.soc
Is .soc a real TLD? Who’s applying to run it?
.soc is not contested. One application for it is on ICANN’s Reveal Day list, as of 7 October 2026. It is Internet Society Hong Kong Limited.
A short, ambiguous abbreviation: some societies and security teams may use it, but most will not see it as a serious home address.
societies, associations and social clubs looking for a short alternative to .org, plus security-operations teams and social-impact projects drawn to the "soc" abbreviation
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 three-letter clipping asked to stand in for a whole sector's full word, sold on brevity and insider shorthand, and carrying more than one plausible expansion that the registry has to resolve for buyers.
Same job and the same buyer — an open generic claim on the social/community sector that organizations would put their primary identity on — but it is the spelled-out word, so it does not take the recognition gamble that the clipped form does.
Also a clipped sector abbreviation betting that the trade already says the short form out loud, with the full word filed beside it, which makes it the same structural wager on an abbreviation rather than a topical neighbour.
What a .soc domain is
.soc 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 .soc domain extension real yet?
.soc 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 .soc domain?
You can’t yet. ICANN publishes every applied-for string on Reveal Day, 7 October 2026 at 18:00 UTC. A .soc name can only be registered after that, once the string is delegated and its registry opens. Last round's closest parallel to .soc was .med, delegated on 3 December 2015.
Is .soc a real TLD?
Not yet. .soc is not in the DNS root, so nothing resolves under it. It’s here because .soc is on ICANN’s Reveal Day list of applied-for strings. Every entry on this page links to its source.
- Internet Society Hong Kong Limited · first recordedICANN
“ISHK2515-T42326 · Internet Society Hong Kong Limited · primary”ICANN
- Band chosen: 10-29 (vanity/joke/narrow). The string "soc" is a three-letter abbreviation that reads several ways at once (society, social, sociology, security operations centre, system-on-chip, soccer) and none of those readings has a community that is currently short of a namespace: societies and associations already default to .org, social projects have .social and .community as existing options, and security vendors brand on .com or .io. By analogy (flagged as such), nonprofit-oriented strings such as .ngo and .ong drew thin uptake against .org, and abbreviation-style generics tend to see shallow, launch-driven registrations with weak renewal strength. It is not in the 30-49 band because there is no evident volume or price-driven registration engine behind it and the brand signal is weak: "name.soc" does not read naturally in English and needs explaining. It is not in the 1-9 band because a genuine, if narrow, niche exists: Hong Kong and regional societies, student and professional associations, and security-operations teams could adopt it as a short-form or secondary identity, and the verified record shows one confirmed applicant (Internet Society Hong Kong Limited, ICANN application ID ISHK2515-T42326, Applicant Support Program) with a related .res application naming .soc as its primary, which points to a regionally anchored operator plan rather than a pure vanity play. Main market uncertainty: whether the operator positions .soc as a community namespace for societies (deepening primary-identity use among a small group) or as an open generic (broader but shallower uptake); either way, aftermarket value over the next 5 years looks thin.