On 8 June, during ICANN86 in Seville, we at CORE attended a Brand Registry Group session that left a hard‑to‑ignore message: for many brands, the 2026 round may be the only realistic opportunity in more than a decade to secure their .brand. Several speakers agreed that the real driver this time is the fear of missing out. One of them, Stuart Fuller, openly described the central issue in many organisations as “the fear of missing out”: “We’ve waited 14 years to get to this point, and we don’t know when the next point will be; many companies are asking how they will explain to investors that they decided not to make a decision.”
Beyond FOMO, the tone in 2026 is very different from 2012. Back then, .brand was treated almost as a marketing experiment; today the conversation is about critical infrastructure, security and digital sovereignty. Matthew Crossman of Amazon described the current landscape as “a fairly mature space from a policy and governance perspective, but still a greenfield for innovation, “where the value lies in” a controlled, trusted namespace as a signal to customers, and to machines and agents.” In practice, some of the strongest implementations are behind the scenes: internal domains, APIs and backend services running under the .brand, far from traditional marketing spotlights.
Security was perhaps the most compelling angle. In an environment where AI is making phishing and fraud cheaper and more scalable, having a closed, authenticated TLD becomes a structural layer of defence. Crews Gore of FOX explained how .fox allowed them to avoid paying more than USD 5,000 per year for a three‑letter domain in a commercial TLD, but above all how they use .fox links in internal email so that the security team can apply a simple rule: what comes from .fox is trusted, everything else is scrutinised. Nisha Parkash, who manages .sky, went further, pointing out that in today’s climate of C‑suite impersonation, one of the best use cases is email: if the CEO writes from ceo.brand, it “can only be” that controlled environment.
There is also a very concrete financial and operational argument: saving money and managing the digital footprint more efficiently. Parkash described how Sky now finds it “almost impossible” to acquire certain generic .coms at prices of USD 30,000–40,000 each, whereas under .sky they can register generic terms aligned with their brands without entering that arms race. Fuller highlighted another smart use case: branded URL shorteners. Instead of relying on generic services like bit.ly, companies such as Zara use formats like go.zara, so every short link doubles as a trust signal and a branding asset. FOX does something similar with go.fox on‑air, reinforcing the idea that when a link ends in .brand, the brand controls the entire user journey.
For companies anxious about not having the “perfect use case” defined yet, Parkash summed up Sky’s experience with a phrase that was repeated more than once in the room: “Say yes and figure it out later.” It took Sky four years to get .sky truly off the ground, but if they hadn’t applied in 2012, they would now have no way to redesign their digital landscape or to stop chasing increasingly unattainable .com domains. Her message to hesitant brands was clear: missing the round also means missing the ability to shape how your online identity and digital sovereignty will evolve over the coming years.
At the same time, several speakers reminded everyone that the administrative window is short and the internal process complex: securing buy‑in, approving budgets, onboarding ICANN as a vendor and choosing an RSP and legal advisers all have to happen in weeks, not months. That is why, rather than a last‑minute impulse, what was advocated in Seville was a strategic, conscious decision: to see .brand not as a marketing luxury, but as a long‑term investment in security, control of the digital footprint and preparedness for an Internet increasingly mediated by AI agents. In that light, the real risk for a strong brand is no longer applying for a .brand and taking time to activate it, but reaching August 2026 without a decision—and discovering that, for all practical purposes, the door will not open again.
