The mission of .STORY is to provide a namespace associated with the concept of story as a narrative, account, or expression of events, experiences, or ideas. The .STORY gTLD is intended to serve a broad range of registrants and users, including individuals, businesses, organizations, communities, projects, and other entities that identify with, relate to, or wish to be associated with the concept represented by the applied-for string.
The purpose of .STORY is to enable registrants to establish online identities using domain names that correspond to this concept. To achieve this purpose, Fore Course, LLC will make .STORY available for registration through registrars and other appropriate distribution channels; maintain a secure, stable, and reliable registry infrastructure; implement registration and operational policies that support the availability, security, and integrity of the namespace; and provide ongoing administration of the gTLD to enable registrants to register and use domain names within the namespace.
The purpose of .STORY is sustainable over time because narratives, accounts, and expressions of events, experiences, or ideas will continue to play a fundamental and enduring role across society. As society, technology, and methods of communication evolve, organizations and individuals will continue to establish online identities associated with the applied-for string.
We hold this truth at the center of our mission: content is valuable. When you publish online—whatever you publish—you are adding something to the world, and that contribution deserves a home you control. Owning your domain means you're not at the whims of an ever-changing algorithm; it's a claim of ownership, independence, and authenticity. Every top-level domain we operate is built on that principle: a meaningful, memorable namespace that marks your corner of the internet as unmistakably your own, in essays, images, music, videos, storefronts, and whatever comes next.
The mission of the .story TLD is to provide a dedicated home for storytellers, writers, and narrative creators.
Storytelling remains fundamental to human communication and culture. Registrants will use .story domains to publish stories and narratives, build reader communities, and establish presence as narrative creators.
Sharing stories is an evergreen human experience. The .story TLD sustains relevance because writers and audiences require a dedicated namespace for narrative creation, distribution, and community-building.
The mission of .story is to give published narrative an address of its own. The string is the ordinary English noun ""story"" - an account of events, told or written - and, in current online usage, a short item shared with an audience. It is applied for and will be operated in those ordinary senses, as an open namespace.
The first group of intended registrants is commercial: small and medium-sized businesses and independent brands, for whom the account of how a product is made, where it comes from and who makes it has become the substance of "story telling" marketing rather than an ornament to it; and the agencies, consultants and studios who write and produce that material for them.
The second is editorial and personal: bloggers and independent writers, journalists and photographers publishing pieces of their own, podcasters and video makers, and community organisers documenting what a group does.
The third is the social reading of the word: creators and publishers who work in short published items also called stories and want an address of their own for that material rather than one held on a platform.
Users are readers, viewers and customers arriving from a search, a profile, a package or a link.
A top-level label that names the work itself as .story would give it an address that reads as what it is, that can be printed on packaging or spoken in a video, and that the author keeps when the site is rebuilt or the platform changes.
The TLD will launch with the rights protection mechanisms required by Specification 7, including a Sunrise period and a Trademark Claims period, followed by the UDRP and the URS. General Availability will then be open, with no eligibility restrictions and no reservation of the namespace to the applying entity or its affiliates. Distribution will be through ICANN-accredited registrars on published, non-discriminatory terms consistent with Specification 9, affiliated registrars included. Technical operation is contracted to a pre-evaluated Registry Service Provider, and abuse mitigation follows the Mandatory Public Interest Commitments and the DNS abuse obligations of the Base Registry Agreement, with a published abuse point of contact.
Telling and publishing accounts is a permanent activity rather than a marketing phase, practised by businesses, journalists, communities and individuals alike, so demand does not depend on any single sector or on the fortunes of any platform. An address of this kind is also expensive to abandon: it goes on packaging and printed material, into video descriptions and profiles already distributed, and is linked from other people's pages, so letting it lapse breaks references that remain in circulation and readers are still following. Because the string names the work rather than its author or its subject, it survives changes of author, of topic and of format, which are what usually strand a descriptive name. The word is short, common and understood in the same sense across language markets, and belongs to no vendor or platform. The applying entity belongs to an established hosting group with a direct channel to small businesses and independent publishers, and registry operations are contracted to a pre-evaluated Registry Service Provider.