A .horse by any other name | InterdependenciesSkip to content<br>1. Sixteen hundred envelopes<br>On 12 August, ICANN closed the application window for its latest expansion of the Internet’s namespace: more than 1,600 applications for new generic top-level domains (gTLDs): the strings to the right of the final dot. The list is expected by mid-October, on what ICANN calls Reveal Day. The 2012 round drew 1,930 applications, delegated some 1,200 registries, and enriched the Internet with the likes of .photography, .sucks, .plumbing and .horse. Fourteen years later, the queue came back some 300 applications smaller, at roughly double the fee.<br>The rules of this round route its economics through ICANN. In 2012, applicants mostly settled contention privately and losers were usually paid by the winner. The 2026 guidebook bans private settlement; the one valve left is swapping to a pre-nominated replacement string, and 1,100 of the 1,600 applications carry one. This is a genuine reform, aimed at a decade of applications filed in order to be paid to lose. Whatever survives the swap exits through ICANN’s auction, at the higher volume the organisation’s own tender expects. An auction loser recovers only a fifth of its fee under the refund schedule — forfeiting some $180,000. Losing, once a business model, is now a fee. And where the auction proceeds go, the guidebook does not say. The 2012 promise to ring-fence proceeds took eight years of community process to become a grants programme, a slice of which now part-funds this round’s 75 supported applicants, up from three last time; the 2026 text does not start even that clock.<br>Losing, once a business model, is now a fee.<br>Roughly half a billion dollars is already spent regardless of outcome: at least $363m in evaluation fees invoiced by ICANN (at $227,000 per application), plus perhaps another $100m in legal and consulting preparation across the queue. The auctions to come will move money rather than burn it, from applicants to an organisation with no stated obligation about where it goes next. The expansion must deliver half a billion in value to the Internet just to recover what the paperwork has consumed so far. Who ultimately pays is murkier. Portfolio registries recover from registrants; defensive applicants recover from no one; what the expansion costs for everyone else on the Internet appears nowhere.<br>Then there is .horse. Delegated in 2014 and marketed to trainers and breeders, the zone sustains around 4,900 registrations today. Sub-$2 promotions swelled the zone to about 5,600 by 2023, standard renewal fees then shrank it by 40 per cent, and the next promotion refilled it. Nothing is wrong with .horse. It is the bare version of a TLD: a string, a price list, and a hope, now priced at $227,000 a throw, sixteen hundred times over. Whether the Internet gains anything from sixteen hundred more of them is not a matter of taste; the last batch was formally audited.<br>2. The defused audit<br>The 2012 case for expansion was written into ICANN’s bylaws as a testable claim: more competition, more consumer choice, and with a mandated review to test the outcome. The reviewers reported in 2018, and the table of contents of the report alone gives the verdict: partway through, they added whole chapters on DNS abuse, on costs to trademark holders, and on domain parking. The audit of competition and choice turned out to concern crime and emptiness, and who was compelled to pay for both. On the programme’s flagship safeguard, the report concluded that it “has made defensive registrations a less efficient means of protection”; on competition, the commissioned economics could find no constraint on legacy pricing. The benefit column, in ICANN’s own accounting, stayed blank.<br>The report carried an enforcement mechanism, on paper: prerequisite recommendations were to be implemented before any next round. Instead the ICANN board only accepted 6 of 35 “subject to costing and implementation considerations”, parked 17 in a newly invented “pending” status, and in July 2024 was still resolving the 4 that called for collecting pricing data. Six years after the auditors asked, the data needed to measure the programme’s first stated purpose, competition, remained ungathered. The audit of the round now under way has been scheduled with similar care: it begins only after the new round has been running for two years.<br>The market, meanwhile, returned its own verdict on competition: consolidation. A registry owes ICANN a $25,000 fixed fee before any operating cost. A zone of a few thousand names cannot carry that, so the 2012 additions became shelf stock. Donuts absorbed Rightside and Afilias to become Identity Digital; GoDaddy bought the portfolio containing .horse. Just ten registries now hold 90 per cent of all new-gTLD names, and the other 458 share the rest. The survivors’ economics are audited, unlike everything else...