Back in 2012 when ICANN held its last round of the new gTLDs program, Donuts ended up controlling more TLDs than anyone else. In the intervening years they rebranded to Identity Digital and their ambitions for the domain name sector have only grown bigger as we enter the next round of the program while they already control almost half of all gTLDs.
CEO Akram Atallah told us that, after encouraging ICANN to simplify the application process to better facilitate bulk submissions of strings from a single organisation, Identity Digital decided the simplest approach was to apply for every word in the dictionary not already delegated into DNS. He said this meant they should have covered all bases and did not want to wait for potentially another fourteen years to apply for any words they may have forgotten about.
Unfortunately for them, they did not qualify for ICANN's applicant support program (ASP) which could've reduced the $227k application cost per string by up to 85%. This means they have had to front up (at least) a cool 113-trillion dollars but this was presumably not a problem for them primarily since they also operate the Anguillan ccTLD .ai as a gTLD. It turns out that selling .ai domains to idiots trying to get rich quick (or destroy humanity) via a glorified T9 predictive-text keyboard has proved something of an infinite-money glitch for Identity Digital with over a million of them registered as of the start of 2026.
It remains to be seen how this will impact ICANN's timeline for the 2026 round considering there were only expected to be around 2000 applications in total. At least they shouldn't have any trouble paying for some extra staff to help process the applications considering the cheque that Identity Digital has just written them.