Hey all, happy to jump in here and clarify a few things.
With regard to the treatment of .eth as a string, as was the case in the 2012 round of DNS expansion through ICANN, .eth is not up for grabs. There are a number of geography-related strings that ICANN has stated are off limits in both the 2012 and 2026 gTLD application rounds.
One of those categories of reserved strings are the alpha-3 codes listed in the ISO 3166-1 standard. This is where .eth is found and why ICANN will not entertain any applications to delegate that string. This moots some of the commentary provided and the query from Thomas so I will move onto the general questions raised about the new gTLD program.
We are very much aware of and engaged with ICANN and its new gTLD application process. We are giving careful consideration to the strings for which we may want to apply. As a live and functional proof of concept bridging web2 and web3, .box is a great example of what TLDs can accomplish by integrating with ENS. Moreover, we are actively working to facilitate additional DNS/ENS integrations and expect great things to come of this.
There is a great deal of activity in this space right now and we are excited about things to come. Stay tuned for more updates.