.avocat
Is .avocat a real TLD? Who’s applying to run it?
.avocat is not contested. One application for it is on ICANN’s Reveal Day list, as of 7 October 2026. It is Barreau de Bordeaux.
A French-language lawyers' namespace: credible for law firms if the bar backs it, but .fr and .com stay the default.
french-speaking lawyers, law firms and bar associations in France, Belgium, Switzerland, Quebec and francophone Africa who want a profession-marked 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.
Identical bet: a regulated profession's own title in a single non-English language, sold to individual practitioners and small firms as their primary identity, and workable only if the registry can verify bar membership inside a language-bounded professional community.
Same profession and same buyer putting a practice identity on the string, but the bet is on an open global English market rather than on one language's bar-regulated community, so the verification and demand assumptions differ.
Also a bare professional title aimed at practitioners themselves, but it bets on the breadth of the English-speaking legal market instead of a narrow, language-defined professional cohort the way .avocat must.
What a .avocat domain is
.avocat is not a TLD yet. It is a string on our record of the ICANN 2026 new gTLD round, filed under Commerce. One application for it is on ICANN’s Reveal Day list.
Is the .avocat domain extension real yet?
.avocat 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 .avocat domain?
You can’t yet. ICANN publishes every applied-for string on Reveal Day, 7 October 2026 at 18:00 UTC. A .avocat name can only be registered after that, once the string is delegated and its registry opens. Last round's closest parallel to .avocat was .abogado, delegated on 15 October 2014.
Is .avocat a real TLD?
Not yet. .avocat is not in the DNS root, so nothing resolves under it. It’s here because .avocat is on ICANN’s Reveal Day list of applied-for strings. Every entry on this page links to its source.
- Barreau de Bordeaux · first recordedICANN
“ODAC2678T-T94227 · ORDRE DES AVOCATS COUR APPEL · primary”ICANN
- Band chosen: 30-49 (usable but limited). "Avocat" is the French word for lawyer, and the single recorded applicant, ORDRE DES AVOCATS COUR APPEL, is a bar body (application ODAC2678T-T94227, status confirmed on the ICANN Reveal Day list, 7 October 2026). A bar-sponsored professional TLD is best read by analogy to the English-language legal strings from the earlier round (.lawyer, .attorney, .law, .legal) and the Spanish .abogado: by analogy, those produced steady but modest registration bases, genuine primary-identity use by a minority of firms, and thin aftermarkets, with the Spanish-language analogue adopted more weakly than the English ones. Francophone law firms overwhelmingly anchor on .fr and .com, and the string also means "avocado", which dilutes the professional signal in general search and social contexts. It is not in the 50-69 band because there is no evidence of demand that would pull serious firms off .fr without explanation, and a likely eligibility restriction (bar membership) caps volume and largely removes aftermarket value. It is not in the 10-29 band because, unlike a vanity string, a bar-operated namespace can function as a verifiable credential mark (analogy: regulated-sector TLDs such as .bank and .pharmacy, which reached real if narrow primary-identity use), and the francophone legal profession is a large, well-defined buyer group with a recurring need for trusted addresses. Main market uncertainty: whether the operator restricts registration to bar-admitted lawyers and promotes it as a trust mark (pushing toward the upper part of this band) or opens it generally (pushing it toward the lower part, with little to distinguish it from .lawyer-style strings). Registration counts, pricing and policy are unknown.