Aruba applies for 39 strings, its first portfolio beyond .cloud

Aruba S.p.A. told Domain Name Wire on 9 September 2026 that it applied for 39 top-level domain strings in the 2026 round, and that the figure includes replacement strings. It is the company’s first disclosed portfolio beyond .cloud, which IANA’s delegation record shows has been in the root since 2015 under ARUBA PEC S.p.A.

The strings, alphabetically: .aid, .all, .ask, .beta, .bit, .bnb, .cart, .ciao, .daily, .demo, .easy, .fix, .gaming, .gen, .genius, .gym, .happy, .hello, .hola, .human, .kit, .lab, .mars, .max, .moon, .omg, .pec, .pop, .rem, .roma, .sign, .sito, .super, .tag, .tex, .vps, .yes, .zen and .zzz.

Francesco Simondi, whom the article names as Head of Registry Services and whom IANA lists as the administrative contact for .cloud, is quoted describing the portfolio as one “that speaks to different audiences and markets”, from vertical-specific domains to everyday language variants.

Which are primary is not public

The article states the 39 were applied for “as primary or replacement” and does not separate them. Because the count itself includes replacements, the number of applications behind the portfolio is not public either, and this tracker records the strings rather than an application count.

That decides how every overlap below reads. A replacement string is reachable only if the primary it rides with fails, so two applicants naming the same string are in a contention set only when both filed it as primary. None of these 39 can be read that way on this source, and the article’s own remark that many of the strings “conflict with those announced by other applicants” is a statement about overlapping announcements, not about confirmed contention.

Italian and European strings, and the rest

Eleven of the 39 are new to these records: .beta, .ciao, .daily, .gaming, .hola, .pec, .rem, .roma, .sito, .tex and .vps. That group is where the portfolio’s Italian and European character is visible. .ciao, .sito and .roma are Italian words, .hola is Spanish, and .pec is the abbreviation for posta elettronica certificata, Italy’s certified electronic mail standard, which the company operates as Aruba PEC.

The other 28 already carried at least one public claimant. Six of them had exactly one, so adding Aruba moves .all, .bnb, .cart, .demo, .genius and .human from a single current claimant to more than one. The catalog moves from 766 current strings to 777, and strings with more than one public claimant move from 132 to 138.

.bit now carries six public claimants, more than any other string in these records: dnrater, Link Freedom Group, Oinkadot, Radix, ShortDot and Aruba. Two of those six state .bit as a primary string; the other four, Aruba included, do not say.

Aruba’s largest overlap is with ShortDot, disclosed the day before: fifteen strings appear in both portfolios. They are .aid, .ask, .bit, .fix, .gen, .gym, .lab, .max, .moon, .omg, .pop, .tag, .yes, .zen and .zzz. Neither company has said which of its own strings are primary, so the overlap is fifteen rows on which two applicants have both spoken and nothing more than that.

Only ICANN’s own publication can establish the applicant list for any of these strings, and which application in each pair is the primary. Until then these 39 rows record a public disclosure, not a filing ICANN has confirmed.