.island
Is .island a real TLD? Who’s applying to run it?
.island is contested: 2 applications for it are on ICANN’s Reveal Day list, as of 7 October 2026. They are Cook Islands Internet Action Group and Vant Nexus. XYZ Registry named .island as a backup string for its .bnb application. ICANN deactivated it, because another applicant applied for the same string or named it as a backup.
A niche TLD for island resorts, tourism boards, ferry and charter operators, real-estate agents, and lifestyle brands marketing a specific island; secondarily hobby and community sites for island residents.
Who is applying, and how much each already runs
One of the 3 is tied to a registry that runs TLDs today. XYZ Registry and Vant Nexus filed 142 applications between them across the round.
The nearest 2012 strings, and how many names each holds today
The closest 2012 string, .town, held 18,596 names, June 2026. .city held 34,258; .land held 22,680. Chosen by AI from every string in the 2012 round, without being told what happened to any of them.
Same bet: a small, generic place-type noun run as an open registry for the entities that literally are one, with local businesses, tourism bodies and residents putting geographic identity on the right-hand side at community scale rather than mass commercial volume.
Also a bare settlement/place-category noun whose value depends on place-based organizations adopting their own geography as their namespace, differing from the target mainly in the size of the eligible population, not in the kind of word or the kind of buyer.
The same generic landform-noun bet usable both as literal geography and as a compound suffix for coined destination names, though it skews further toward playful suffix wordplay than toward a real community's self-description.
island resorts, tourism boards, ferry and charter operators, real-estate agents, and lifestyle brands marketing a specific island; secondarily hobby and community sites for island residents
What a .island domain is
.island is not a TLD yet. It is a string on our record of the ICANN 2026 new gTLD round, in our Places category. 2 applications for it are on ICANN’s Reveal Day list.
Is the .island domain extension real yet?
.island 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 .island domain?
You can’t yet. A .island 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 .island was .town, delegated on 11 April 2014.
Is .island a real TLD?
Not yet. .island is not in the DNS root, so nothing resolves under it. It’s here because .island is on ICANN’s Reveal Day list of applied-for strings. Every entry on this page links to its source.
- XYZ Registry · first recordedICANN
- Cook Islands Internet Action Group · first recordedICANN
- Vant Nexus · now confirmedICANN
- Vant Nexus · first recordedVant Nexus Technologies LLC
“CIIA2564-T39435 · Cook Islands Internet Action Group Inc. · primary · contention set 2026-124 VNTL2649T-T68087 · VANT NEXUS TECHNOLOGIES LLC · primary · contention set 2026-124 XL2625T-T80284 · XYZ.COM LLC · replacement string of .bnb · Deactivated”ICANN
“CIIA2564-T39435 · Cook Islands Internet Action Group Inc. · primary · contention set 2026-124 VNTL2649T-T68087 · VANT NEXUS TECHNOLOGIES LLC · primary · contention set 2026-124”ICANN
“Vant Nexus Technologies LLC has applied to ICANN for the .PORTAL, .ISLAND, and .TRUCK gTLDs.”Vant Nexus Technologies LLC
- Band chosen: 30-49, usable but limited. .island is a clean, universally understood English noun that reads naturally as a suffix (<name>.island) and maps to a real commercial cluster: island tourism, resorts, ferries, property, and destination marketing. That gives it a plausible reason to exist above the vanity band (10-29): a resort or tourism operator could credibly run <islandname>.island as a marketing identity, and the demand is recurring rather than event-driven. It is not in the strong-niche band (50-69) because, by analogy to descriptive-noun new gTLDs aimed at travel and place (for example .travel, .vacations, .voyage, .holiday, .city), such strings have generally seen modest registration volumes, a great deal of defensive or speculative holding, and thin aftermarkets; the buyers who care most about an island's identity usually already hold a strong .com or the relevant ccTLD (many islands are themselves ccTLDs or sit under national codes), so adoption needs explaining and rarely becomes the primary identity. Flagged as analogy: these outcomes are inferred from comparable TLD categories, not from any figure about .island itself; registration counts and pricing are unknown. The applicant, Vant Nexus Technologies LLC, a Dubai-headquartered digital infrastructure company, has announced applications for .PORTAL, .ISLAND and .TRUCK; that is stated neutrally and mostly signals the string will be operated as a generic open TLD rather than a brand-restricted one, which supports availability but says little about marketing reach. Main market uncertainty: whether tourism and hospitality marketers actually treat a place-word TLD as a primary identity or only as a redirect, and whether the operator's pricing lands in the impulse range or the premium range, which within the next 5 years would shift this between the low and high end of the 30-49 band.