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Press Release: ICANN CEO Highlights 2026 Domain Expansion Opportunities During Türkiye Visit

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ISTANBUL – 19 February 2026 – As the global Internet community prepares for the next expansion of domain names in 2026, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) President and CEO Kurtis Lindqvist recently concluded a two-day visit to the Republic of Türkiye focused on what the upcoming round means for Turkish businesses, institutions, and Internet stakeholders.

The New Generic Top-Level Domains (gTLD) Program: 2026 Round will be the first opportunity in more than a decade for organizations to apply for new domain name endings beyond familiar options such as .com or .org. These new domains can reflect brands, cities, sectors, or communities and are designed to expand choice and competition in the domain name system.

For the Republic of Türkiye, the next round presents opportunities. Turkish companies can strengthen brand protection and global visibility. Industry groups and institutions can develop domain names aligned with sector identity. Communities can enhance cultural and linguistic representation online.

During a stakeholder roundtable in Istanbul, Lindqvist met with representatives from business, academia, civil society, government, and the technical community to discuss how Turkish stakeholders can prepare for the 2026 Round and what participation could mean for the country's digital economy. The discussion spanned Internet security, stability, and resilience, as well as the broader policy environment in which the Domain Name System operates.

Lindqvist also met with the Deputy Minister of Transport and Infrastructure, Dr. Ömer Fatih Sayan, to discuss the Republic of Türkiye's readiness for the 2026 Round and ICANN's role in coordinating domain names and IP addresses. The meeting focused on maintaining a stable and globally interoperable Internet while ensuring that national perspectives are reflected in global technical coordination processes.

The Republic of Türkiye plays an active role in these conversations. ICANN's regional office for the Middle East and Africa is based in Istanbul, supporting stakeholder engagement and capacity-building efforts across the Republic of Türkiye and the wider region.

As preparation for the 2026 Round moves forward, ICANN will continue to meet with governments, businesses, and technical communities worldwide to support informed participation and readiness. For Turkish stakeholders, the coming months will be an important period to assess opportunities and determine how they wish to participate in the next phase of global domain name expansion.

About ICANN

ICANN's mission is to help ensure a stable, secure, and unified global Internet. To reach another person on the Internet, you need to type an address – a name or a number – into your computer or other device. That address must be unique so computers know where to find each other. ICANN helps coordinate and support these unique identifiers across the world. ICANN was formed in 1998 as a nonprofit public benefit corporation with a community of participants from all over the world.

Media Contacts

Luna Madi
Senior Director, EMEA Communications
Istanbul
Mobile: +90 (533) 031 35 05
Email: luna.madi@icann.org
or press@icann.org

Domain Name System
Internationalized Domain Name ,IDN,"IDNs are domain names that include characters used in the local representation of languages that are not written with the twenty-six letters of the basic Latin alphabet ""a-z"". An IDN can contain Latin letters with diacritical marks, as required by many European languages, or may consist of characters from non-Latin scripts such as Arabic or Chinese. Many languages also use other types of digits than the European ""0-9"". The basic Latin alphabet together with the European-Arabic digits are, for the purpose of domain names, termed ""ASCII characters"" (ASCII = American Standard Code for Information Interchange). These are also included in the broader range of ""Unicode characters"" that provides the basis for IDNs. The ""hostname rule"" requires that all domain names of the type under consideration here are stored in the DNS using only the ASCII characters listed above, with the one further addition of the hyphen ""-"". The Unicode form of an IDN therefore requires special encoding before it is entered into the DNS. The following terminology is used when distinguishing between these forms: A domain name consists of a series of ""labels"" (separated by ""dots""). The ASCII form of an IDN label is termed an ""A-label"". All operations defined in the DNS protocol use A-labels exclusively. The Unicode form, which a user expects to be displayed, is termed a ""U-label"". The difference may be illustrated with the Hindi word for ""test"" — परीका — appearing here as a U-label would (in the Devanagari script). A special form of ""ASCII compatible encoding"" (abbreviated ACE) is applied to this to produce the corresponding A-label: xn--11b5bs1di. A domain name that only includes ASCII letters, digits, and hyphens is termed an ""LDH label"". Although the definitions of A-labels and LDH-labels overlap, a name consisting exclusively of LDH labels, such as""icann.org"" is not an IDN."