.roma
Is .roma a real TLD? Who’s applying to run it?
.roma is not contested. One application for it is on ICANN’s Reveal Day list, as of 7 October 2026. It is Aruba.
A niche TLD for rome-based small businesses, hospitality and tourism operators, local media and cultural projects, plus Italian-speaking brands wanting a "Roman" identity.
Rome-based small businesses, hospitality and tourism operators, local media and cultural projects, plus Italian-speaking brands wanting a "Roman" identity
Aruba S.p.A. told Domain Name Wire it applied for 39 strings in the 2026 round 'as primary or replacement', listing .roma among them without saying which strings are primary. The claim is the applicant's own, post-filing, relayed by the publication. Founder ruling 2026-09-09: recorded as announced. First application for this string on the record.
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 exactly: a major city's own native-language name (rather than the international exonym) run as a local-identity namespace for residents, businesses and civic bodies who already say the word that way, which only works if local pride plus municipal blessing can pull a city's commercial base off the incumbent ccTLD.
A capital-city geo string in the local language, sold as the primary identity for that city's businesses, institutions and municipality — the buyer, the civic-endorsement requirement and the local-market-depth risk are identical.
The endonym of a capital whose English name differs, betting that the locally used form of the city name is the one residents will put their primary identity on, backed by city-level authority rather than a commercial category play.
What a .roma domain is
.roma is not a TLD yet. It is a string on our record of the ICANN 2026 new gTLD round, in our Places category. One application for it is on ICANN’s Reveal Day list.
Is the .roma domain extension real yet?
.roma 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 .roma domain?
You can’t yet. A .roma 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 .roma was .koeln, delegated on 5 March 2014.
Is .roma a real TLD?
Not yet. .roma is not in the DNS root, so nothing resolves under it. It’s here because .roma is on ICANN’s Reveal Day list of applied-for strings. Every entry on this page links to its source.
- Aruba · now confirmedICANN
- Aruba · first recordedDomain Name Wire (Andrew Allemann), quoting Aruba S.p.A.
“Aruba S.p.A., which operates the .cloud top level domain, is expanding its domain portfolio. The company told Domain Name Wire that it applied for 39 top level domains in this year's new TLD round. That number includes replacement strings. [...] The company applied for the following strings as primary or replacement: aid, all, ask, beta, bit, bnb, cart, ciao, daily, demo, easy, fix, gaming, gen, genius, gym, happy, hello, hola, human, kit, lab, mars, max, moon, omg, pec, pop, rem, roma, sign, sito, super, tag, tex, vps, yes, zen, zzz”Domain Name Wire (Andrew Allemann), quoting Aruba S.p.A.
- Band chosen: 30-49 (usable but limited). Rome is one of the most recognizable city names in the world, and the Italian-language form .roma reads naturally as a local identity for hotels, restaurants, tours, real estate, and civic or cultural projects, which gives it a genuine geographic buyer base rather than a vanity one. By analogy (flagged as analogy), city TLDs from the 2012 round such as .berlin, .london, .paris, .amsterdam, .tokyo and .nyc found real but plateauing demand: registrations concentrated in local SMBs and hospitality, primary-identity use remained a minority, and aftermarket values stayed thin, with .nyc among the stronger performers only because of sustained city promotion. It is not in the 50-69 band because Italian businesses default heavily to .it, and no city TLD has (to my knowledge, by analogy) become a default identity inside its own market without institutional promotion; it is not in the 10-29 band because a major world city name carries durable, non-event-driven local and tourism demand that a joke or vanity string lacks. Main market uncertainty: whether the city of Rome, its tourism bodies, and Italian registrars actively promote and adopt .roma, or whether it lands as a defensive/vanity registration lane beside .it. Applicant context (neutral, from the facts block): Aruba S.p.A. is an Italian hosting company and operator of .cloud, so it has an Italian distribution channel, which modestly favors local adoption; Aruba lists .roma among 39 strings applied for as primary or replacement without specifying which.