dotMeow wants to be the purrfect place for a queer and open internet

What makes someone decide to apply for a .meow top-level domain?

A few years ago, a few of us queer nerds were sitting in a pub, thinking about what we could do to give our community greater stability. The idea of running our own gTLD came up. Because many people in our community love cats, and because the wilder side of the internet is often associated with cat videos and memes, we soon settled on .meow.

Was it a concrete plan from the outset?

No. The application alone costs $227,000, so at the time it was completely unrealistic. Then, a few months later, we discovered that ICANN (the organisation that makes decisions about top-level domains worldwide, editor’s note) now has an Applicant Support Program (ASP). It allows non-profit organisations to submit their applications at a much lower cost under certain conditions. It also gives us free support from lawyers and other experts with knowledge of the technical and administrative world of domain names.

For us, that was the signal to really go for it. As a group, we at dotMeow have an activist mindset: if you have the opportunity to do something that can improve the world, you have to do it. The opportunity almost fell into our laps.

How do you even begin applying for a gTLD?

We initially discussed the idea with others in late 2024. We saw a great deal of enthusiasm at Chaos Computer Congress (CCC), a hacker conference in Hamburg, and afterwards we set up a non-profit association in Belgium.

Of course, this is not something you do alone. TQ Hirsch (co-founder and CFO) and I also found a third board member, Nadim Kobeissi, who has experience in cryptography and network security. Our team has since been joined by Lauren Thomas as project manager, or ‘Chief Cat Herder’, a role that is certainly needed to keep us moving in the right direction throughout this process. The team also includes Ela Bambust, graphic designer and social media manager, and ElleJay König, an advisory member.

By the summer of 2025, we knew that we were eligible for the ASP and announced our Kickstarter campaign. But even then, we thought: ‘We’ll try, but the chances of raising that kind of money are slim.’ We were aiming to raise €80,000 and ended up raising more than €120,000. That was when it suddenly became very real, and we could really go for it!

Are you still looking for people to help support .meow?

A good bookkeeper would be very welcome. They could actually become one of our first employees. We currently have enough legal support, but an accountant with knowledge of the domain name industry and the complex intersection between non-profit and international law would really help us move forward.

Your first employees—so none of you currently do this as a job?

All six members do this voluntarily: five of us are unpaid, while our project manager works extremely hard as a freelancer for a very modest fee. But just because we do so, does not mean we expect others to work entirely for free for .meow, or that we intend to keep doing so ourselves in the long term.

ICANN opened the application round on 30 April. Have you submitted your application yet?

It will have been submitted by the time this interview is published. Because we are a fairly new organisation, ICANN also wants to assess our financial solvency, so we waited until our second financial quarter had closed.

But much of the work has already been done. We were asked many of the questions applicants need to answer as part of our Applicant Support Program application, and we have also been making further preparations behind the scenes using the Applicant Guidebook.

Once that is done, we have to wait until October. That is when every applicant will hear whether their application has been accepted in principle. That is the biggest hurdle.

Is that simply a matter of having a strong application?

Other parties may also apply for .meow. If so, it will be allocated through an auction. That would probably be the end of the road for us, because we do not have the means to throw, say, a million dollars at it.

Besides the administrative processes, there is the technical side too. How will you manage that with a small team?

Initially, we will work with a third party: a registry service provider ( RSP ) that will handle the technical operations for the domain extension for us. We do not have our own DNS servers, although that is our longer-term ambition.

Why not now, and why later?

For now, we want to keep our overheads low and get up and running smoothly. But our ambition is, for example, to apply stricter privacy and security rules than those required by GDPR or NIS2 . We want to collect only the absolute minimum amount of data and share it only when absolutely necessary.

At present, no RSP does this in the way we want, so in about five years’ time, we aim to be able to run the technical operations ourselves. If that works well, we may eventually become an RSP for other gTLDs ourselves. In that case, the income generated by providing registry services to others could flow back to the dotMeow Foundation (the foundation behind the future gTLD), allowing us to support even more projects.

When do you expect the first .meow domain names, and do you expect there to be many?

Through Kickstarter, we are giving supporters vouchers to buy one or more domain names. Around 1,300 people will receive at least one voucher, and they will probably be the first to register.

