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> The Ismaili Imamat is a supra-national entity, representing the succession of Imams since the time of the Prophet Muhammad. ( https://ismaili.imamat/#introduction ) The Aga Khan is the leader of the Ismaili Imamat. They have as good a claim to a TLD as Berlin, if not more.
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Application fee with ICANN: $185k, non-refundable, Yearly fee: $25k Technical backend with Verisign: $200k per year Add maybe $100k of lawyer fees.
What happens when a company goes under and the yearly fee can no longer be paid? Has a gTLD ever been resigned?
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There's also .va for the Vatican and .lds for the Mormon faith (and .mormon), and more generic Christian ones like .church. I didn't find any for other religions on a casual search, perhaps because many of them don't have the same degree of centralization.
The Vatican is a country, so it gets a ccTLD.
It is smaller than high school campus nearest my house, is not a UN member, and seems to exist solely as a tax haven.
It also has no native citizens. No person has been born in Vatican City in a century and even if you pop out a baby in Vatican City and are you yourself a Vatican City resident and citizen, the baby is not a citizen until made so by legal decree, citizenship which ends the second your employment ends, of course, because citizenship is tied to employment.
It doesn't make sense.
It isn't a country.
It is a tax dodge.
My perspective may be skewed. I value "quirky quirks of quirktastic history" very little.
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If you pay ICANN hundreds of thousands of dollars, you can get basically any .word domain. I believe the only actual requirement is that it has to be 3 characters or longer, as two characters are reserved for countries.
Application fee with ICANN: $185k, non-refundable, Yearly fee: $25k Technical backend with Verisign: $200k per year Add maybe $100k of lawyer fees.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Vatican is a country, so it gets a ccTLD.
I don't understand why the Vatican is considered a country, besides as a quirk of history. It is smaller than high school campus nearest my house, is not a UN member, and seems to exist solely as a tax haven. It also has no native citizens. No person has been born in Vatican City in a century and even if you pop out a baby in Vatican City and are you yourself a Vatican City resident and citizen, the baby is not a cit…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't understand why the Vatican is considered a country, besides as a quirk of history. It is smaller than high school campus nearest my house, is not a UN member, and seems to exist solely as a tax haven. It also has no native citizens. No person has been born in Vatican City in a century and even if you pop out a baby in Vatican City and are you yourself a Vatican City resident and citizen, the baby is not a cit…
What is a country for you? How do you define it? Is the land size that important?
Who are the people of the Vatican? The only persons who live there are temporary government employees and not even all of them are citizens because that is optional.
You cannot own property, vote for your government, start your own business, go to school, buy anything except what is stocked in the small canteen, or go to the hospital if you are a Vatican citizen and odds are pretty good you live in Italy anyways.
Imagine if a bank drew a boundary around its Manhattan skyscraper headquarters and declared itself a country called Bankistan whose only residents were janitors, financial analysts, and management-- and most of its citizens live in Brooklyn. Except for the C-suite and senior vice presidents who live in penthouses and the janitors who live in tiny rooms in the basement.
Also the second the bank fires you or you quit or retire, you're no longer a citizen of Bankistan.
At a minimum, a capital-see (heh) Country is something that belongs to you if but in a very, insignificantly, small part.
So my definition of "country" is ill-defined but does not include the Vatican.
Presumably way the same as .google and all the other special-purpose organization-specific domains. Blame ICANN for allowing any public or private organization who can meet the requirements to buy and operate a gTLD back in 2012: https://newgtlds.icann.org/en/applicants/global-support/faqs... And as per another comment in this thread, they’re doing another round of this in 2026: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4…
The fact that private entities can monopolize gTLDs, including words that aren't even made-up or reasonably copy-written (e.g. the MAN group in Europe owns .man) was an embarrassing and dishonorable decision by ICANN. I'm all for having tons of weird, awesome gTLDs, and I'm even for brand-specific gTLDs like .google, but the cost these entities should incur by asking for one to be created is: Anyone can use it. 1. A…
I'm reminded when the people of the Amazon rainforest petitioned to own .amazon, but it was given to the US company.
The Ismaili leaders are super influential and have connections everywhere. They are megawealthy socialites. Basically they wanted the TLDs so they knew who to talk to to make it happen.
FWIW, Google owns .gle, and I emailed both Sundar Pichai and Charleston Registry, but no response of any kind. My startup is called MedAngle, and we'd love to get medan.gle, but it just left a sour taste in my mouth. Some of these processes are giant black boxes.