Automattic Wants .wordpress. It Doesn’t Own WordPress.

Kellie Peterson · Medium ·

7 min read Original article ↗

ICANN published the full list of 2026 top-level domain applications this week. All 2,783 of them. I went looking for one string out of curiosity and came away reading a different one three times. I also made a pit stop at .taylorswift because… duh, but that’s beside the point.

Automattic has applied for .wordpress.

Some disclosure first. I worked for Matt Mullenweg years ago. I’d also spent the majority of my career in the domain name space, so I read ICANN filings the way other people read box scores. I may have a personal axe to grind with Matt, but that doesn’t mean I don’t know what I’m talking about. I read this application, then I read the rulebook it was written against. Together they say something the application alone doesn’t.

What they’re asking for

The applicant is Knock Knock WHOIS There, LLC, the Automattic subsidiary that has run .blog since 2016. Its filing asks ICANN for an exemption from the Registry Operator Code of Conduct, which is Specification 9 of the standard registry contract. Registration in .wordpress, the application says, “will not be made available to unaffiliated third parties.” Every name would belong to Automattic or its affiliates.

The Code of Conduct is the rule that keeps a registry from favoring itself. Closed brand registries routinely get out of it. Apple doesn’t sell .apple domains, and nobody needs protecting from self-dealing when the only customer is Apple. It made its intentions clear by applying as a “.brand” TLD.

The filing also insists WordPress is not a “Generic String.” That matters because ICANN won’t approve a closed generic, a general term locked up by one company, until it has a method for judging whether one serves the public interest. To get a closed .wordpress, Automattic has to convince ICANN that WordPress is a brand and nothing more.

The test that never asks who owns the name

Automattic doesn’t own the WordPress trademark. The WordPress Foundation, a nonprofit Matt started in 2010, holds it. When the mark moved, Matt wrote that WordPress’s name was now “fully independent from any company.” Under the Foundation’s trademark policy, Automattic holds an exclusive license for commercial use.

Here’s what I didn’t expect when I opened ICANN’s 2026 Applicant Guidebook. The Code of Conduct exemption has exactly three tests, set out in Section 7.4.4. Every registration must belong to the registry operator or its affiliates, for their exclusive use. None can be sold or handed to anyone outside that group. And applying the Code must not be “necessary to protect the public interest.”

Trademark ownership isn’t one of them. ICANN runs a separate track for brand TLDs, called Specification 13, which requires a registered trademark verified through the Trademark Clearinghouse. But the Guidebook says plainly that an applicant can get the Code of Conduct exemption without qualifying for brand status.

So the application describes WordPress as a brand that “corresponds to” registered trademarks and never says who owns them. No evaluator will flag that. The test it applied under doesn’t ask.

Pick one

If Automattic also wants .wordpress designated a brand TLD, the trademark comes back into play, and the registered owner of that trademark is the Foundation. Watch how Automattic connects itself to a mark it doesn’t own. The obvious route runs through ICANN’s definition of “Affiliate.”

The registry contract defines affiliates by control, and it counts control exercised “by serving as an employee or a member of a board of directors.” Matt is Automattic’s CEO. He is also one of the WordPress Foundation’s three board members, according to its 2022 tax filing as reported by LWN.

For sixteen years, whenever someone asked whether one company had too much say over WordPress, the answer was that the name belongs to an independent nonprofit. That answer got heavy use once the WP Engine fight started in 2024. The Foundation can be independent of Automattic, or it can be under common control with Automattic. It can’t be both, and an ICANN filing is a strange place to quietly choose.

“Nobody uses those things anyway”

That’s the reply I expect first, and on the surface it’s right. Most people have no idea what a top-level domain is. Plenty of companies bought their own in the last round of “new TLDs” and did little with them. Nobody is going to type plugins.wordpress into a browser. Yet.

Usage was never the point. An approved application is a record. The body that coordinates the internet’s naming system would have accepted that WordPress is not a generic term, and handed a closed namespace carrying that name to the trademark’s commercial licensee. That record holds whether or not anyone ever visits a single domain.

Built to last

The standard registry contract runs ten years and renews for further ten-year terms, except in narrow cases tied to breach. That’s Sections 4.1 and 4.2.

Closed registries get one more protection. Under Section 4.5, a registry that keeps every name for itself and its affiliates, and where no public-interest reason requires a handover, can’t have its TLD moved to a new operator when the contract ends unless it consents. Those are the same conditions the Code of Conduct exemption is built on.

A trademark license is a permission. Nothing in the exemption ties the TLD to that permission. If Automattic’s license to the WordPress name ever changed, .wordpress would stay right where it is.

Then there’s what a closed namespace can hold. A list of certified hosts. A plugin marketplace. Email addresses that look official. None of that exists today, and maybe it never will. Once this is approved, Automattic alone decides.

What you can do, and when

Nothing is open yet. The list of applied-for strings locks on November 17, 2026. That starts the community input period, which ICANN says runs to March 16, 2027, with a pause built in for its year-end office closure.

The Guidebook says a Code of Conduct exemption request is open to public comment, and evaluators consider only comments that arrive inside the window. The third test is where comments count. ICANN has to conclude that applying the Code to .wordpress is not necessary to protect the public interest. For a name attached to an open-source project built by thousands of people outside Automattic, and relied on by hosts that compete with Automattic, that conclusion deserves a fight. So does the claim that WordPress is a brand and not a general term for a kind of software.

If you build with WordPress, host it, sell plugins for it, or contribute to core, read the application yourself on ICANN’s Application Publication System. Comment when the window opens. If hosts and contributors want to go further, ICANN’s rules allow a community objection. It requires showing a clearly delineated community, substantial opposition within it, a string that targets it, and likely detriment.

I hope I’m wrong about where this goes. I’d still rather say it now, while it can matter, than in 2028, when someone explains that the comment period closed and nobody noticed.

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