Aruba S.p.A., the Italian hosting company that runs .cloud, has applied to ICANN’s 2026 round for 39 top-level domain strings, the company told Domain Name Wire. The number covers both primary applications and replacement strings, and the disclosure is voluntary: ICANN has not yet published its official applicant list.
The list is a departure from the one namespace Aruba already operates. The technical picks include vps, demo, beta, lab and kit. Beside them sit Italian-market strings including sito, roma, ciao and pec, the abbreviation Italy uses for certified email, and a run of everyday words from hello and hola to happy, easy, super and zzz.
What has changed since Aruba last did this is the part worth a hosting operator’s attention. It won .cloud in the 2012 round by a route ICANN has since outlawed.
Key facts
- The filing: 39 strings, primaries and replacements together, per Domain Name Wire. How many are distinct primary applications has not been said.
- The round: ICANN logged more than 1,600 primary applications when the window closed on August 12, over 1,100 of them carrying replacement strings.
- Nothing is official yet: ICANN has not published its applicant list. ICANN expects to name the Reveal Day date in mid-September and to publish no later than nine weeks after the window closed.
- The rule that changed: private auctions between applicants are banned. Unresolved contention can ultimately go to an auction ICANN runs itself.
A Portfolio Aimed at Three Different Buyers
Francesco Simondi, head of registry services at Aruba, described the spread to Domain Name Wire in terms of audience rather than theme. “We are building a portfolio that speaks to different audiences and markets,” he said. “Everything from vertical-specific domains to everyday language variants, giving registrars and end-users real choice.”
Read against the list, that resolves into three groups. The first group is the one a hosting company would find easiest to sell into its own base, and the most direct of them is vps. The Italian set is a home-market play, and pec in particular maps onto Italy’s legally recognized certified email system. The everyday words are the broader, more speculative part of the portfolio.
Aruba is not widely known outside its region, but Domain Name Wire describes it as a dominant player for web presence in Italy with services elsewhere in Europe. Its one existing TLD, .cloud, has passed 500,000 registrations, on that publication’s figure, and it won the string by outbidding Amazon, Google and others.
The Route That Won .cloud Is Closed
That win came in a private auction, the mechanism applicants used among themselves to settle who took a contested string, with the winner paying the losers to withdraw. Most contests of that round never reached an ICANN auction: of 234 contention sets only 16 did, and the rest ended in withdrawals, community priority evaluations or private deals.
The 2026 Applicant Guidebook removes that option. ICANN’s own processes, up to and including an auction it runs itself, are described there as the only permissible path to resolving contention, with private auctions and joint ventures named among the banned routes. The penalties are not procedural: they run to disqualification from this round and future ones, forfeiture of evaluation fees and legal action.
That changes the arithmetic for every applicant holding a contested string, Aruba included. At $227,000 per application, an applicant who loses a contest and has nowhere to go is out roughly $150,000 under the standard refund schedule, where in the 2012 round the same position was a negotiating chip.
Why 39 Includes Fallbacks
This is where the replacement strings in Aruba’s total stop looking like padding. An applicant that finds itself in a contention set on Reveal Day gets 14 days to switch to a declared fallback, without paying another application fee. Naming replacements in advance is the one free exit left from a contest an applicant does not want.
How much of Aruba’s 39 is fallback rather than first choice has not been disclosed, which also means its exposure cannot be worked out from the number. Domain Name Wire reports that many of the strings collide with ones other applicants have announced, though those collisions rest on voluntary disclosures rather than anything ICANN has published.
The disclosure itself is the point for now. Aruba chose to show its hand before it had to. Reveal Day will give the first official view of which of its strings already face direct competition, in a round where a contested string can no longer be settled privately.
