Imagine visiting www.MrBeast.youtube - a domain that doesn’t exist - and it takes you to www.youtube.com/@MrBeast

Meet AnyName - enabling your brand gTLD to turn user intent into navigation!

What It Does

Imagine a system where you can match your customers’ intent (expressed through type-in navigation via nonexistent domains) with existing content:

• any product (iphone17.amazon) -> leading to the product page - e.g. amazon.com/iphone-17/s?k=iphone+17

• any category (books.amazon) -> leading to amazon.com/amz-books/store

• any brand (samsung.amazon) -> leading to amazon.com/samsung

• any combination (levisjeans.amazon) -> amazon.com/levis-jeans/s?k=levis+jeans

Brands like Amazon, Disney, Netflix, or Spotify could never register all domain combinations to match user intent.

AnyName turns the URLs for those non-existent domains into signal by allowing them to resolve within the DNS - enabling brand gTLD operators to interpret user intent and serve them with meaningful results inside the brand’s own namespace.

Benefits for Brands
Allowing internet users to express their intent through natural, meaningful (yet unregistered) domains requires a dynamic registry - something the current DNS infrastructure does not provide. The AnyName concept introduces that missing layer, enabling intent recognition and controlled dynamic responses inside brand gTLDs.

Brands Avoid Legal Exposure When Resolving URLs Like mrbeast.youtube or apple.samsung

Under U.S. Section 230, platforms such as YouTube are not legally responsible for user-generated content they merely host.
The same principle applies here: unregistered labels such as mrbeast.youtube are not domains owned by the brand but URLs interpreted inside its own namespace.

Because no domain is being registered, the brand remains fully Spec-13 compliant and retains its platform-style immunity - no ownership, no liability.
The same protection extends to commerce brands: merely resolving the URL samsung.amazon - a URL for which no domain exists - to amazon.com/samsung avoids the legal exposure that a domain registration would create.

The Breakthrough

By wildcarding a URL that merely resembles a domain (a domain that never exists), you remove both prerequisites that have frozen every brand TLD since 2014: the need to pre-register millions of labels and the legal exposure the domain registration would create.

Ecosystem Adoption — Brands Build It Together

• Not one brand’s win. AnyName only works when many brands join—no single player owns the benefit.

• Collective teaching. Every brand that adopts “user-intent.brand” trains users the same way. More brands = faster habit.

• Shared payoff. Even rivals (car makers, retail, tech) win when the pattern becomes predictable for everyone.

• Network effect. Big players like Amazon, Target or YouTube kickstart trust; every small brand adds momentum. Once users see all major brands behave the same, typing intent becomes second nature.

Together, we’ll steer brand-related traffic into the brands’ own trusted TLDs for the first time.

Intent-Driven Namespace Management

Once promoted, type-in traffic for requests like officechairs.target will grow. The brand can analyze this intent traffic to identify popular customer requests.

This enables a dynamic namespace: high-impact labels can be activated, while temporary trends can be retired. The result is a self-regulating system that automatically aligns your namespace with real-time customer interest.

Technical Basis / Mechanism - The Underlying Problem

In 2003, VeriSign’s SiteFinder redirected all unregistered .com and .net domains to a single monetized page.
The Internet community quickly put a stop to this practice, and since then, second-level wildcarding in gTLDs has been considered taboo - for good reason.

In .com, wildcarding turned noise - mostly typos & stale links - into monetization, with no benefit to the Internet user, effectively exploiting their behavior.
That’s why the Internet community intervened and permanently prohibited the practice (see all ICANN, IETF & CA/B provisions that prohibit wildcarding here).

That incident exposed three major problem areas:
• Policy and Ethics – wildcarding was used for monetization, exploiting Internet user behavior.
• Technical Stability – it disrupted mail delivery, DNS tools, and non-HTTP protocols.
• Security (TLS/SSL) – By now, HTTPS and mandatory certificate validation have made second-level wildcarding technically difficult to implement safely.

Our Solution: Our cutting-edge, patent-pending mechanism addresses all three dimensions:

• Policy & Eligibility – available predominantly to Spec-13 brand registries, which act as the single trusted controller and interpreter of their namespace, formally authorized by their registrant base (or being the registrant base themselves).
A strict eligibility policy prevents any other TLDs from using the technology for monetization or user-data capture.
→ see Policy

• Technical Stability - fully compliant with all relevant ICANN and IETF standards, and designed to avoid every class of breakage observed in 2003.
→ see Mechanism & Technology

• TLS/SSL Security – utilizes modern certificate technologies (on-the-fly or wildcard certificates) to ensure secure HTTPS handling for unregistered domains.
→ see Mechanism & Technology

Next Steps

Brand TLD operators: see Timeline and Licensing to learn when and how you can use AnyName.

Browsers & Resolvers, ICANN, CAB Forum, IETF: see Mechanism & Technology, and Eligibility & Policy to understand how AnyName works in detail and how you can help make it happen. See ICANN & CA/B & IETF for the next steps in your involvement.

If you want to know why the technology is licensed yet remains open and free for almost everyone, see Licensing. The short answer: the patent is not for profit but for protection. Only the largest companies globally pay a modest license fee.

We need ICANN, the CAB Forum, and the IETF to establish a strong policy wrap ensuring that second-level wildcarding will never again create technical disturbance or be used for monetization. Through their eligibility gates and the accompanying licensing model, AnyName enforces these safeguards - guaranteeing that this new capability remains safe, auditable, and permanently aligned with the Internet user’s interest. Instead of causing havoc, AnyName, in the cases where eligible (primarily Spec-13 registries), empowers the Internet user and introduces innovation and improved utility into the DNS - directly fulfilling the original objectives of the new gTLD program: to enhance innovation in the domain name industry and to enhance the utility of the DNS.

AnyName Interactive .airport Mockup

The following .airport mockup lets you experience how the future .airport gTLD would deploy the AnyName concept (.airport will be a highly controlled community gTLD - AnyName was originally developed for .airport).

Type a .airport domain using your keyboard or the on-screen keyboard, then tap the blue Go. You can also communicate with the mock-registry AI by using the refine search field. Try airport name typos, cities, countries, states — or events like burningman.airport (something that you assume will never be a registered .airport domain)!!

For more information please send an email to alexander.schubert@anyname.technology or call +1(202)888-2029