ICANN Opens New gTLD Round After 14 Years. What Was Learned From the Last One?

WEST PALM BEACH, FL – When ICANN approved hundreds of new top-level domains in 2012, supporters predicted a fundamental shift in how businesses would use the internet. Companies applied for extensions such as .google, .apple, .microsoft, .barclays, and hundreds of others. The vision was ambitious. Brands would move beyond .com addresses and begin operating entire namespaces under their own control. Fourteen years later, the results are mixed.

Many of the world’s largest companies secured dotBrand extensions, but widespread adoption never followed. Most consumers continue to interact with businesses through traditional domains such as brand.com, while many dotBrands remain largely invisible to the public. That raises an important question as ICANN prepares for its next application window: What did the first round actually accomplish?

The Marketing Revolution Never Arrived

One of the original selling points behind dotBrands was branding. Supporters envisioned a future where consumers would routinely visit websites such as:

• products.brand
• support.brand
• careers.brand

Instead, most organizations continued to rely on established .com domains. The reality is that consumers already understood .com, search engines worked well, and businesses saw little reason to retrain customers. If the goal was to replace .com as the dominant online destination, the first fourteen years suggest that did not happen.

A Different Internet Than 2012

However, the internet of 2026 is very different from the internet of 2012. Artificial intelligence systems now consume and summarize content at scale. Businesses face growing concerns about impersonation, digital trust, authenticity, and machine-readable identity. These developments have led some observers to revisit the value of dotBrands. Rather than serving primarily as marketing tools, dotBrands may increasingly be viewed as controlled digital namespaces. Every address ending in a company’s extension is created and managed by that company alone. In theory, this could provide stronger trust signals for both people and machines.

The AI Question

The biggest argument in favor of dotBrands today is one that barely existed when the first application window opened. Can AI systems use ownership of an entire namespace as a trust signal? If AI assistants, autonomous agents, and machine-to-machine interactions become increasingly important, digital identity may matter more than memorable website addresses. That remains a theory rather than a proven reality. Today, AI systems rely on many factors, including reputation, citations, content quality, security signals, and ownership data. Whether dotBrands become a meaningful part of that trust framework remains to be seen.

The Verdict After Fourteen Years

The first round of dotBrands produced far less public adoption than many supporters expected. At the same time, it may be too early to declare the experiment a failure. The original marketing case largely failed to transform the internet. The emerging trust and identity case has yet to be fully tested. As ICANN prepares for another application round, organizations face a different question than they did in 2012.

The question is no longer whether a dotBrand can replace a .com website. The question is whether controlling an entire digital namespace could become a strategic advantage in an internet increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence, trust, and authentication. The next fourteen years may provide the answer.

The Next Opportunity Has Arrived

For companies interested in operating their own internet extension, the next opportunity is now. ICANN’s 2026 application window opened on April 30, 2026, and remains open through August 12, 2026. This is the first opportunity to apply for a new generic top-level domain since the original 2012 round.

The cost of applying is substantial. ICANN has set the evaluation fee at $227,000 per application, up from $185,000 during the 2012 round. That fee covers the application review process but does not necessarily represent the total cost of launching and operating a registry. Technical infrastructure, legal services, compliance requirements, and ongoing registry operations can push total costs significantly higher.

For many companies, that expense helps explain why dotBrands never became commonplace during the first fourteen years. While major corporations such as Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Barclays obtained branded extensions, most businesses continued to rely on traditional domains such as .com, where registration costs are measured in dollars rather than hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Applicants selected during the 2026 round will still face evaluation, contracting, technical testing, and delegation processes before their extensions become operational. As a result, even successful applicants are unlikely to begin actively using new dotBrands immediately. The first new extensions from this round are expected to take months, and in some cases years, to move from application to full public operation.

John Colascione

About The Author: John Colascione is Chief Executive Officer of SEARCHEN NETWORKS®. He specializes in Website Monetization, is a Google AdWords Certified Professional, authored a how-to book called ”Mastering Your Website‘, and is a key player in several online businesses.