Gate News reports that on March 25, a community of over 3,000 members (including more than 700 companies and over 2,300 developers) is applying to ICANN for the .agent top-level domain, advocating that this AI naming layer should be governed by the community rather than controlled by a single company. Privacy browser Brave announced it has registered the .agent domain and joined the initiative. Other participants include Ollama, Datadog, Netlify, Sourcegraph, Alibaba Cloud, Product Hunt, and more. The community believes that .agent for the AI Agent network is like 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 not influenced by any single company’s board. ICANN’s application window will open in late April 2026 and last for 90 days. In the allocation of contested top-level domains, ICANN uses a “Community Priority Evaluation” (CPE) mechanism, where a third-party expert panel scores based on community size, relevance to the domain, registration policies, and community endorsement. The number and diversity of community members directly impact the bidding outcome.