Past gTLD disputes show applicants can win ICANN accountability rulings without obtaining the contested string, raising a critical question for 2026 applicants about whether expanded review mechanisms can deliver meaningful remedies.
The 15th Registration Operations Workshop convenes domain name and DNS professionals September 29 for technical sessions on mTLS, RPKI, DNS resilience, delegations, DNSSEC, registrar concentration, dispute proceedings and alternative naming systems.
Russia is imposing state identity verification on .su, the Soviet Union's surviving domain, as researchers uncover criminal infrastructure across the namespace and ICANN pursues a retirement process that could eventually remove it from the global root.
AI is becoming a gateway to the internet, but thousands of languages remain excluded. Closing the gap requires multilingual infrastructure, representative training data and policies that make linguistic inclusion a foundation of the AI era.
Fourteen years after ICANN's last gTLD expansion, registration figures offer an incomplete verdict. The next round will test whether applicants can build namespaces with enduring relevance, rather than merely generating impressive launch volumes and revenues.
Project Jake aims to bridge the divide between internet protocols and policy, offering registries, law enforcement and rights holders a decentralised framework for accessing domain-registration data securely while navigating privacy laws and institutional gridlock.
The push for open-weight AI promises broader access and competition, but true openness requires more than releasing model weights. Compute, infrastructure, training data, security, and control ultimately determine who can meaningfully benefit from open AI.
Research suggests criminals may control a striking share of newly registered gTLD domains, raising questions about whether ICANN's definitions, contractual safeguards and enforcement mechanisms are keeping pace with the industrial scale of technology-facilitated harm.
AFRINIC's proposed Constitution offers Africa's troubled internet registry a chance to turn years of litigation, disputed elections and institutional paralysis into durable governance, provided reforms constrain external capture, internal concentration and administrative overreach alike.
DNSSEC adoption is stronger than headline figures suggest, yet uneven across industries. New data indicate the bigger obstacle is not reputation but operational friction, especially key rollovers, registrar coordination and automation still missing across major domains.