Link Freedom Group (LFG) aspires to become a best-in-class, vertically integrated domain name registration authority, see linkfreedomgroup.link. This TLD is part of a carefully curated portfolio of strings that LFG intends to pursue in ICANN’s 2026 New gTLD Program. In assembling this portfolio, LFG focused on securing meaningful, memorable, and commercially compelling strings that resonate strongly with end users and offer long-term growth potential.
Over the past four years, LFG (Nova Registry) has successfully grown its flagship TLD, .LINK, from approximately 125,000 to more than 300,000 domains under management. This growth has been driven by innovative distribution strategies, the expansion of registrar partnerships, and a granular pricing model that has enabled .LINK to remain competitively priced while avoiding the significant fee increases implemented by some other registry operators.
LFG’s experience in the domain name industry has reinforced one of the key lessons from the 2012 application round: long-term sustainability is strengthened through portfolio diversification. By spreading operational costs and mitigating revenue fluctuations across multiple TLDs, LFG is better positioned to withstand market volatility and invest in continued growth. Accordingly, LFG believes that even obtaining a subset of the TLDs for which it has applied will establish a diversified portfolio capable of supporting long-term economic stability, operational resilience, and sustainable growth.
The mission of .start is to give services a front door that says what it is. The string is the ordinary English verb and noun ""start"". What makes it useful at the top level is the construction it allows: the second level names the service and the top level names the action, so that gym.start, hosting.start or lesson.start read as an instruction rather than as an address.
Registrants are organisations providing a service people enter rather than buy off a shelf: gyms, clubs and studios; schools and training providers; clinics and practices taking new patients; hosting, software and subscription businesses; utilities and insurers handling enrolment; public bodies and associations handling applications; and the agencies building campaigns for them.
Users are people at the point of signing up: reading a poster, scanning a code, following a link from an advertisement, or opening the first page of a sequence.
The gTLD has a use for two related needs, one physical and one digital.
The first is the front door of a service. A service is entered through a sequence - an enquiry, a trial, a form, an appointment, a first session - and that sequence needs a public entry point that can be printed on a poster, said aloud on the radio, or put on a membership card. What it usually gets is a long path inside a corporate site, chosen for the site's convenience rather than the reader's.
The second is the legibility of the link itself. Registration questionnaires and sign-up forms are commonly circulated as opaque shortened links, or as vendor-platform addresses that say nothing about where they lead and cannot be checked before clicking - a poor position for any organisation asking for personal information, and precisely what people are taught to distrust. An address whose top level reads ""start"" and whose second level names the service is legible before it is opened, and belongs to the organisation rather than the tool it currently uses.
The TLD will launch with the rights protection mechanisms required by Specification 7, including a Sunrise period and a Trademark Claims period. General Availability will then be open, with no eligibility restrictions and no reservation of the namespace to the applying entity or its affiliates. Distribution will be through ICANN-accredited registrars on published, non-discriminatory terms consistent with Specification 9, including any affiliated registrar, which will receive the same terms as every other. Abuse mitigation follows the Mandatory Public Interest Commitments and the DNS abuse obligations of the Base Registry Agreement, with a published abuse point of contact.
The demand is not attached to beginnings as a moment but to enrolment as a permanent function. Every gym, school, clinic, hosting company, insurer and public body runs intake continuously rather than as a campaign, so the need recurs rather than expires. The address becomes part of that machinery: printed on membership cards and campaign material, embedded in onboarding documentation and in codes already distributed, so letting it lapse breaks an intake channel still bringing people in. The construction is what makes the name durable: because the second level names the service and not the company, the address survives rebranding, changes of tool and changes of campaign - the things that usually end a domain's life. The word is short, common and understood in the same sense across language markets, and is tied to no vendor or platform. The applying entity belongs to an established hosting group with a direct channel to the businesses concerned, and registry operations are contracted to a pre-evaluated Registry Service Provider.