From then on, we hope to see slow, steady annual growth of five to ten per cent. We base this on figures from comparable gTLDs such as .gay and .lgbt.

The exact launch date depends on ICANN’s process, but we consider 2028 realistic. That would mean we could hopefully offer financial support to projects for the first time from mid-2029.

A space of its own for the queer community

.meow wants to be the domain extension for the queer community. What does that mean in practice?

We are doing this for our community, but also to make the internet more decentralised: today, a large part of the internet is controlled by a handful of major platforms. They are not always keen to support the queer community—and that is true even in some European countries. We want .meow to provide a counterweight. In time, we want to use .meow’s income to support projects for our community.

What kinds of projects?

Some will have a technological focus, such as supporting an AT Protocol server (the protocol that Bluesky runs on) or queer-friendly internet cafés. But they could also be initiatives unrelated to the internet. If things go very well financially, we could, for example, establish a medical and legal advisory organisation for transgender people and other queer people. Such an organisation could support people with their rights and needs, because there is also a lack of legal and administrative advice from an explicitly supportive perspective.

We also want to set aside a dedicated budget to provide financial, practical and administrative support for projects submitted to us.

These are, of course, ambitions. It is too early to name specific projects, because we will not see our first income until 2028, and there will always be more applications than we can support.

As an organisation, do you want dotMeow itself to solve or tackle issues for the community, apart from the projects you support?

Queer oppression is not going to disappear tomorrow or within five years. Nor do we tell ourselves that dotMeow can solve it on its own. But in the meantime, we are building an environment where queer people are explicitly welcome and can find support.

TQ, my co-founder, recently put it well: ‘There are many initiatives focusing on rights and safety, but it remains a struggle. Financially too: even successful queer authors barely earn enough to live on, and as a community we are tired of living on the margins of society.’

But this is not only about safety. We also want to create a space where wonderful things can happen again. We want the internet to become weird again. We want to recapture the pleasant, welcoming chaos of the late 1990s and early 2000s.

You talk about an internet that is weird and joyful again. What does that look like to you today?

It is hard to define exactly, but the open-source community is a good example. Another example is Tumblr, where I first discovered my queer identity.

That wonderfully weird and joyful quality is mainly about building community. Your online world is no less real than the physical world. It is a place where you meet people who may become better friends than your neighbours. That is the kind of vibe we would like to see on .meow.

The internet’s weirdness lies in being radically yourself. Everyone is a little eccentric, and that is what makes the world interesting and the internet fun. This is our little corner of weirdness and cats. But above all, do what you want with it and be yourself.

Open to everyone, but true to the mission

Suppose you are allowed to start operating .meow in eighteen months’ time. Is it yours for life, or do you have to renew it after a few years?

In principle, it is permanent. A TLD is a cornerstone of the internet, so it cannot simply disappear. Even if an organisation ceases to operate, ICANN has procedures to deal with that.

One thing we are very explicit about is that we NEVER want to sell our gTLD to another company. The organisation behind .gay has done exactly that. For us, this is a lifelong project. Even if I can no longer be actively involved with dotMeow, I still hope to play a role on the board or on an advisory council. This is a passion project that is getting out of hand.

Do you want .meow to host only queer-related websites and services, or will it be broader than that?

Much broader. .gay and .lgbt are also explicitly queer, but with .meow we have chosen a slightly more discreet name, because some registrants do not necessarily want to be visibly queer. This domain is for queer people and their allies, but equally for people who simply think it is a fun or quirky name and register a domain with us for that reason.

Naturally, we would rather not see websites full of hate speech. But if, say, the KKK (a racist organisation from the US, editor’s note) or the Kremlin wants to register a .meow domain tomorrow, we will happily take their money and use it to do good things.

What if some people register a .meow domain name specifically to misuse it?

ICANN has very clear rules on this. As a registry operator, you have little say over what someone does on your TLD. But there are rules for when a website’s content breaks the law. That is also why you have to collect a minimum amount of data about your registrants (people who register a domain name).

We explicitly welcome all people, groups and organisations, including those whose views do not align with what we stand for, provided, of course, that they remain within the boundaries of the law.