ICANN’s new TLD land rush draws 13 applicants for dot-agent alone, with AI a focus for new names

When ICANN revealed the 1,615 applications for new top-level domains (TLDs) on Wednesday, it provided a peek into efforts to control mindshare and organization perceptions via URL naming. Existing TLDs include .com, .org, .net, .edu and .gov, as well as country-specific TLDs such as .uk and .ca, and an already long list of generic ones, but ICANN envisions even further expanding the number globally, potentially also expanding the headaches for IT teams who must manage routing, allowlists, and blocklists. Judging from the number of applicants, there’s considerable enthusiasm for ICANN’s notion. Although it will be months before ICANN officials can whittle down the list of applications, sort out multiple requests for some TLDs, and ultimately decide who gets which one, Meta seems to be in the tech lead for attempts, with 21 requests, including .aiglasses, .facebook, .instagram, .llama, .messenger, .meta, .metaai, .metaglasses, .metaverse, .muse, .superintelligence, .threads, .vrs, .wearables and .whatsapp. It is also one of 13 organizations seeking to grab .agent. OpenAI made 15 requests, for everything from the obvious, such as .chatgpt and .openai, to .asi, .codex, .deploy, .evals…

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