.north
Is .north a real TLD? Who’s applying to run it?
Nobody has applied for .north in its own right, as of 7 October 2026. XYZ Registry named .north as the backup string of its .node application.
A pleasant generic word with brand and regional appeal but no category of its own; expect modest, price-driven uptake.
brands and projects with a northern, Nordic or "true north" identity, outdoor and regional businesses, and bargain registrants assembling short word pairs
Nobody has applied for .north in its own right.
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.
Both are short connotation-rich common adjectives with no industry, community or category behind them — the registry is betting purely that the word's flavour makes a good right-of-dot modifier for brand constructions, so there is no natural registrant class to court and nothing has to be true except that people like how the phrase reads.
Same bet as .north's geographic half: a vague place-word that nobody owns and no authority certifies, monetised as a suffix in name constructions rather than as a registry for an actual defined territory (unlike the real-region bets such as .nrw or .bzh, which .north cannot make because 'north' is not anyone's place).
An abstract positional word whose value is sentence-completion rather than category membership — its buyer is anyone who wants the qualifier, not a trade or a locality, which is exactly .north's problem of having a resonant string and no defined constituency to put its primary identity on it.
What a .north domain is
.north is not a TLD yet. It is a string on our record of the ICANN 2026 new gTLD round, in our Brand category. Nobody has applied for .north in its own right. It is named on ICANN’s list as part of an application for another string.
Is the .north domain extension real yet?
.north is not yet a domain extension you can register: nothing resolves under it, and no registrar sells names in it. Nobody has applied for it on the public record; the ICANN 2026 new gTLD round is the process that would decide whether it becomes one.
When can you buy a .north domain?
You can’t yet. A .north 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 .north was .black, delegated on 27 March 2014.
Is .north a real TLD?
Not yet. .north is not in the DNS root, so nothing resolves under it. It’s here because ICANN’s list names .north as part of an application for another string. Every entry on this page links to its source.
- XYZ Registry · first recordedICANN
“XL2625T-T11396 · XYZ.COM LLC · replacement string of .node”ICANN
- Band chosen: 30-49 (usable but limited). The string is a common English word with real brand resonance (compass-direction and 'true north' metaphors, northern and Nordic regional identity, outdoor and heritage brands), so it can attract genuine registrations rather than purely novelty ones; by analogy, generic single-word TLDs with a loose evocative meaning but no defining category tend to fill on promotional pricing and word-pair combos, with the aftermarket concentrated in a thin layer of dictionary-word left-sides. It is not in the 50-69 band because a direction word does not anchor any industry or buyer group that would adopt it as a primary identity without explanation; 'company.north' reads as a stylistic choice, not a category signal, and there is no evident sustained demand pool comparable to a sector or geo TLD. It is not in the 10-29 band because, unlike joke or hyper-narrow strings, it carries enough brand and regional meaning (northern cities, Nordic and Canadian-north projects, outdoor brands) to see some serious primary use over 5 years. Applicant facts on the record: one application by XYZ.COM LLC, standard type, filed as a replacement string for .node; a portfolio-style operator (inference from the record's framing, flagged as analogy) tends to favour broad distribution and promotional pricing, which raises registration volume more than brand strength. Main market uncertainty: whether any regional or cultural community (Nordic, northern UK, Canadian north) adopts it as a quasi-geographic identity, which would lift it toward the strong-niche band, or whether it settles as a vanity suffix.