ICANN will name who applied for 1,600-plus new top-level domains on October 7

Someone buying jitterbug.app at GoDaddy pays $27.99 ^[5]. Google's registry takes $14 of that as its wholesale price, and ICANN takes a 20-cent transaction fee ^[5]. GoDaddy keeps the remaining $13.79 ^[15]. The company that owns the extension collects about half of what the customer pays ^[16], and it collects again every year the name renews ^[13].

That renewal is the product a new extension sells. Owning a string makes a company a registry, selling names through registrars to everyone else ^[13]. At $14 wholesale, Google needs about 1.79 million domain-years of .app registrations to match its $25 million auction bid, before it spends anything on running the registry ^[17].

Teams pitching an application tend to point at Verisign and .com ^[6]. The user behaviour in Wired's account is plainer. Its picture of an internet that works is a person typing a name they already know. "You type in nike.com, you see the swoosh," Wired wrote ^[12]. The account does not include usage figures for new extensions, or explain how a company contests another party's application.

For anyone who did not file by August 12 ^[7], the apply side of the choice is closed. The gap between this round and the last was 14 years ^[14]. Wired wrote that "once someone else owns a string, you can't have it" ^[11].

What remains sorts on two questions. One is whether the string at stake is your brand name or a generic word for what you sell. The other is whether you filed.

- Filed, generic word: expect other bidders. In 2012 .app drew a dozen ^[4]. The useful work is settling a ceiling before the list goes public on October 7 ^[8]. - Filed, brand name: the October 7 list shows whether anyone else asked for the same string ^[8]. - Not filed, generic word: the winner becomes the registry selling names in your category, to your competitors as well as to you ^[13]. - Not filed, brand name: this is where reading the list matters most, because a rival's win would be permanent ^[11].

A team that did not file sits in the bottom row. I'd give the October 7 list one named owner and a review in the same week against the brand and category words the company depends on, since most applicants keep their plans secret until then ^[9]. The tradeoff is that defending means paying another company's registry about half the retail price of every name you hold ^[16], until ICANN opens a round it has not yet scheduled ^[10].