# Geographic names: what the DNS learned, and onchain > City, region and country names were among the most contested strings in the DNS. The questions they raised return onchain, without the process. Source: https://hush.partners/geographic-names-lessons-from-the-dns Category: Market & ICANN Published by Hush Partners. --- A city name is not a brand name. No single entity invented it, registered it first, or holds a certificate for it. It belongs, in some sense, to the people who live under it, to the authority that governs it, to the businesses that trade on its reputation, and to anyone who has ever spoken it. That diffuse, layered ownership is what makes a place name so contested at the top level of a naming system, whether that system is the DNS or an onchain registry. The Domain Name System spent years working out what to do with geographic strings. ICANN built review panels, asked for letters of support from governments, and reserved entire categories of names. The process was slow and expensive. It was also a careful mapping of a hard problem: how to assign a name to one party when no party owns it and many parties have a legitimate claim. Onchain TLD registries did not inherit those rules. A place name can be registered there without any of that review. This article traces what the DNS learned, explains who the real claimants are, and gives a public authority or a TLD holder the grounding needed to act, or to pause, with a clear view of the stakes.
1,616applications going forward in the 2026 ICANN round
USD 227,000what ICANN expects to charge to evaluate one application, advisers and registry operations not included
Noneannual renewal fee on a Freename TLD

Sources: the trade press for the count of applications, ICANN's new gTLD program pages for the evaluation fee, the Freename registry for the renewal fee.

## Why place names are different from brand names A brand name is created deliberately, usually by a legal entity that then registers it as a trademark in one or more jurisdictions. That registration creates a bounded, documented right. When a dispute arises over a brand at the top level of a naming system, the trademark certificate is a starting point. It does not resolve every question, because trademark rights are territorial while a TLD is global, but it gives the claimant standing and gives a decision-maker a reference point. A place name has none of that structure. It predates any company. It appears on official maps, in the names of government departments, in the titles of sports teams, and in the marketing copy of every hotel and airline that serves the area. The name has been used by so many parties for so long that exclusive ownership is not a coherent legal concept in most systems of law. This distinction has practical consequences. A [trademark TLD](/trademark-tlds) is, at bottom, a question of who holds the mark. A geographic TLD is a question of governance: who speaks for a place, and on what authority? Those are political and constitutional questions as much as legal ones, and they do not have tidy answers. The DNS learned this early. Every time a geographic string came up for consideration, the process surfaced the same underlying problem: the string was meaningful, valuable, and unclaimed in any legally clean sense. The answer the DNS arrived at was not to assign ownership but to require consent, and to require it from the right parties. ## Who claims a place name: a map of interests The table below organizes the main categories of claimant for a place-name TLD. Every real situation adds local complexity, but the structure holds across most geographies. | Claimant | Basis of interest | What they bring | What they cannot do alone | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | National or regional government | Authority over the territory | Formal support or objection | Run a namespace day to day | | Municipal authority | Direct governance of the place | Legitimacy, policy, local rules | Settle a conflict with another level of government | | Tourism or promotion body | Mandate to promote the place | Deployment, local partners | Grant or withhold legal rights | | Local businesses | Use of the place name in trade | Registrants, the economic case | Claim exclusivity against other traders | | Residents and civil society | Identity and reputation | Public voice, political pressure | Create enforceable rights at the TLD level | No single row holds a clean, exclusive right to the string. That is the structural reason why place-name TLDs are harder than brand TLDs, and why the DNS ended up with a consent process for them instead of plain first-come, first-served registration. ### Authorities rarely speak with one voice It is tempting to treat "the government" as one claimant. In practice, a place usually sits under several layers of public authority, and each can reasonably say the name is its business. A city council governs the place directly. A regional government may fund its promotion. A national ministry may consider any name tied to its territory a matter of national interest. These bodies do not always agree, and the rules for settling a disagreement between them vary by country. ### Businesses use the name without owning it A hotel, a guide company, a food producer or a sports club may have used the place name in trade for generations. In many countries, trademark law limits how far a purely geographic term can be monopolized by one trader, precisely so that