Now that ICANN has released the list of applications for its 2026 New gTLD Program, what should trademark owners do? Fourteen years ago, I published a list of the “10 Things Trademark Owners Should Do on ICANN's Domain Name 'Reveal Day',” when ICANN unveiled applications for its first round of domain-name expansion. Remarkably, very little has changed since that time! In fact, I think most of my advice then still applies today. While I encourage trademark owners and others to review my 2012 blog post, I’ll focus on just three things that I recommend now.

ICANN reports that it received more than 1,600 primary applications for new gTLDs! Despite the large number of applications, this doesn't mean we will actually see more than 1,600 new top-level domain names. Among other things, there are likely numerous applications for the same TLDs, so many applications will be subject to dispute processes for string confusion objections, as well as legal rights objections.

The number of decisions under the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP), as well as the number of domain names in those cases, each rose more than 11 percent year-over-year in the second quarter of 2026, according to data from GigaLaw’s Domain Dispute Digest.

I recently filed one of the earliest complaints under WIPO’s “expedited” process for the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP), and it worked exactly as advertised: I received a winning decision for my client in only 26 days.

The World Intellectual Property Organization's Arbitration and Mediation Centre (WIPO) — well-known as the leading provider of domain name dispute services, including under the popular Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) — will soon take over responsibility for the “administrative and backend processes” of Nominet’s Dispute Resolution Service (DRS) for .uk domain names, both organizations have announced.

The number of decisions under the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) jumped nearly 15 percent in the first quarter of 2026 – and, the number of domain names in those decisions skyrocketed more than 41 percent, the biggest increase since GigaLaw started tracking UDRP cases six years ago.

The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) has announced a significant step to shorten the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) process in some cases, without short-circuiting any of the protections available to domain name registrants. WIPO refers to its solution as “expedited case processing.” In short, if a trademark owner is willing to pay a higher filing fee, WIPO says that a case “will be managed by a dedicated team and decided by a special roster of panelists” and that it will “commit to decision delivery in one-month from start to finish in UDRP cases.”

Data in the newest issue (Q4 2025) of GigaLaw’s Domain Dispute Digest show shows that the number of decisions across all five service providers for the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) decreased (very slightly) slightly in 2025.

The number of decisions under the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) rose 9.89 percent in the third quarter of 2025, from the same period a year ago, according to data in the newest issue of GigaLaw’s Domain Dispute Digest.

Although it sometimes seems like it receives a lot of attention, Reverse Domain Name Hijacking (RDNH) is a very uncommon finding in domain name dispute cases. Across all service providers under the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP), panels in only 1.3 percent of decisions issued a finding of RDNH in the second quarter of 2025.