.bug
Is .bug a real TLD? Who’s applying to run it?
.bug is not contested. One application for it is on ICANN’s Reveal Day list, as of 7 October 2026. It is Oinkadot.
Who is applying, and what they run today
Oinkadot filed 25 applications across the round.
Will names sell?
A playful name ending for bug trackers, security pages, and pest control; fun for a few, rarely a serious company's main address.
Last round the AI scored the 2012 strings blind to their fate. Strings it scored 60 or more hold a median 27,168 names today; those under 30, a median of 30. .bug’s closest 2012 strings hold .bot 23K, .foo 5K and .gripe 2K.
The nearest 2012 strings, and how many names each holds today
The closest 2012 string, .bot, held 23,099 names, June 2026. .foo held 4,650; .gripe held 1,669. Chosen by AI from every string in the 2012 round, without being told what happened to any of them.
Same bet: a short everyday-looking English noun that software people have annexed as their own vocabulary, sold to builders of a specific technical artifact who would put their primary identity on the word for the thing they make (or hunt).
Same bet on developer vernacular, where the string's value depends entirely on the engineering in-crowd recognizing it and it means nothing to anyone else, so adoption rides on dev tooling rather than a broad category market.
Both are short common nouns naming a problem or defect rather than a business category, with no incumbent industry that owns the word, so the bet is on connotation pulling in issue-and-complaint uses rather than on a defined buyer pool.
software teams and security researchers wanting a memorable home for bug reports, bug bounty, and disclosure pages, plus pest-control businesses and insect enthusiasts who see the literal word as a fit
What a .bug domain is
.bug is not a TLD yet. It is a string on our record of the ICANN 2026 new gTLD round, in our AI & tech category. One application for it is on ICANN’s Reveal Day list.
Is the .bug domain extension real yet?
.bug 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 .bug domain?
You can’t yet. A .bug 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 .bug was .bot, delegated on 5 December 2015.
Is .bug a real TLD?
Not yet. .bug is not in the DNS root, so nothing resolves under it. It’s here because .bug is on ICANN’s Reveal Day list of applied-for strings. Every entry on this page links to its source.
- Oinkadot · now confirmedICANN
- Oinkadot · first recordedDomain Name Wire (Andrew Allemann)
“A new partnership has applied for 25 top level domain names in this year's ICANN TLD expansion round.”Domain Name Wire (Andrew Allemann)
- Band chosen: 30-49, usable but limited. The string has two coherent buyer stories: a developer/security angle (bug reporting, bug bounty, QA tooling, disclosure pages) and a literal one (pest control, entomology). But in both, .bug reads as a clever secondary address, not a primary identity; the word carries a negative connotation in software (a bug is a defect), which weakens it as a brand signal for the very audience most likely to notice it. It is not in the 50-69 band because there is no evidence of sustained primary-identity demand and adoption would need explaining to nearly every buyer; it is above the 10-29 band because the developer-tooling and pest-control use cases are functional and recurring, not purely event-driven or joke registrations, and the applicant context (both Oinkadot principals run consumer registrars, per the verified facts) plausibly gives it real retail shelf placement, which by analogy tends to help volume for quirky strings. By analogy with other short, witty tech-adjacent TLDs, such strings typically see modest registration volume driven by novelty and price promotion, a thin aftermarket, and occasional standout single uses rather than category-standard status; that analogy, not any measured data, is the basis here, and specific volumes for those analogs are unknown. Main market uncertainty: whether the security/bug-bounty community treats .bug as a recognized convention for disclosure and bounty pages (which would push it toward the top of this band or above) or whether it settles as a novelty/redirect namespace with the negative-connotation problem capping serious use.