.stiftung
Is .stiftung a real TLD? Who’s applying to run it?
.stiftung is not contested. One application for it is on ICANN’s Reveal Day list, as of 7 October 2026. It is index Internet und Mediaforschung GmbH.
A German-language namespace for foundations: a real but small sector, with .de and .org likely to stay the default for most of them.
foundations, endowments and philanthropic bodies in German-speaking countries, plus the law firms, banks and advisors that serve them; secondarily German-language nonprofit projects wanting an exact-match institutional label
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.
Identical bet: a German legal-entity-form word whose buyers are exactly the entities that legally carry that form, bounding the market to a German register rather than a topic.
The same institutional-form noun aimed at the same buyer, endowed mission-led organizations naming themselves by what they legally are, differing only in language.
Another German-only generic noun wagering that a regulated institutional German registrant class prefers its own language over .de or .com, though it sells an industry rather than a legal form.
What a .stiftung domain is
.stiftung is not a TLD yet. It is a string on our record of the ICANN 2026 new gTLD round, filed under Other. One application for it is on ICANN’s Reveal Day list.
Is the .stiftung domain extension real yet?
.stiftung 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 .stiftung domain?
You can’t yet. ICANN publishes every applied-for string on Reveal Day, 7 October 2026 at 18:00 UTC. A .stiftung name can only be registered after that, once the string is delegated and its registry opens. Last round's closest parallel to .stiftung was .gmbh, delegated on 9 March 2016.
Is .stiftung a real TLD?
Not yet. .stiftung is not in the DNS root, so nothing resolves under it. It’s here because .stiftung is on ICANN’s Reveal Day list of applied-for strings. Every entry on this page links to its source.
- index Internet und Mediaforschung GmbH · first recordedICANN
“IIUM2696T-T27855 · index Internet und Mediaforschung GmbH · primary”ICANN
- Band chosen: 30-49, usable but limited, at its lower edge. 'Stiftung' is the ordinary German word for a foundation, so the string is an exact-match institutional descriptor for a well-defined, long-lived sector in Germany, Austria and Switzerland; many foundations carry the word in their legal name, which gives a plausible primary-identity use (name.stiftung) rather than a joke or vanity label. That is why it is not in the 10-29 band: demand would be institutional and durable, not event-driven. It is not in the 50-69 band because foundations are conservative registrants that already sit on .de, .ch, .at or .org, rarely rebrand their web identity, and face no pressure to move; by analogy (flagged as analogy) the German-language descriptive TLDs from the earlier round reached only modest registration counts and thin aftermarkets, with the legal-form string .gmbh doing better than sector words like .versicherung or .reise, and .stiftung sits closer to the sector-word group. Aftermarket value would be thin: exact-match foundation names are mostly unique to one institution, so resale demand is near-absent beyond a handful of generic words. The record shows one standard application from index Internet und Mediaforschung GmbH and no contention, which suggests a single operator setting positioning freely; whether that positioning is restricted/credential-based (which would raise credibility) or open volume (which would dilute it) is unknown. Main market uncertainty: whether the operator prices and restricts the TLD so that it reads as an institutional credential foundations actively want, versus a generic open namespace they ignore.