Domain Daily · 27 October 2026
The next new gTLD fight is shaping up to be the biggest one yet. Andrew Allemann at Domain Name Wire reports that .agent has drawn 13 applicants in the 2026 round, making it the most contested string on the table.
The list reads like a who’s who of the AI race: Google through Charleston Road Registry, Meta through Meta Registry Holdings, OpenAI through an entity called OPCO, LLC, Alibaba through Elegant Leader Limited, and EchoStar, Nano Labs, Identity Digital, Radix and XYZ.COM all in the mix too. There’s also Internet Land & Cattle LLC, which Andrew notes is run by Michael Ho of D3 as a separate venture, and a community applicant, Open Agent Registry, Inc., which will go through a Community Priority Evaluation. Andrew’s view is that the CPE is unlikely to succeed – that’s his opinion, not a settled outcome.
Contested strings go to auction, and Andrew thinks this one could clear $50 million, pointing back to Google’s $25 million win for .app in the last round as the benchmark. ICANN is due to say on 17 November whether any applicants have dropped out or swapped to a different string, so nothing is decided yet. Worth bookmarking.
.si keeps picking up registrars and sellers
The .si momentum I’ve flagged before hasn’t slowed down. TLD Investors reports that GoDaddy is now offering .si registrations, which puts one of the biggest registrars behind the extension alongside the marketplaces already pushing it.
NameBio’s daily sales report for 26 October listed two more .si trades: di.si at $9,838 through Sedo and specters.si at $6,488 through Atom.com. Both figures come from NameBio’s own listing and I haven’t checked them elsewhere, but the pattern of .si names clearing four and five figures through multiple venues is becoming hard to ignore.
On the speculative end, Mike Domainer posted that he keeps getting low offers for Neuralnet.si and asked what readers think a fair exit price should be. No sale here, just a domainer thinking out loud about pricing a name that leans on the AI and superintelligence angle.
And if you want more on the extension’s backstory, Domain Gang posted a link to the first edition of a new newsletter it’s running about .si, though the post itself didn’t say what’s in it.
Medicare.io Sells for $29,999
Domain.News posted that medicare.io sold for $29,999 through Afternic on 26 October, and NameBio’s own sales report for the same day lists the identical figure, so this is one price repeated by two separate trackers rather than one account echoing another. I couldn’t check the registry record myself, since .io domains don’t carry a public RDAP lookup. A health-insurance or health-tech buyer is the obvious fit for the name, though neither source named one.
Also on my radar
- UDRP watch: Domain Gang covered two new disputes: Arata.ai, where a 2024 registration ran into a newer AI startup of the same name, and BroscoConstruction.com, where the contractor argued the name simply came from his own surname.
- Sedo sale: No weekly Sedo report this week, but Domain Gang notes Sedo reported n8n.nl selling for 2,500 EUR.
- DropCatch auctions: Domain Gang’s roundup puts Tuesday’s results at $62,846 across roughly 250 domains, topped by OECDObserver.org at $8,472, with most of the rest selling for under $800.
- AI agents buying domains: Atom.com showed an AI agent completing a $1.80 domain purchase in USDC, built with Coinbase, with funds held until registration completes. Atom sells domains, so treat the framing accordingly, but the mechanism itself is worth watching.
Thirteen applicants for one string tells you where the money thinks the internet is heading. Are you more interested in how the .agent auction shakes out, or in how far .si can run before the buyers move on?
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