others in the same place can keep describing where they are. The result is a large group of parties with a real commercial interest in the name and no exclusive right to it. They are the natural registrants of names under a place-name TLD, which is why their view of it matters. ### Residents have a stake but no instrument Residents do not file applications or hold registrations in the name of the place. Their stake is identity and reputation: what the name is associated with, and who profits from it. They act through elected bodies, the press and civil society. A project that ignores them can be legally sound and still fail in public. ## How the DNS came to treat geographic strings The DNS did not start with a theory of place names. It arrived at its rules through successive application rounds for new generic top-level domains, each prepared over years of policy work in which governments took an active part. What follows is an outline. The detailed rules belong to each round and are published by ICANN. ### Country names were set apart The clearest rule concerned countries. Strings that stand for a country or territory were kept out of the open application process for generic TLDs. Countries already have their own two-letter country-code TLDs, run under local arrangements, and the full names of countries were treated as too sensitive to hand to a private applicant through a commercial process. ### City and regional names required consent Below the level of countries, the treatment was graduated. An application for a string that named a capital city, a region or, in defined cases, another city had to come with documented support, or at least a statement of non-objection, from the relevant government or public authority. A dedicated panel reviewed whether an applied-for string was a geographic name under the rules and whether the supporting documents were genuine and came from a body competent to give them. The wording matters. "Support" means the authority backs the project. "Non-objection" means only that it does not stand in the way. The DNS accepted either, which tells you what the rule was for: it was not designed to make governments into registry operators, only to make sure none of them was surprised. For city names, intended use carried weight too. Many city names are also ordinary words, family names or brand names. An applicant who intended to use such a string for purposes tied to the city fell under the consent requirement; one who intended an unrelated use could argue that it did not apply. The same string could therefore be treated differently depending on what the applicant said it was for. ### Governments kept a voice throughout Governments take part in ICANN through an advisory committee. During an application round, its members could signal concern about a specific application early, before evaluation had gone far, and the committee could later give formal advice on it. An applicant facing such a signal had a choice: address the concern, change the project, or withdraw. The round that ICANN opened in 2026, the first in more than a decade, again treats geographic names as a category that calls for particular care. It is a large exercise: the trade press reports 1,616 applications going forward, and ICANN's new gTLD program pages put the expected evaluation fee at USD 227,000 per application, before advisers and registry operations. Applicants in that process accept its review as part of the cost. The lesson from this history is that the rules never resolved who owns a place name. They resolved who must consent before someone else can operate it at the top level of the DNS. Those are different questions, and the distinction matters when the conversation moves onchain. ## City TLDs in the DNS: what the experience showed The experience of city TLDs in the DNS was instructive in ways that went beyond the formal rules. Four patterns stand out, stated here in general terms. First, the consent requirement shifted negotiating power. An applicant who had invested in a technical and financial case could find the whole application blocked or complicated by a single letter, or by the absence of one. The authority might have no capacity to run a TLD itself and no plan for the namespace, but it held a functional veto. Applicants who understood this spoke to the authority before anything else, and the stronger projects were often partnerships in which the authority set policy and a specialist ran the registry. Second, more than one applicant could want the same string. Where competing applicants each held some form of support, from different levels of government or from different bodies claiming to represent the same community, resolving the contention was complex. The paperwork showed that someone with authority had agreed. It could not always show which authority should prevail. Third, the intended use of the TLD mattered. An applicant who proposed an open commercial registry under a city name faced different scrutiny from one proposing a tightly governed community namespace. The process rewarded specificity about intended use, even though commitments made in an application are harder to hold a registry to years later. Fourth, a delegated city TLD does not automatically become a thriving namespace. Governance structures that look coherent on paper can prove difficult to sustain. Coalitions formed to support an application can loosen once the application has succeeded. Running a geographic