.ihop
Is .ihop a real TLD? Who’s applying to run it?
.ihop is not contested. One application for it is on ICANN’s Reveal Day list, as of 7 October 2026. It is Dine Brands Global, Inc..
A single-company brand domain: useful only to its owner for marketing links, with no open registrations or resale market.
the applicant company itself and its marketing team; no third-party buyers, since a brand-type TLD is closed to outside registrants
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 single franchised consumer restaurant chain putting its registered trademark on a TLD it alone would ever use, where value comes entirely from existing brand recognition rather than from the word meaning anything to anyone else.
Same bet in the same shortened form the target takes — a restaurant company's clipped/initialism house mark, which only works if the public already reads those letters as the company, so the string carries zero generic fallback value.
Also a restaurant operator's own name as a closed brand TLD, but the bet rests on a luxury hospitality house's prestige with a narrow clientele rather than a mass-market franchise's household familiarity.
What a .ihop domain is
.ihop 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 .ihop domain extension real yet?
.ihop 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 .ihop domain?
You can’t yet. ICANN publishes every applied-for string on Reveal Day, 7 October 2026 at 18:00 UTC. A .ihop name can only be registered after that, once the string is delegated and its registry opens.
Is .ihop a real TLD?
Not yet. .ihop is not in the DNS root, so nothing resolves under it. It’s here because .ihop is on ICANN’s Reveal Day list of applied-for strings. Every entry on this page links to its source.
- Dine Brands Global, Inc. · first recordedICANN
“DIN2676T-T31000 · Dine Brands Global, Inc. · primary”ICANN
- Band chosen: 10-29 (vanity/narrow). The record shows one application, by Dine Brands Global, Inc., with ICANN application type 'brand'; the string matches a well-known restaurant brand name (general knowledge, not a recorded fact). A brand-type TLD is a closed namespace: the only realistic user is the owning company, so there is no open registration volume, no third-party primary-identity use, and no aftermarket, which rules out the 30-49 band (that band needs registrations at volume or on price). It is above the 1-9 band because the owner has a genuine, if modest, use case: short campaign redirects, loyalty or store-locator links, and defensive brand consistency, which by analogy with earlier-round dot-brands sometimes becomes real customer-facing use and sometimes stays dormant (inference from analogy, outcomes vary widely). Main market uncertainty: whether the owner actually routes customer-facing traffic through the TLD or keeps it as an unused defensive asset; dormant dot-brands by analogy tend to be retired within a few years, which would push toward the bottom of the band, while active use of a memorable short string for promotions would support the upper half.