.day domain names: registry, rules and buyer notes

Check the IANA root database and you will find Charleston Road Registry Inc. named as the sponsoring organisation for .day. That is the same outfit that signed the registry agreement with ICANN on 30 January 2014. Charleston Road Registry is a Google subsidiary, and it runs the show publicly under the Google Registry brand at registry.google. The administrative and technical contacts listed on the IANA record are Google Inc. staff, and the name servers sit on Charleston Road Registry's own infrastructure, there is no separate third-party backend named anywhere in the record.

Three roles get muddled constantly, so keep them separate. The registry is Charleston Road Registry: it holds the master database for every .day name, sets the technical and policy rules (the HTTPS requirement included), and answers to ICANN under its registry agreement. The registrar is whoever you actually hand your money to, Namecheap, GoDaddy, Rebel.com, take your pick, accredited to sell .day names into that registry and responsible for your billing, DNS and support. The registrant is you: the person or organisation whose name sits on the registration.

ICANN sits above the whole arrangement as the policy authority, the body that contracted with Charleston Road Registry in the first place and sets the baseline rules registries and registrars have to follow across gTLDs generally. Buy through a reseller and none of this shifts, the registry underneath and its rules stay exactly the same no matter which storefront sold you the name.

.day doesn't gatekeep. Charleston Road Registry's own application material spells out a deliberately open, unencumbered gTLD, nobody has to prove they run an actual "day", a cause, or an organisation before they can register one. Registrar documentation backs this up independently: .day is sold to the public on a plain first-come, first-served basis.

That openness sits at the registry level, and no registrar gets to tighten or loosen it. What differs from one registrar to the next is smaller stuff around the edges, whether they offer IDN registrations for .day, domain privacy, DNSSEC support, and how they word the mandatory HTTPS notice at checkout.

There are two exceptions baked into Google Registry's policy regardless of who you register through. Anyone buying a two-character letter/letter label has to confirm they're not implying any government or country-code link. Anyone registering a name on the reserved IOC, Red Cross or IGO list has to confirm they're registering on that organisation's behalf. Outside those two narrow cases, .day is open to individuals and organisations anywhere in the world, no nexus requirement, no verification step.

Live examples collected by the registry and reported by CNET and Google's own .day site cluster around three uses: awareness days for causes (freedom.day for International Justice Mission, holocaustremembrance.day for the World Jewish Congress, equalpay.day for the National Women's Law Center), brand tie-ins to a specific date (nutella.day, valentines.day), and personal or product branding (felicia.day, mon.day for monday.com).

Before going live, know that the registry requires HTTPS on all .day sites. The extension sits on the HSTS preload list, so browsers flat out refuse plain HTTP connections. Registrars have to disclose this before purchase, and a working SSL certificate isn't optional at any point in the site's life. Given that format, .day works best as a dedicated microsite or landing page for a specific campaign, event or date, not as a company's sole, permanent web address. The naming tip that actually matters: pick a second-level word that reads as a natural sentence fragment ending in "day" (birth.day, wedding.day, tax.day) rather than a generic noun bolted onto the suffix. The wordplay is the entire reason to choose .day over a conventional extension, so skip it and you've lost the point of the domain.