.meta
Is .meta a real TLD? Who’s applying to run it?
.meta is not contested. One application for it is on ICANN’s Reveal Day list, as of 7 October 2026. It is Meta.
A company-owned name space: useful to its applicant for its own products, but outsiders cannot buy addresses and there is no resale market.
the applicant's own products, services and corporate pages; not a namespace an outside business or individual can register on
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 as .meta's open-registry reading: an abstract technology-era concept word that names a mode or layer rather than a product category, so its value rests on a buzz-concept hardening into durable identity space that no single firm owns.
Also a modifier-as-stance rather than a noun for a thing — buyers put their identity on it to signal what kind of outfit they are, not what they sell, which is exactly the job a registry would sell .meta to do.
Covers .meta's other reading: an ordinary dictionary word that one large company has converted into its own primary identity, so the string's worth turns on whether the corporate meaning overwhelms the common-language one.
What a .meta domain is
.meta 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 .meta domain extension real yet?
.meta 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 .meta domain?
You can’t yet. ICANN publishes every applied-for string on Reveal Day, 7 October 2026 at 18:00 UTC. A .meta name can only be registered after that, once the string is delegated and its registry opens. Last round's closest parallel to .meta was .cloud, delegated on 26 June 2015.
Is .meta a real TLD?
Not yet. .meta is not in the DNS root, so nothing resolves under it. It’s here because .meta is on ICANN’s Reveal Day list of applied-for strings. Every entry on this page links to its source.
- Meta · first recordedICANN
“MRHL2653T-T58277 · Meta Registry Holdings LLC · primary”ICANN
- Band chosen: 10-29 (vanity/narrow), at its top. The record shows one confirmed application for .meta from Meta Registry Holdings LLC, filed under the ICANN application types brand and geographic name, with a contention count of 1. A brand-type TLD is operated for the applicant's own use, so the best-fit buyer is the applicant itself: the string can carry serious primary identities for its own properties (by analogy with earlier-round brand TLDs that moved corporate or product pages onto their own string), which keeps it out of the 1-9 band. It is not in the 30-49 band because that band presumes open registrations at volume or on price and at least a thin aftermarket; a brand-restricted namespace offers neither to third parties, and the string's appeal as a generic word (metaverse, meta-analysis, gaming usage) cannot be captured by anyone other than the operator. The analogy flag: earlier brand TLDs show a wide spread between strings that became genuine primary web identities for their owners and strings that were delegated and then left mostly dormant; which outcome .meta follows is unknown from the record. Main market uncertainty: whether the operator migrates consumer-facing products and its corporate home onto .meta addresses as primary identities, or keeps them on existing second-level .com names and uses .meta for redirects and campaign pages only. Applicant facts are stated neutrally from the record and used only to inform adoption likelihood.