The Web’s Address Book Is About to Get a Lot Stranger
The internet’s naming system – the invisible architecture that turns a typed address into a loaded webpage – is on the verge of its largest expansion in years. Hundreds of new top-level domains are working through the approval pipeline at ICANN, the nonprofit organization responsible for coordinating the global domain name system, and the list includes entries that range from the commercially logical to the genuinely absurd. Among the candidates: .meow and .fart.
WIRED’s reporting takes readers inside the procedural and political machinery at ICANN, where the decisions about which domains get added to the internet’s root zone are made through a process that is far messier, and far more politically charged, than most internet users would expect from what sounds like a technical committee doing technical work.
This is not a minor footnote in web history.
What ICANN Actually Does – and Why It Matters Here
ICANN – the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers – functions as the gatekeeper for top-level domains, the suffixes that appear after the final dot in any web address. The familiar ones, .com, .org, .net, have been part of the internet so long they feel like natural features of the landscape rather than deliberate decisions. They were deliberate decisions, made by a specific organization with a specific process, and that same process is now deciding whether .fart deserves a place alongside them.
The organization opened a previous application round in 2012, which produced domains like .guru, .pizza, and hundreds of others that have since settled into varying degrees of actual use. Some became legitimate business tools. Many became speculative holdings that never developed into anything. The upcoming round represents a continuation of that expansion, with the added wrinkle that internet culture has shifted considerably since 2012 – meaning the pool of applicants now includes people with entirely different ideas about what a domain suffix could or should express.
The backroom dynamics WIRED describes are not incidental to the story – they are the story. ICANN’s internal deliberations involve competing financial interests, jurisdictional arguments, brand protection claims from large corporations, and genuine philosophical disagreements about who the internet’s naming system is actually for. A domain like .meow might read as a joke, but the application process behind it is expensive, bureaucratic, and intensely contested. Filing an application alone costs tens of thousands of dollars, which means the people pursuing novelty domains are doing so with real money and real intent.
Cats, Pornography, and the Shape of What’s Coming
The Wired headline’s reference to cats and pornography is pointed. Both categories have historically driven enormous volumes of internet traffic, shaped platform policies, and influenced infrastructure decisions in ways that more respectable content categories have not. The suggestion that the web is about to get “cattier and pornier” is a way of acknowledging that the new domain expansion will likely cater to the internet’s actual appetites rather than its aspirational self-image. .Meow speaks to one end of that spectrum. The inclusion of adult content domains – a category ICANN has debated for years – speaks to the other.
Adult content domains have their own complicated history within ICANN’s processes. The idea of a dedicated top-level domain for explicit material – which would theoretically make content filtering easier for parents and institutions – has been proposed, debated, shelved, and revived across multiple policy cycles. Whether the current round resolves that debate in any definitive direction is part of what makes the upcoming decisions consequential beyond the novelty of individual domain names.
The sheer volume of incoming domains also creates a practical question for businesses, registrars, and ordinary users: what happens to brand protection, trademark enforcement, and consumer trust when the namespace expands by hundreds of new suffixes? Companies that have spent years securing their names across dozens of extensions will face a new wave of potential conflicts. Squatters and speculators are already paying attention. The internet’s informal communities – built around shared interests as niche as dog ownership – stand to gain their own corners of the namespace for the first time, assuming they can afford the application fees and survive the process.
The Organization Nobody Thinks About Until Something Goes Wrong
ICANN occupies an unusual position in internet governance. It is technically a nonprofit, incorporated in California, but it exercises authority over a genuinely global resource – the domain name system – with no clear democratic mandate and a governance structure that has drawn criticism from governments, civil society groups, and industry players alike. Its decisions about top-level domains are not purely technical rulings. They carry economic consequences for registrars who sell domains, for businesses that depend on predictable namespace stability, and for the broader ecosystem of companies built around domain registration and management. The addition of .meow to the root zone sounds trivial. The process required to get it there, and the fights happening inside that process right now, are anything but.
What WIRED’s reporting surfaces is a reminder that the internet’s infrastructure – even the parts that seem most arbitrary – is governed by human institutions with human failings. The same organization deciding whether .fart gets approved is also making decisions about country-code domains, disputes between governments over territorial claims expressed through domain suffixes, and the question of who can challenge an approved domain after the fact and on what grounds. The whimsical and the weighty move through the same pipeline.
Hundreds of new top-level domains could reach the internet within the next few years if ICANN’s process moves at its current pace. Some will find genuine use cases. Some will become collector’s items in the speculative domain market. And some – the ones that made it into the Wired headline – will exist primarily because someone with tens of thousands of dollars and a strong opinion about cats decided the internet needed one more place to put them. Whether ICANN’s famously slow and contested process will actually deliver all of them, or stall on the ones that generate the most argument, is the question that people inside that room are already fighting about.
