.ulm
Is .ulm a real TLD? Who’s applying to run it?
.ulm is not contested. One application for it is on ICANN’s Reveal Day list, as of 7 October 2026. It is SWU TeleNet.
A civic address for one mid-sized German city: useful to local shops, clubs and public bodies, with little value beyond the city.
local businesses, associations, public institutions and residents of Ulm and the surrounding region who want a visibly hometown address
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 as .ulm: a mid-sized, non-capital European city whose own municipal government puts the city's local-language name up as a civic namespace, betting that a few hundred thousand residents and local businesses will re-identify under it rather than a national ccTLD.
Also a German city applying under its own German-language spelling as the primary identity for local civic and commercial registrants — the identical city-as-namespace bet, differing mainly in the size of the local market it has to convert.
Another German-speaking city name run as a municipal geo-namespace with the same "locals adopt their city" premise, but it rides a far larger and wealthier commercial base, so what has to be true for it to work is much easier than for a small Swabian city.
What a .ulm domain is
.ulm 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 .ulm domain extension real yet?
.ulm 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 .ulm domain?
You can’t yet. A .ulm 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 .ulm was .gent, delegated on 13 July 2014.
Is .ulm a real TLD?
Not yet. .ulm is not in the DNS root, so nothing resolves under it. It’s here because .ulm is on ICANN’s Reveal Day list of applied-for strings. Every entry on this page links to its source.
- SWU TeleNet · first recordedICANN
- Band chosen: 10-29 (vanity/narrow), near the top of it. .ulm is a geographic-name application for one mid-sized German city, with a single applicant on the record, SWU TeleNet GmbH (application type recorded as geographic name). Germany has one of the most developed city-TLD cultures in the market; by analogy, .berlin, .hamburg, .koeln and .cologne, plus regional strings such as .bayern, .nrw and .saarland, achieved genuine primary-identity use by local businesses, clubs and public bodies, and a locally rooted operator tends to help a civic string get adopted by the city's own services. That is why this is not in the 1-9 band: there is a realistic, if small, local market. It is not in the 30-49 band because a city of Ulm's size has a much thinner pool of businesses and institutions than the capital- and state-level German strings; by analogy, smaller German city and regional strings have run at a fraction of the big-city strings' registrations, demand is almost entirely local and non-transferable, and the aftermarket for second-level names is close to nonexistent. Over the next 5 years the plausible outcome is modest, stable local registrations used mostly as a secondary or promotional identity alongside .de, which remains the national default. Main market uncertainty: whether the city administration and major local institutions move their primary web identities onto .ulm, which would lift credibility and local uptake, or treat it as a redirect-only vanity layer. Registration counts, pricing and launch dates are unknown.