namespace, with the political sensitivity attached to every decision about who may register names and on what terms, is more demanding than the application suggests. There is a fifth, quieter lesson. Where a city TLD worked, it was usually because local businesses, institutions and residents found a use for names under it, not because the string itself was prestigious. The name of the place opened the door. What was built behind it decided the outcome. These lessons apply to anyone considering a place-name TLD, in the DNS or onchain. ## Onchain: the same strings, registered without that process Onchain TLD registries operate on a different model. On Freename, for example, a TLD is recorded onchain as a token held in a wallet, there is no annual renewal fee on it, and only the holder of the TLD can issue names under it. Registration does not pass through a geographic names panel, a requirement for a letter from a government, or an advisory committee of governments. This means that a string corresponding to a city or a region can be registered onchain without notice to any public authority and without any review of the registrant's relationship to the place. For a place-name string, as for any other, the registry record is public: a block explorer, which is a website displaying the contents of a blockchain, lets anyone check it. Whoever holds the token holds the TLD. The absence of gatekeeping cuts both ways. For a body with a legitimate connection to a place name, such as a tourism board, a municipal authority or a regional government, there is no application round to wait for and no evaluation fee on the scale of ICANN's. But the same openness applies to everyone else, so the string may already be held by a party with no connection to the place. And the DNS-style review that would have tested that party's standing does not exist onchain. It helps to be exact about what this does and does not change. Even in the DNS, the idea that a geographic name "belongs" to a community and should not be assigned without its authorization was hard to apply: national interests stop at borders, and many names have several legitimate uses at once. Onchain, no review applies that idea at all. That is not a judgment on the registries. It is a different design, built for open registration, and it places the work of care on the parties themselves. The reach of an onchain TLD is also different. Onchain names resolve outside the ICANN DNS root, so an ordinary browser does not open them without support, and coverage across wallets and browsers is partial and changes. A place-name TLD onchain is therefore not a rival to a city TLD in the DNS in terms of everyday visibility. For general public reach, the DNS is simply better. The sensitivity of the name, however, does not depend on how widely it resolves. ## For a public authority: options and sensitivities A public authority considering a place-name TLD onchain faces questions that have no close parallel in ordinary domain name practice. Some are legal, some are political, some are operational. ### Who has the mandate The legal questions begin with authority. Which body has the mandate to act on behalf of the place: a national ministry, a regional government, a municipal council, a promotion agency? In many countries the answer is not obvious. A tourism body may have the operational capacity but not the standing. A municipal authority may have the legitimacy but not the budget. A national ministry may have both, along with many competing priorities. Getting the mandate question wrong at the start creates problems that compound through every later decision. Holding a token is also new ground for most public bodies. Someone must decide which wallet holds it, who controls that wallet, and how control passes when staff change. A multisignature wallet, which needs several approvals before anything moves, is one common way to avoid dependence on a single person. Whether public procurement, asset or records rules apply to the token is a question for the authority's own counsel. ### How it will be received The political questions concern public perception. A place name carries meaning for residents, businesses and the communities abroad that keep a connection to the territory. A decision to hold a place name as a TLD, and to operate it as a namespace where names are sold, can attract scrutiny that a routine infrastructure decision would not. The framing matters. A namespace presented as a public utility for residents and local businesses is received differently from one presented mainly as a revenue source. ### What it will be used for The operational questions concern what the TLD will actually do. Names under an onchain TLD can receive payments in supporting wallets and can carry websites, among other uses. The [capabilities that are live](/whats-live) are documented with their sources, and so are their limits. An authority that holds a place-name TLD and does nothing with it has a record on a blockchain, no public benefit, and an awkward answer when someone asks what it was for. The sensible path is to treat the matter as an infrastructure decision, not a branding exercise. That means deciding in advance what the namespace is for, who will administer it, on what terms names will be issued, and who is accountable for it. Doing nothing is also a legitimate option. An authority can conclude that an onchain namespace is not a priority, record that conclusion, and revisit it later. What