dotFurry campaign confirms .furry application submitted to ICANN

While they confirmed all the way back in June that they had already hit their crowdfunding target, the dotFurry campaign hadn't posted any public news since the ICANN application window for new gTLDs closed last month. On Friday, they finally announced they had submitted their application*¹:

Hi all! Just a quick update: we’ve submitted our completed gTLD application to ICANN and paid the application invoice ($54,250). In the coming months, ICANN will review our application and do some due diligence as part of the pre-evaluation step.

Now we wait for their next update on ICANN's Reveal Day in October, when all the submitted applications will be made public. Although the new gTLD application fee has been covered, the campaign still anticipates "years of application review, legal work, and platform operations ahead" so are continuing to accept donations in the meantime.

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If .furry is successfully delegated it will be the first time we've had a dedicated furry TLD in the ICANN root but it wouldn't be first furry TLD ever. Back in 2003, Dennis Carr (who has a Dennis the Tiger fursona) created the .fur TLD which was peered with the OpenNIC alt root*². But this would only have been accessible to users who had reconfigured their clients to use a special set of DNS servers in order to resolve the .fur domains to IP addresses.

The TLD swapped hands a few times with Carr retiring it in 2007, it was recommissioned by OpenNIC in 2008 before decommissioning it themselves and by 2009 it was under the control of fellig.org*³. I'm not sure exactly how much longer it lasted than this - looking at snapshots of Fellig's forums on the Internet Archive reveals users discussing it as recently as 2016 and 2019*⁴ but nic.fur no longer resolves to an address via OpenNIC's resolvers and there is no mention of the TLD on Fellig's current main website or the ev.fellig.org subdomain.

Update: It may have been briefly inaccessible when I previously checked but nic.fur is currently resolving via OpenNIC to 49.12.203.237 although the last update is from January 2023:

FurNIC is migrating

FurNIC as part of Fellig e.V. is currently migrating to a new virtual home. While we're on the move services are limited. If you need any updates to your infrastructure, please drop a mail to: furnic-operators@fellig.org.

New root servers

We will soon publish the names of the new root servers. Stay tuned.

--- 2023-01-04

If you are not an OpenNIC user and would like to view the FurNIC site, I have created an archive of it*⁵ but the overview is as follows:

FurNIC is a Network Information Center providing the Top Level Domain "fur". FurNIC also provides management for the RFC 6264 IPv4 address space to Common Network Infrastructure (CNI) partners. FurNIC operates in the hope to provide a place for all Furrys, Fans of the Furry Fandom and everybody who is into animals and plants and other beings in general.

FurNIC tries to be transparent and democratic and a place of free and speech and invites everybody to join and help those goals to be reached.