question ICANN87: More Extensions to Sell, or Better APIs for AI Buyers?

[nicenicnicenic is verified member.]

At ICANN87 in Bali, registries and registrars are discussing the next new gTLD round. For the agent era, there's a business question behind the naming discussion.

New extensions would expand the catalogue. Better APIs could let agents compare prices, place registrations and manage DNS across the extensions already offered.

For registrars and resellers, which looks like the bigger opportunity: new AI-focused extensions, or making existing domains easier for agents to buy and manage?

 

[ElhagMousab]

I own a portfolio of a few hundred names rather than running a registrar, so I come at this from the buyer's side, and from that seat the API question matters far more in the short run than another batch of extensions. Every time I want to compare a price or move a name between registrars I still end up clicking through the same five control panels, doing the same lookups by hand. A lot of accounts still have no way to hand a scoped, revocable key to a tool that would do the registration for me, which is a real barrier if you are trying to build a checker for expiring names or a quick valuation before buying. New extensions mostly add catalogue depth, and after the last round we are not short of depth. If this round produces extensions with actual adoption stories I will be glad to see them, but I would trade half of them for one common way to search, price and transfer what already exists.