Agents Need Names

TL;DR: .agent is the most strategically important TLD still without an owner. ICANN's application window opens in weeks. A company is going to bid for it - unless a community claims it first. Here's the story, and two questions I'd actually like pushback on.

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Agents already need real addresses. I've been working on this for over a year, and the pitch just keeps getting simpler. Right now agents mostly live at a subdomain of whoever built the framework — platform.com/yourname-7. Borrowed identity, borrowed trust.

If you want the concrete version, look at OpenClaw. An autonomous agent running on your machine with its own email (real OTP codes, real password resets), OAuth credentials across hundreds of thousands of SaaS apps, sub-agents spawning and talking to each other, webhooks, the whole thing. A worker, not a demo.

And in its first three days live, OpenClaw had to rename itself twice. The name it launched under - gone. That's the whole argument in one news cycle: agents running real lives from borrowed names are one legal letter away from disappearing.

.agent is the most strategically important TLD still without an owner. ICANN's next gTLD round opens in weeks. And once .agent is claimed, it's claimed - the internet's naming system doesn't hand these out twice.

If one company wins it, .agent becomes their product. They'd set pricing. They'd set policies. They'd decide who gets yourname.agent and who gets blocked. One company choosing shareholder interests over an open internet - because that's literally what it would be.

The community bid is a formal ICANN community application — its own specific path with its own process. The goal, if approved: keep .agent open infrastructure. Open standards for agent discovery. No gatekeeper. Governance by the people actually building agents, within ICANN's rules.

23,000+ members have joined. Esther Dyson, who used to chair ICANN, and Illia Polosukhin, who co-wrote "Attention Is All You Need," are advising. 

It's not done. ICANN scores community applications on size, governance, nexus, and endorsement depth. You need 12/16 points to beat the corporate applicants who are absolutely going to file. Every signal matters.

Two questions I'd genuinely like pushback on:

1. Is the naming layer for AI agents something the community should own, or is it fine if it goes corporate? I have a strong view, but makers building agents every day see things I don't.
2. If you think it should stay open - what governance rules would you want locked in from day one? What would make you still trust the TLD in 5 years?

If this resonates, the non-binding endorsement is here (30 seconds). The one-pager has the deeper version.

Either way, would love to hear what you think. Especially the pushback.