matters is that the choice is made knowingly and not by default. If the TLD is already held by another party, the options change. The authority can check the public record, consider whether the string is in use, take advice on whether any law in its own country bears on the situation, and decide whether an acquisition makes sense. Where it does, a [buy-side acquisition](/buy-side-acquisition) mandate exists for that case: the organization mandates the desk to find and approach the holder on its behalf. ## For a holder: why this is a slow, careful sale A holder of a place-name TLD is in a structurally different position from a holder of a TLD that matches a brand. The difference lies in who the likely buyer is, and also in the pace and character of any negotiation. A TLD such as `.yourbrand` is most valuable to the organization whose brand it reflects. That organization either wants it or does not. The conversation is bilateral and the logic is reasonably clear: the TLD matches the brand, the brand has a legal team, and the questions are price and process. A private valuation gives the holder a realistic starting point. A place-name TLD can interest many parties with very different intentions. A tourism body may see a public namespace. A property developer may see a marketing asset. A technology company may see a neutral namespace for local services. Each has a different sense of what the string is worth, a different tolerance for public scrutiny, and a different view of governance. Not all of them are equally acceptable to the place itself, and a sale to a buyer the local authority later contests can follow the holder's reputation. Public buyers also move at their own pace. A public authority cannot usually commit funds on the word of one official. It may need a budget line, a committee decision, a legal opinion on whether it may hold a token at all, and sometimes a procurement process. None of this is a sign of bad faith. It is how public money is spent, and a holder who expects a commercial timetable will be disappointed. This is why a [sell-side mandate](/sell-side-mandates) for a place-name TLD tends to take longer than one for a brand TLD. The holder's main task is to avoid creating political noise before the parties understand each other. An unprepared approach to a public authority, a public advertisement of the TLD for sale, or parallel conversations with several parties can each create complications that take longer to resolve than the transaction itself. Discretion here is a practical necessity, not only a courtesy. It is equally important that discretion never becomes pressure. A holder who presents the sale to an authority as a problem that will grow unless it pays has misread the situation and will likely end the conversation. The useful posture is the opposite: here is the string, here is the public record, here is what it could do for the place, and there is no deadline. ## Good practice on both sides Good practice for a public authority and good practice for a holder converge on the same principles, even though their starting positions differ. **Know what is being acquired or sold.** A place-name TLD is not self-evidently more or less valuable than a brand TLD. Its value depends on the string, the depth of association between the string and the place, the number of plausible registrants, and the governance model the operator intends to run. A valuation that ignores the political and governance dimensions of a geographic name is incomplete. **Map the interested parties before you move.** For a public authority, this means identifying the bodies with a legitimate interest in the namespace and deciding how their interests will be reflected, either in the governance of the TLD or in a formal record that they were consulted. For a holder, it means understanding who the plausible acquirers are and which of them could take on the name without provoking a public dispute. **Separate holding the TLD from operating it.** Holding the token secures control of the string. It does not commit anyone to a particular use. Governance takes longer to design than a transfer takes to execute, and the two should not be forced into the same timetable. A draft launch roadmap prepared before closing gives an acquiring authority a clearer picture of what it is taking on. **Document what the transfer does not carry.** An onchain transfer of a TLD moves operational control of the namespace. It is not, by itself, a transfer of any intellectual property, license or governance obligation. The documents that accompany the closing need to address those points explicitly, and they are for the parties' own counsel to draft. **Allow time for political process.** An authority that wants a place-name TLD should expect its internal approvals to take longer than the technical side of the transaction. Both sides are better served by a timetable that admits this from the start than by one that assumes a commercial pace and slips. **Think as an operator from the start.