Buried under the thousand-odd new domain extensions that ICANN published this month is a small governance fight with a long tail: two German city names are being sought as ordinary generic top-level domains, apparently without the cities' consent.
The 2026 application round is the first since 2012, and it is smaller than its predecessor. ICANN's Reveal Day on 7 October listed 1,615 active applications from 481 applicants. Of the 1,615 proposed strings, 263 are contested, drawing a total of 891 applications; the most popular, .agent, attracted a dozen bidders. Three hundred and thirty-three applications are for brand TLDs, according to registry reporting from the ICANN87 meeting in Bali — only six of those from German companies.
The rules distinguish between categories. Brand TLDs require a registered trademark. Community TLDs require documented support from the relevant group. And geographic TLDs — GeoTLDs — require the consent of the country or city whose name is at stake. That last requirement is where .muenchen and .frankfurt become interesting. Dirk Krischenowski, co-founder of dotBerlin, filed for both as general gTLDs.
Munich's press office says the digital ministry informed it "that a private company had applied for the use of the domain .muenchen as a 'normal' and not as a geoTLD". No approach had been made to the city's IT department, a spokesperson said, and the city has "no agreements about possible cooperation with the applicant". Munich added that because a city name is a GeoTLD under ICANN's own guidelines, its IT office is now working to have the application handled "in the correct (geoTLD) context". Frankfurt's press office had not answered when the German tech outlet heise published its report.
Krischenowski declined to comment until the confirmation phase closes, and ICANN's rules impose a silence period until 17 November, String Confirmation Day, when the final string list and updated contention sets are published. Applicants had until 21 October to switch to a pre-registered replacement string and avoid an auction.
The same applicant is involved in cleaner bids. dotBerlin, led by managing director Kathrin Ohlmer, has applied for .ber and .bln — .ber being the IATA code for Berlin Brandenburg airport, and, as the application notes, also an acronym for bit error rate and base encoding rules. Ohlmer is also involved in preparatory work for .bremen, which is intended as a proper GeoTLD.
Why the category matters is not bureaucratic tidiness. A GeoTLD hands a city a veto and, in practice, a say in how its name is run. A generic string does not. If a private operator wins .muenchen as a gTLD, it can sell second-level domains under it to anyone, and the city's only remedies would be a later objection or a trademark claim. That is a strange outcome for a string whose entire commercial value derives from being mistaken for the city.
The trust question is contested. Krischenowski argues in his Bremen application that internet users have spent 30 years with privately operated name spaces and extend no special trust to a geoTLD. ICANN's Governmental Advisory Committee disagrees in substance: it has warned that applications such as .passport, filed by entrepreneurs in Texas, or the contested .official, could prove problematic precisely because they look official. Governments can file objections individually or collectively until 16 March 2027, and a GAC consensus vote escalates to the ICANN board before any contract is signed.
The money explains why the round is smaller than 2012's. The application fee is $227,000, of which ICANN has said about $24,000 will be returned to applicants. A geographic review adds roughly $12,000, and LEMARIT, a registry provider, estimates operating costs around $60,000 a year — including $25,000 in annual ICANN fees plus escrow and infrastructure. Success is not permanent either: 130 brand TLDs from the 2012 round have since been removed from the DNS root zone at their owners' request, most of them quietly.
The practical timeline now runs through objections rather than applications. String confirmation on 17 November opens community and government input. Objections close in March. Auctions settle the rest. For Munich and Frankfurt, the near-term question is narrow — whether ICANN evaluates the two strings as geographic names — but the precedent is not. City names are one of the few parts of the namespace where the public has an obvious stake, and the 2026 round will show whether that stake can be traded away by whoever files first.
