.paws
Is .paws a real TLD? Who’s applying to run it?
Nobody has applied for .paws in its own right, as of 7 October 2026. Qaten named .paws as the replacement string of its .astro application.
A cute pet-business address that will mostly compete with .pet and .com for small groomers, shelters and pet brands.
pet-care businesses, shelters, rescues, pet-product brands and pet-focused creators who want a playful name instead of a generic one
No applications recorded for this TLD yet.
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 plural, warm, generic pet-world noun that any pet business, shelter or pet-owner community could put its primary identity on, with no owner of the word and no vertical gatekeeper — .paws is just the side-door, metonymic version of the same namespace.
Same open-category pet bet aimed at the same buyers (vets, groomers, pet brands, rescues); it needs the same thing to be true — that the pet vertical is cohesive enough for people to re-identify under a non-.com pet word.
Same kind of unowned animal-affection noun sold to the same pet-owner and pet-commerce audience, but it narrows the bet to one species rather than standing in for the whole pet world the way .paws does.
What a .paws domain is
.paws is not a TLD yet. It is a string on our record of the ICANN 2026 new gTLD round, filed under Commerce. Nobody has applied for .paws in its own right. It is named on ICANN’s list as part of an application for another string.
Is the .paws domain extension real yet?
.paws is not yet a domain extension you can register: nothing resolves under it, and no registrar sells names in it. Nobody has applied for it on the public record; the ICANN 2026 new gTLD round is the process that would decide whether it becomes one.
When can you buy a .paws domain?
You can’t yet. ICANN publishes every applied-for string on Reveal Day, 7 October 2026 at 18:00 UTC. A .paws name can only be registered after that, once the string is delegated and its registry opens.
Is .paws a real TLD?
Not yet. .paws is not in the DNS root, so nothing resolves under it. It’s here because ICANN’s list names .paws as part of an application for another string. Every entry on this page links to its source.
- Qaten · first recordedICANN
“LMDL2690T-T89453 · La maison Digitale Ltd · replacement string of .astro”ICANN
- Band chosen: 10-29 (vanity/narrow), at the upper edge. The string is a playful, pet-themed word that already appears constantly in small pet-business naming (groomers, walkers, rescues, boutiques), so there is a real if shallow pool of buyers who would find 'happy.paws'-style names charming. It is not in the 30-49 band because the pet category already has more generic TLD options (.pet and .dog, by analogy) whose adoption has been modest rather than category-defining, and .paws is a narrower, more whimsical variant that must compete with those and with .com for the same small-business buyers; volume registrations are unlikely without aggressive pricing, and the aftermarket for pet-themed names is thin. It is not in the 1-9 band because the pet-care economy is large and fragmented into many small brands that name themselves with exactly this vocabulary, so sustained low-level demand is plausible for the next 5 years. The record shows one standard application, filed as a replacement string for .astro, with no contention; what that implies for pricing, channel distribution and marketing effort is unknown. Main market uncertainty: whether small local pet businesses, who tend to be conservative about web identity, will treat a whimsical TLD as a credible primary address rather than a redirect or vanity extra. Inference from analogy throughout: outcomes of existing pet-themed TLDs are used qualitatively, no figures asserted.