I'll admit something up front. In almost twenty years of buying and selling domains, I've never seriously thought about owning the other side of the dot. Registries always felt like a different universe. Verisign and the big infrastructure players. Not something a guy flipping names out of Chicago needed to understand beyond renewal pricing.
Joe Alagna and Andrey Insarov wrote a book that made me question that a little.
How to Get Your Own Top Level Domain: Understand ICANN, the Process, and the Caveats is exactly what the title says it is. A plain-language walkthrough of what it takes to apply for and actually run your own TLD when ICANN opens the next application round in 2026. We're talking about the extension itself here, the part after the dot.
If anyone's qualified to write this, it's these two. Alagna has been around the industry longer than most of us, and he helped write over sixty successful gTLD applications in the 2012 round, including names you know like .xyz and .app. Insarov runs it.com Domains, a registry with over 100,000 names under management. They've both lived this from the inside, and it shows. This isn't theory.
The best thing about the book is that it exists at all. Before this, your options for understanding the process were basically ICANN's Applicant Guidebook, which reads like it was written by a committee of lawyers who bill by the comma, or expensive consultants who'd rather you stay confused. The authors even say the quiet part in their own marketing: plenty of insiders would prefer this stuff stay buried. Why invite competition?
I've got a soft spot for anyone willing to open the curtains like that.
Now, the caveats, and the book is honest about them. This is not a cheap hobby. Application fees alone run well into six figures, and that's before the legal fees and backend contracts start piling up. There's also a very real chance you end up in a contention auction against someone with deeper pockets. The 2012 round chewed up plenty of applicants who had the money and still got burned. Anyone can tell you a TLD costs a lot. The useful part of this book is knowing where the bodies from the last round are buried, and these guys clearly walked past a few of them.
Is this book for the average domain investor? Probably not directly. Most of us aren't writing a check that size, and I'm certainly not. But I found it useful anyway. The registry layer shapes everything we do downstream. It helps to know how extensions get born and why some of them rot on the shelf. Operators are optimizing for things most investors never think about, and once you see that, it changes how you look at the second-level names we all trade in.
And there's a certain kind of reader, a brand, a well-funded founder, maybe a government, for whom this book might be the difference between a smart application and a very expensive education.
The writing is clear and it doesn't pad itself out to look impressive, which I appreciate in an industry book more than I can say.
I'm not applying for a TLD. But I understand the game now, and I keep catching myself thinking about it anyway. Which is probably how these things start. Although, dot sully rolls off the tongue. Don't you think?
If you want a copy, it's on Amazon here. Full disclosure, that's an affiliate link. If you buy through it, Amazon sends me somewhere around a dollar and change. I've got four kids with student loans, so split evenly that's about 34 cents per kid, or roughly 0.0003 percent of the total damage. By my math we'll have those cleared sometime around the year 5000, so honestly, every click counts.