233 New gTLD Application Questions - Now What?

ICANN has increased the number of questions in the New gTLD Applicant Guidebook fourfold.  Seems a little intimidating.  The last round of the New gTLD program has 50 questions in the application.  The Next Round Application, scheduled to open in April 2026 has 233 questions.  Is the New gTLD Next Round Application four times more complicated than the last?  Let’s look at the data. 

The prior round 50 questions could be broken up into four topics: Applicant-Related, String-Related, Technical & Operational and Financial.

This round has 233 questions, which, if segmented similarly result in the following comparison graph.

Let’s break down the four topics and understand how the questions have changed.

Applicant-Related:  These questions increased tenfold from 12 to 114.  However, the content required is much the same.  ICANN has simply broken out the administrative information into much more granular questions.  As an example, in the Prior Round, administrative information such as address was buried within the question.  Whereas in the Next round, each address has six individual questions (address 1, address 2, locality, region, postal code, country code) and there are six addresses requested for 36 address questions.  Similarly, other administrative content has been requested in more granular format, but the data requested is still similar.  The goal is gain enough information for ICANN to perform background checks and due diligence on the applicant’s viability to be a registry operator of Internet critical infrastructure.

String-Related: These questions have increased eightfold from 10 to 82.   Here there is a real difference in the focus of the questions.  In the Prior round, the questions were more open-ended descriptive narrative and there were only 4 TLD types: generic, community, geographic and brand. This round there are still those four TLD types plus a replacement string as well as four additional variant strings related to the applied-for sting and the replacement string. It can get a little confusing. The Next Round questions are more focused on identifying the contractual obligations that will be relevant to your applied-for string.  These include the Public Interest Commitments (PIC) and the Registry Voluntary Commitments (RVC).

Technical & Operational: These questions have reduced over 75% from 22 to 5.  The primary reason for the substantial reduction is due to ICANN’s new Registry Service Provider (RSP) program.  The technical questions which were a major part of the prior round have been removed and replaced with three questions related to whom is the pre-approved RSP that the applicant has selected.  This simplifies the technical questions substantially.  There are still two operational questions around security and DNS abuse that the applicant will need to answer.

Financial: These questions have increased fivefold from 6 to 32.  The primary reason for the increase is that ICANN has defined four different applicant financial profiles:  Government, Registry Operator, Public Company (AKA: Top 25), and All Others (AKA: Standard).  Depending upon your financial profile, your financial data submission varies.  You only provide data for the profile that is relevant to your business.  The questions still require complete and audited financial statements for the most recently closed year.  ICANN has again provided scenario templates for Most Likely and Worst Case as well as Risk Analysis and domain sales projections however the new templates are much simplified over the prior round templates.  Applicants should still develop multi-year pro-forma financial models for their registries to then feed accurate data into the ICANN templates.   Another change is that an applicant who is applying for more than one New gTLD, their financial answers must include the data for all their applications in aggregate. The prior round had individual projections per application whereas this round has projections per applicant. 

Hope this helps to explain the differences.  Please reach out if you are interested in applying for a New gTLD in the Next Round.  I look forward to our conversation.