After the dotFurry project confirmed their .furry application, we looked back at the OpenNIC-peered FurNIC which runs .fur as an alt-root1. But I was recently contacted by the dotFurry Mastodon account2 to say the FurNIC operators had approached them about their own ICANN bid though ultimately chose against it in light of the successful crowdfunder for the .furry domain. I couldn't access the dotFur Telegram link they shared but I found the same statement on their Discord server, posted on 06 July 2026:
Itโs with very sad hearts that we must announce a unanimous board decision to sunset the https://dotfur.org/ project. After careful consideration, and in light of https://dotfurry.org/ and their successful fundraising campaign, we think itโs unlikely for two competing furry TLD applications to succeed in the 2026 New gTLD program.
Along with the sunset of the project, we will be additionally sunsetting our alt-root DNS as well on August 1st. This means that any domains delegated will stop working after August 1st and our official DNS resolvers will be going offline as well.
Thank you for your support over the last 3 years, and we will keep an ear out for any future possibilities to revisit this project.
All other Fur Society projects remain unaffected, and we look forward to sharing the details of those very soon.
Ahead of a potential bid for the .fur TLD in the ICANN root, they had been running their own alt-root with resolvers for .fur, along with a plethora of services in the namespace including root CA, forums and whois since at least October 2004.
Pre-registration was initially limited to claiming verified fursonas - either via FurAffinity or in-person at a Furcon booth. General registration at the second-level would be limited to a minimum of four characters, with anything less reserved for registry use. They also planned to prevent cybersquatters, hoarders, "investors" etc by threatening to revoke any domains that were registered "with the intent to resell it or hoarding a name with no intent to make use of it".
Unfortunately, as per their July announcement, all their services were taken offline on 01 August 2026 (in both the ICANN root and their own alt-root). Although they stated their decision not to apply was in light of dotFurry's application, it's not clear why that would've been a barrier for them. The projects were using different strings so there would've been no contention in that sense. It's possible that dotFurry could've argued .fur was too close to .furry and would potentially confuse users (though there are already plenty similar strings delegated). The dotFurry Bluesky account actually clarified they had specifically avoided .fur because of contention with the fur industry and didn't want a battle with them in the future3.
The two projects also had significantly different approaches: dotFurry was one of the successful applicants via ICANN's Applicant-Support Program (ASP) which substantially reduced the initial fee from $227k to $90k - an amount they were able to raise with a month to spare on their deadline. Having looked through previous messages and announcements in the dotFur Discord, they were not supported by the ASP but there is no detail on how they planned to pay for the full application fee or any progress on their application being submitted. Possibly its board were already able to afford the fee and so did not need to raise any funds from the community. Confusingly, on 02 June 2026, they suggested that dotFurry had "missed the gTLD applications" well before the deadline. I'm not sure if this means that dotFur had already submitted their application (but hadn't paid and later cancelled) or if they thought they themselves had also missed out.
While dotFurry plan open registration for .furry, dotFur wanted .fur as a community string - this comes with more stringent rules though and dotFurry pointed out they'd have to prove their organisation represented everyone in furry community, which they didn't consider possible4." dotFur also took issue with dotFurry's plan to partner with a Registry Operator Service (RSP) instead of running their own registry services. But dotFurry argued they would still be in control of policy and resources - an RSP would just allow them to have a quicker start with the potential for them to run their own dedicated services in the future.
It seems that in the end though, dotFur decided to cancel their own application and get behind the dotFurry bid, encouraging their Discord users to support the campaign as well as posting about it positively on Bluesky. Time will tell how things pan out for the .furry domain but, who knows, maybe we could still see .fur delegated by ICANN one day - just not any day soon as Reveal Day confirmed no applications for the string in 2026.