.cdn
Is .cdn a real TLD? Who’s applying to run it?
.cdn is not contested. One application for it is on ICANN’s Reveal Day list, as of 7 October 2026. It is Ethos Digital.
A useful technical label for serving website files, not a name a company puts on its front door; demand stays niche and utility-driven.
web engineering teams, hosting and edge-delivery providers, and large sites that want a separate asset-serving hostname; a secondary pull from Canadian businesses reading "cdn" as a country abbreviation
The 2012 applications making the most similar bet. Chosen by AI from every string in that round, without being told what happened to any of them.
Same bet: the plain trade name for a web-infrastructure service, where the only people who would put primary identity on it are the providers selling that service and their engineering customers, not consumers.
Same bet: a generic delivery-layer infrastructure word with no owner, pitched at the same provider-and-devops buyer, and working only if infrastructure firms accept a category ending as their public identity.
Same shape of bet - a three-letter industry-jargon acronym for a content-delivery model that only a trade audience decodes - but it addresses media distributors rather than the general web-infrastructure stack, so the buyer pool is narrower.
What a .cdn domain is
.cdn is not a TLD yet. It is a string on our record of the ICANN 2026 new gTLD round, in our Infrastructure category. One application for it is on ICANN’s Reveal Day list.
Is the .cdn domain extension real yet?
.cdn is not yet a domain extension you can register: nothing resolves under it, and no registrar sells names in it. It is a string applicants have put forward in the ICANN 2026 new gTLD round, the process that decides whether it becomes one.
When can you buy a .cdn domain?
You can’t yet. A .cdn name can only be registered once the string is delegated (added to the DNS root) and its registry opens. Last round's closest parallel to .cdn was .hosting, delegated on 16 August 2014.
Is .cdn a real TLD?
Not yet. .cdn is not in the DNS root, so nothing resolves under it. It’s here because .cdn is on ICANN’s Reveal Day list of applied-for strings. Every entry on this page links to its source.
- Ethos Digital · first recordedICANN
“EDPB2563-T87820 · ETHOS DIGITAL PUBLIC BENEFIT CORPORATION · primary”ICANN
- Band chosen: 30-49, usable but limited, at its low end. The string names a durable engineering pattern: large web properties commonly serve static assets from a separate registrable domain for cookie isolation and security, and "cdn." is already a widespread hostname prefix, so "brand.cdn" has concrete end-use utility. By analogy (flagged as analogy), infra-flavored TLDs such as .cloud found a working niche while narrower ones like .host and .hosting stayed thin; .cdn sits closer to the narrow end because it describes a delivery function rather than a product or company. It is not in the 50-69 band because few serious projects would adopt a .cdn address as their primary identity and the aftermarket for infrastructure-suffix names tends to be thin. It is not in the 10-29 band because the demand is not event-driven or novelty-based; it is a steady, if small, technical need, and the Canadian-abbreviation reading adds a second, modest buyer group even though the national ccTLD dominates that market. Facts on the record: one confirmed application from Ethos Digital Public Benefit Corporation, no contention recorded, and a related .cos filing recorded as a replacement string. Main market uncertainty: whether engineering teams actually move asset hostnames onto a new TLD rather than keeping them under domains they already own, since the technical benefit can be achieved without a new TLD.