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.
Replies
Do builders actually feel the need for a dedicated namespace yet?
@isaac_dominic1 TLDs are for "eternity". So the "yet" part is not a question only for today, but what the agentic web looks like in 10 years 20 years from now. hard to guess, but if this naming layer is owned by a single shareholder value maximizing entity we have a very different future.
How do you balance openness with abuse prevention?
@daisy_morgan2 good q. especially as the underlying AI models will get better and better. Long term the goal is to link liability of owner to the agent running on .agent names. short term to ensure the agent meets technical criteria's.
The naming layer argument is actually bigger than it looks.
Identity + trust for agents is going to matter a lot more than most people expect right now.
How would identity verification work for agents?
@yara_simone ha, a bit of a side question but there are few ideas on top of my mind:
but the shortest is a signature (ideally quantum proof). If you expand on the question I can better understand from what aspect you thought of the verification
The OpenClaw example is a really clean illustration of the problem - agents running real infrastructure from borrowed names is genuinely fragile. On your second question: the governance piece I'd want locked in from day one is some kind of price cap mechanism so it doesn't quietly become extractive five years in once the community application is approved and attention moves on. Signed the endorsement. Good luck!
The corporate risk isn't just pricing, it's prioritization. A company owning .agent will inevitably make decisions based on their roadmap, not the community's needs. The OpenClaw rename situation is a perfect example of how fragile borrowed identity really is.
How do you handle bad actors using agent domains?
@sienna_claire beyond the the generic TLD protection practices we plan to set up our own infra to track each deployment to our best abilities. It's a membership led community bid. very good question. How would you do?
I would trust a community-owned namespace more if the governance model made abuse handling and portability very explicit from day one.
Open infrastructure is attractive, but trust comes from how edge cases get resolved when stakes become commercial.
@luca_ardito Luca, come join the agentcommunity.org and we are thinking about this exact topic!
I'm intrigued... but can't get past the front door. The emails sent have a six-digit code, not a magic link, and there's no place on the website to add that six-digit code.
@chris_backe fixed! try again
honest question - do agents even resolve identity through DNS? every agent i run authenticates with API keys and oauth tokens, not domain names. the naming problem for agents is really an auth and trust problem and TLDs dont solve that at all. you could own coolagent.agent and still be running malware behind it
@umairnadeem honest answer. not yet, because there aren't tru agent to agent communication happening yet, but they will. we wrote aid.agentcommunity.org to have any domain work to resolve the agent
DNS is for discovery not a full blow identity with auth capability etc, and once we reach billions of agents discovery will be required. On reputation, that's an other layer and we are working on ideas at the community to build systems align with others to ensure there is portable reputation for agents. Happy to loop you in if you care about the topic