As part of the preparation work for the next application round, ICANN has been considering the thorny, and very controversial issue of contention sets. In a letter to the GNSO, ICANN Chair Tripti Sinha stated that the board had agreed on three principles on how contents could be dealt with once the application round has closed in mid 2026. These principles were discussed and agreed upon at an ICANN Board workshop earlier in September and are:
- No private contention resolutions – This means no private auctions, one of the most talked about aspects in the planning for Round 2.
- The ability to submit alternative strings – Applicants will be permitted to submit one (or more) alternative strings at the time of the application, which would allow the applicant the opportunity to choose a different string to avoid contention. However, the timing of when this decision could be made is still unclear.
- The continued use of the 2012 round ascending clock second-price auction method – Where contention sets are decided by auction, the ICANN public auction method would again be the ascending clock, where the winning bidder pays the second highest bid for the TLD.
These principles are more likely to impact generic or open TLD applications rather than any dotBrand applications where contention was in round 1 restricted to a single TLD (.Merck) but it does provide a mechanism for how any future cases will be handled.
The debate on these three, and other aspects, of contention will continue to be debated but it is a positive sign that the community is moving in the right direction towards finalising the detail before the 2026 application window opens.