contract with ICANN to run what’s called the Root Zone Database, or simply “the root.” The root is an alphabetized list of all the top-level domains: .aaa for AAA, the roadside assistance company; .aarp for AARP, the retiree assistan