.met
Is .met a real TLD? Who’s applying to run it?
.met is not contested. One applicant has said publicly that it applied to run it, and nobody else has, as of 15 August 2026. It is Link Freedom Group.
Short and catchy with 'we met' and metro-city vibes, but too ambiguous to be any industry's default; a niche lifestyle pick.
lifestyle and social brands: dating and meetup apps that can use the 'we met' hook, city-culture media, events and nightlife projects wanting a short metropolitan-flavored ending
In LFG's published list of 300+ strings submitted before the ICANN window closed on 2026-08-12. Their catalog tagline: “City energy, global reach.”
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: a single revered non-profit institution claiming the three-letter shorthand the public already calls it by, accepting that the string is a generic word/fragment to everyone else and betting institutional prestige alone justifies owning it.
Same bet: the colloquial contraction of a long corporate name registered as a second, shorter identity alongside the full legal-name string, where the value is entirely in the nickname's existing recall rather than in any meaning the letters carry.
Same bet in kind — the affectionate public nickname rather than the registered name — but it is an unambiguous single-owner nickname, whereas the target's defining problem is that several large institutions answer to it equally.
What a .met domain is
.met is not a TLD yet. It is a string on our record of the ICANN 2026 new gTLD round, filed under Culture. One applicant has said publicly that it applied for .met.
Is the .met domain extension real yet?
.met 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 .met domain?
You can’t yet. ICANN publishes every applied-for string on Reveal Day, 7 October 2026 at 18:00 UTC. A .met name can only be registered after that, once the string is delegated and its registry opens. Last round's closest parallel to .met was .mit, delegated on .
Is .met a real TLD?
Not yet. .met is not in the DNS root, so nothing resolves under it. It’s here because an applicant said publicly that it applied for .met in the ICANN 2026 new gTLD round. Every claim on this page links to its source.
- Link Freedom Group · first recordedLink Freedom Group
“.met · Lifestyle · “City energy, global reach.””Link Freedom Group
“LFG voluntarily published its full list of submissions ahead of ICANN’s official Reveal Day.”PR Newswire (Link Freedom Group)
“Top level domain registry Link Freedom Group (LFG) has disclosed more than 300 strings submitted as part of the ICANN new top level domain name program.”Domain Name Wire (Andrew Allemann)
- Band chosen: 30-49 (usable but limited). The string is short, pronounceable, and semantically rich in several directions at once: past tense of 'meet' (social, dating, events), the metro/metropolitan prefix (city lifestyle, which matches the applicant's published 'Lifestyle' framing and 'City energy, global reach.' tagline), and the common short name of several prominent cultural and civic institutions, which it does not exclusively evoke. That very ambiguity is the problem: no single buyer category reads .met and instantly knows what it signals, so every serious use needs explaining and the brand signal stays weak. It is not in the 50-69 band because there is no visible sustained demand base or category where .met would be a natural primary identity; comparable evocative lifestyle strings have, by analogy, tended toward volume or promotional registrations rather than durable primary-identity use. It is not in the 10-29 band because the meet/metro hooks are real enough that social, events, and city-media projects could plausibly adopt it seriously over the next 5 years, and a three-letter ending has memorability that pure joke strings lack. Applicant context, stated neutrally: the applicant filed a very large portfolio of strings and published its list before Reveal Day, which suggests a broad portfolio strategy rather than a single-string community push; that makes deep category-specific marketing investment less certain and tempers adoption likelihood. Main market uncertainty: whether the 'we met' framing gets picked up by dating/social products as a naming convention, which would concentrate demand into one clear use case, versus the string staying diffuse across metro/lifestyle meanings with no anchor. Exact registration volumes, pricing, and any institutional interest in the string: unknown.