Is .facebook a real TLD? Who’s applying to run it?
.facebook is not contested. One application for it is on ICANN’s Reveal Day list, as of 7 October 2026. It is Meta.
A brand-owned namespace: useful to Facebook itself as a trusted address, but no open market or resale value for anyone else.
the brand owner and its product teams, who would use it for official links, login and anti-phishing trust signals rather than selling names to outsiders
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 coined, meaningless-on-its-own company name that a global consumer-internet firm owns outright and uses as its primary corporate identity, applied for so the firm controls its own namespace rather than to sell or to claim a category.
Same bet at the platform level: the proper name of a mass social network whose value rests on hundreds of millions of people already treating that word as the place they post, so the string's worth is entirely the installed user base behind it, not any generic meaning.
Same shape of string and same user-generated-social-platform bet, but it is a subsidiary platform brand carried by a parent company rather than the applicant's own corporate identity, which makes the ownership story one step less direct.
What a .facebook domain is
.facebook is not a TLD yet. It is a string on our record of the ICANN 2026 new gTLD round, filed under Brand. One application for it is on ICANN’s Reveal Day list.
Is the .facebook domain extension real yet?
.facebook 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 .facebook domain?
You can’t yet. ICANN publishes every applied-for string on Reveal Day, 7 October 2026 at 18:00 UTC. A .facebook name can only be registered after that, once the string is delegated and its registry opens. Last round's closest parallel to .facebook was .google, delegated on 15 September 2014.
Is .facebook a real TLD?
Not yet. .facebook is not in the DNS root, so nothing resolves under it. It’s here because .facebook is on ICANN’s Reveal Day list of applied-for strings. Every entry on this page links to its source.
- Meta · first recordedICANN
“MRHL2653T-T68583 · Meta Registry Holdings LLC · primary”ICANN
- The verified record shows a single application from Meta Registry Holdings LLC, which points to a dot-brand string rather than an open generic; the string is a well-known trademark, so third-party demand is effectively foreclosed even if the registry were technically generally available. By analogy (flagged as such), earlier-round dot-brands tied to large consumer platforms have mostly been used for redirects, campaign links and official-channel trust signals, with some operators making visible primary use and many making little or none; the string itself is one of the most recognised consumer names, which raises the odds of meaningful internal use (for example an official-links or verification namespace) compared with a typical dot-brand. Band chosen: 10-29 (vanity/narrow). Not 30-49 because registrations at volume or on price will not happen and there is no aftermarket at all, which is the floor of 'usable but limited'. Not 1-9 because a serious project, the brand's own products, plausibly adopts it as a primary or official identity, and a trademark-backed anti-phishing address has real end-use utility within the next 5 years. Main market uncertainty: whether the operator moves core user-facing surfaces onto the string or confines it to marketing redirects; the former would lift the score toward the top of the band, the latter leaves it near the bottom. Registration counts, pricing and usage figures are unknown.