.mall
Is .mall a real TLD? Who’s applying to run it?
.mall is contested: 3 applications for it are on ICANN’s Reveal Day list, as of 7 October 2026. They are XYZ Registry, Identity Digital and Link Freedom Group.
Who is applying, and what they run today
Two of the three already run TLDs, 26.76M names between them. Two run one of .mall's closest 2012 strings: Identity Digital .market and Identity Digital .shopping. Link Freedom Group runs none.
Will names sell?
A shopping-themed web address that sounds dated; most online sellers reach for other commerce endings, so demand is likely thin and price-driven.
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. .mall’s closest 2012 strings hold .shopping 8K, .shop 4.72M and .market 21K.
The nearest 2012 strings, and how many names each holds today
The closest 2012 string, .shopping, held 8,388 names, June 2026. .shop held 4,716,233; .market held 20,973. Chosen by AI from every string in the 2012 round, without being told what happened to any of them.
Same bet: an unowned generic retail-venue noun that no single merchant can claim, sold to the whole population of retailers and e-commerce sellers, and it only works if the registry can convince stores that a category word confers more identity than their own brand.
Same bet in singular form: a plain commerce noun any seller could put a primary storefront identity on, valuable purely as generic retail real estate rather than for anything specific to the string.
Closest structural analog to a mall as a container of many independent sellers under one roof, though the string leaks into financial/trading meaning in a way mall does not, diluting the pure-retail buyer.
Where they meet elsewhere
Identity Digital and XYZ Registry face each other in 77 contests this round, .mall included.
- Identity Digital × XYZ Registry
- Identity Digital × Link Freedom Group
- XYZ Registry × Link Freedom Group
operators of physical shopping centers, multi-vendor marketplace builders, and bargain-oriented e-commerce registrants who want an obviously retail-flavored address on the cheap.
What a .mall domain is
.mall is not a TLD yet. It is a string on our record of the ICANN 2026 new gTLD round, in our Commerce category. 3 applications for it are on ICANN’s Reveal Day list.
Is the .mall domain extension real yet?
.mall 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 .mall domain?
You can’t yet. A .mall 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 .mall was .shopping, delegated on 21 June 2016.
Is .mall a real TLD?
Not yet. .mall is not in the DNS root, so nothing resolves under it. It’s here because .mall is on ICANN’s Reveal Day list of applied-for strings. Every entry on this page links to its source.
- 2 applicants · first recordedICANN
- Link Freedom Group · now confirmedICANN
- Link Freedom Group · first recordedLink Freedom Group
“LFGL2683T-T99880 · Link Freedom Group Ltd · primary · contention set 2026-145 SS2654T-T78139 · Hair Apparent, LLC · primary · contention set 2026-145 XL2625T-T38044 · XYZ.COM LLC · primary · contention set 2026-145”ICANN
“.mall · Commerce · “Shop till you drop.””Link Freedom Group
- Band chosen: usable but limited (30-49). The word is instantly legible and unambiguously retail, so registrations can plausibly happen at volume on price, and there is a real if narrow buyer set: physical shopping centers wanting a branded web home, and multi-vendor marketplace projects for which 'mall' is semantically exact. It is not in the strong-niche band (50-69) because, by analogy to how earlier commerce-generic endings have played out, serious e-commerce projects tend to consolidate on one or two commerce suffixes as their explained default, and 'mall' carries a dated, physical-retail connotation online (the early-web 'cybermall' framing) that works against primary-identity adoption; that is an inference from analogy, not a measured fact. It is not in the vanity band (10-29) because the semantics are genuinely functional rather than a joke: a marketplace or shopping-center site using a .mall address needs little explanation, and physical malls are a concrete, addressable (if shrinking-attention) buyer group. Applicant context, stated neutrally: the string is announced by Link Freedom Group, which filed more than 300 strings in the ICANN 2026 round and published its catalog (Domain Name Wire, 2026-08-13), listing this string under 'Commerce' with the tagline 'Shop till you drop.'; a large-portfolio applicant suggests a volume-registration go-to-market rather than a single-category flagship push, which fits the price-driven adoption profile. Main market uncertainty: whether 'mall' still reads as a live commerce word to online buyers over the next 5 years, or as nostalgic physical-retail vocabulary; if super-app-style multi-vendor 'online mall' branding gains traction in Western markets the way it has connotatively in some Asian e-commerce naming, primary-identity demand could be meaningfully stronger than assumed.