.neko
Is .neko a real TLD? Who’s applying to run it?
.neko is not contested. One application for it is on ICANN’s Reveal Day list, as of 7 October 2026. It is Interlink Systems Innovation Institute K.K..
A fun cat-themed Japanese-word ending for fan sites and pet projects, not a serious business address.
cat-content creators, anime and VTuber fans, and Japanese pop-culture hobby projects wanting a playful, memorable address
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 exactly: a short romanized Japanese word with no corporate owner, sold as a cheap identity flag to a global fandom that already uses the word about itself, so it only works if an online subculture adopts it as self-description.
The companion-animal species noun as an affinity namespace — pet owners, breed clubs and animal-content creators putting personal identity on the animal's own name, rather than a pet-industry category play.
Also a Japanese-origin common noun marketed worldwide as a playful self-label rather than to any institution or industry, but its buyer is anyone claiming a trait, not a community naming the thing it loves.
What a .neko domain is
.neko is not a TLD yet. It is a string on our record of the ICANN 2026 new gTLD round, filed under Culture. One application for it is on ICANN’s Reveal Day list.
Is the .neko domain extension real yet?
.neko 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 .neko domain?
You can’t yet. ICANN publishes every applied-for string on Reveal Day, 7 October 2026 at 18:00 UTC. A .neko name can only be registered after that, once the string is delegated and its registry opens. Last round's closest parallel to .neko was .moe, delegated on 31 March 2014.
Is .neko a real TLD?
Not yet. .neko is not in the DNS root, so nothing resolves under it. It’s here because .neko is on ICANN’s Reveal Day list of applied-for strings. Every entry on this page links to its source.
- Interlink Systems Innovation Institute K.K. · first recordedICANN
“ISII2617T-T77506 · Interlink Systems Innovation Institute K.K. · primary”ICANN
- Band chosen: 10-29 (vanity/joke/narrow), score 21. "Neko" is the Japanese word for cat and a widely recognized term in anime, VTuber and internet-meme culture, so the string is memorable and has a natural fan audience; the applicant is recorded as a standard (non-community) application from a Japanese entity, which makes Japanese-market-focused distribution the likeliest adoption path, and the record also lists .otaku as a replacement string on the same application, suggesting the applicant is targeting Japanese pop-culture strings generally. By analogy (not from data), earlier pet- and culture-themed generic TLDs such as .pet, .dog and .moe found small, hobbyist-driven registrant bases where domains serve as secondary, playful identities rather than the primary address of a serious project, and aftermarket resale on such strings has tended to be thin; .cat is not a useful analogy because it is a Catalan linguistic-community TLD rather than a feline one. It is not in the 30-49 band because there is no evident volume or price-driven registration engine beyond novelty and fan use, and the brand signal for a business is weak; it is not in the 1-9 band because the word is globally recognized, cat content is a durable internet genre, and Japanese fan culture has shown willingness to register themed domains, so some sustained hobbyist demand over the next 5 years is plausible. The main market uncertainty is whether Japanese creators (VTubers, illustrators, maid-cafe style brands, cat-cafe businesses) adopt .neko as a primary identity in meaningful numbers, or whether demand stays at one-off meme and defensive registrations with low renewal.