According to 1M AI News monitoring, a community comprising over 3,000 members (more than 700 companies and over 2,300 developers) is applying to ICANN for the .agent top-level domain (TLD). They advocate for this AI naming layer to be governed by the community, rather than being controlled by a single company. Privacy browser Brave has announced it has registered a .agent domain and joined the initiative. Other participants include Ollama, Datadog, Netlify, Sourcegraph, Alibaba Cloud, and Product Hunt, among others. The community believes that .agent for the AI Agent network is akin to DNS for the early internet: whoever controls the naming layer can decide which Agents are discoverable and which are blocked. The community governance model aims to ensure transparent registration policies, predictable pricing, and access rules that are not swayed by any single company's board of directors. ICANN's application window will open in late April 2026 and will last for 90 days. In contested TLD allocations, ICANN employs a 'Community Priority Evaluation' (CPE) mechanism. A third-party expert panel scores applications based on four dimensions: community size, relevance to the domain, registration policies, and community endorsement. The number and diversity of community members directly impact the bidding outcome.