** The long-term value of a place-name TLD lies in the names issued under it, not in the token. The governance model, the pricing of names, the categories of registrant that are welcome, and the way disputes over names are handled all decide whether the namespace becomes useful. The page for [operators](/operators) describes that way of working. On Freename, the registry's royalty program gives the holder of a TLD a share of each registration fee for names registered under it, advertised at up to half, subject to the registry's current terms and activation conditions. The absence of a renewal fee does not extend to that program: taking part carries an annual cost set by the registry. Some TLDs were registered under earlier terms that include the program for life, and whether those terms pass to an acquiring authority is something to confirm with the registry before closing. That makes the choice of who may register, and at what price, a question of public policy as much as of revenue. ## Closing a transfer and what must be written outside it The technical closing of an onchain TLD transfer follows the same path whether the string is a brand name or a place name. The TLD moves from the seller's wallet to the buyer's wallet through onchain escrow on an aftermarket. For a file handled by Hush Partners, the private desk for onchain TLDs that publishes this Journal, that is Freename's aftermarket by default, or another marketplace such as OpenSea if the client prefers. The registry record then shows the new holder, and anyone can check it on a block explorer. What differs for a place-name TLD is the documentation that surrounds that technical event. The parties should agree in writing on the intended use of the namespace, the governance commitments the new operator will uphold, and the way names will be issued. Those agreements sit outside the blockchain and depend on ordinary contract law in the country that applies, which is again a matter for counsel. On the desk's side, every exchange is covered by a standard mutual NDA, and one named partner follows a file from first note to closing. For a place name, where an early leak can turn a negotiation into a public argument, that continuity matters more than usual. The page on [escrow and transfer](/escrow-and-transfer) describes the onchain side of closing, and [post-transfer activation](/post-transfer-activation) covers putting a TLD to work afterwards. For a public authority taking on a namespace for the first time, defining the registration policy and bringing the first local registrants in is often more work than the acquisition itself. The next step depends on where you stand. If you act for a public authority, establish which body has the mandate, check the public registry record for the string, and take your counsel's view before speaking to anyone outside. If you hold a place-name TLD, write down who the legitimate claimants to the name are and what a responsible buyer would need to see, before any approach is made. Either side can reach the desk through the contact form on the site. ## Questions people ask ### Does holding a place-name TLD onchain give the holder any rights over the geographic name itself? No. The registry record shows who holds the TLD, and on Freename only that holder can issue names under it. It does not create trademark rights, public rights or any other interest in the geographic name. Rights in a geographic name, to the extent they exist in a given country, are set by the law of that country and exist independently of any domain or TLD registration. ### Can a public authority challenge a place-name TLD that someone else already holds onchain? There is no onchain equivalent of the geographic review and government advice that exist in the DNS. The practical options are to approach the holder about an acquisition, to mandate an adviser to make that approach, or to ask counsel whether any law of the relevant country reaches the situation. These routes are less direct than the DNS mechanisms, and their outcomes are less predictable. ### Is a place-name TLD valued differently from a brand TLD? The questions are the same, but the answers differ. A place-name TLD has a wider set of potential registrants, since every business, association or civic body connected to the place could want a name under it. It also carries a heavier governance requirement and has fewer institutional buyers able to decide quickly. Together, those factors usually mean a wider range of plausible values and a longer sale. ### Does the UDRP help when two parties claim the same place-name TLD? Not in the way people expect. The UDRP is the dispute policy that ICANN applies to names registered under generic TLDs in the DNS. It binds registrants through their registration agreements, it is designed for trademark owners, and it deals with individual domain names, not with who should hold a TLD. A competing claim to an onchain place-name TLD is therefore settled by negotiation, or under the law of the country that applies, and not through a registry procedure. Early legal advice is the right response. ### Should a public authority hold a place-name TLD before deciding what to do with it? It depends on the string, on the interest it attracts, and on the authority's capacity to move from holding to operating within a reasonable time. A TLD held and left dormant is not free of consequences: it creates a public record, invites questions and may raise expectations among local stakeholders. An authority that is not ready to commit can start with something smaller: a quiet check of whether the string is already held, followed by an internal decision on who would be responsible for it. A related case, an organization recovering the TLD that matches its own name, is described on the [brand namespace recovery](/brand-namespace-recovery) page, and the page for [holders](/holders) sets out the other side of that conversation.