ICANN considers lifting ban on .home, .mail and .corp domains

Recent news suggests that the International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is considering lifting the ban on the generic top-level domains (gTLDs) of .home, .mail, and .corp, a move based on the recommendations of an expert panel. These domains had sparked a heated controversy during an application round in 2012, and in 2018, they had been put on hold due to name conflict concerns.

The risk of name clashes is a situation where top-level domains in the public DNS conflict with domains that are widely used in private networks. More than 20 applications for these three domains were initially placed on hold before being rejected outright in 2018.

Although these domains do not exist, they receive more than 100 million queries per day at the DNS root, which could lead to the risk of data corruption or theft of sensitive information if authorized.

However, ICANN has been advised to go beyond the number of domain name conflicts when rejecting top-level domains, and to propose a more detailed "Domain Name Conflict Risk Assessment Process" for .home, .mail and .corp.

The recommendations come from the recently released final report of the Name Conflict Analysis Project Discussion Group, which has been working on name conflict issues for the past four years.

The report suggests that ICANN should create a list of high-risk string conflicts for new gTLD applicants, but it does not propose actively banning strings through a "not applicable" list. The report notes that determining risk and impact based solely on the volume of queries is complicated by the complexity and variety of query sources for these TLDs.

.corp is likely to be relatively easy to unban because most queries to the domain are due to a "globally dominant software package" produced by Microsoft that uses .corp by default, while .home is more complex because it is subject to spoofed traffic from a variety of sources.

Similarly, .mail can be safely authorized. The report notes that at least six TLDs with more query traffic were subsequently authorized, while the number of real-time deployment conflicts reported was very low.

The report does not ban any strings, but proposes a new framework for name conflict risk assessment.

Under the framework, a new technical review team would be tasked with testing every gTLD application that is not already considered a high conflict risk and placing the high-risk gTLDs into a list of conflicting strings that essentially ban strings.

This would represent a significant change to the current system, under which gTLDs can only be authorized after a contract has been signed with a registry administrator. Implementing the proposals will obviously take some time, but is unlikely to delay the next application window, which opens in the second quarter of 2026.

The new recommendations mean that the gTLDs .home, .mail, and .corp will likely be back in the spotlight in the next round, which will be good news for applicants who have bundled in $185,000 in application fees before ICANN's final decision. These domains were banned in 2018 and full refunds are being offered.

There were seven applicants for .mail, six for .corp and a whopping 11 for .home, including GoDaddy, Google, Amazon and Identity Digital.

According to ICANN's website, Google never actually withdrew its applications for .home, .corp and .mail, and Amazon never withdrew its application for .mail. If this is accurate, it could lead to some interesting controversy ahead of the 2026 application round.

Source: domainincite