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How did .agakhan, .ismaili and .imamat get their own TLDs?

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Re: How did .agakhan, .ismaili and .imamat get their own TLDs?

#81

.george is a pretty funny one. apparently Walmart owns it, so you probably won't be able to register a .george domain any time soon. https://icannwiki.org/.george do companies even use these in the wild or are they buying these TLDs for nothing? ".brother", ".canon", ".nokia", ".panasonic", ".playstation", ".xbox", ".xerox"... there's even ".sandvikcoromant", which is some sort of Swedish metalwork company.

https://global.canon/en/c-museum/

Canon does use .canon for a few things, at least.

Re: How did .agakhan, .ismaili and .imamat get their own TLDs?

#82
post #60
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon/AWS use them (.aws), so does Google (.google) but I agree, it is pretty funny how many companies seemed to get on board (out of fear of being left out?) and then...didn't use them for some reason?

Google does use theirs for public-facing landing pages even [1], just not uniformly, but that's very on-brand for Google as an org. Where have you seen .aws in use though? [1] e.g. https://quantumai.google/

https://skillbuilder.aws/

Re: How did .agakhan, .ismaili and .imamat get their own TLDs?

#83
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might want to look at the "domain" directive of resolv.conf and the concept of "split horizon DNS".

I've done plenty of interesting things but a distributed correction attempt for ICANN's incompetence is never going to be adequate. You can read their own work on gTLDs in the past to know they understand this.

Accusing ICANN of incompetence when you can't be bothered to configure your DNS to avoid leaking queries to the root is an interesting approach.

Re: How did .agakhan, .ismaili and .imamat get their own TLDs?

#84
post #2

Seriously - how did that go down?

It would be helpful if you would explain why you think it is surprising or confusing or objectionable or whatever else inspired you to ask. Also helpful would be examples that you think are similar in some way, but that are not surprising, etc.

As is, your question is practically impossible to answer without just pointing you to the ICANN process.

Re: How did .agakhan, .ismaili and .imamat get their own TLDs?

#86

.george is a pretty funny one. apparently Walmart owns it, so you probably won't be able to register a .george domain any time soon. https://icannwiki.org/.george do companies even use these in the wild or are they buying these TLDs for nothing? ".brother", ".canon", ".nokia", ".panasonic", ".playstation", ".xbox", ".xerox"... there's even ".sandvikcoromant", which is some sort of Swedish metalwork company.

Aside: Sandvik Coromant is a major industrial conglomerate with billions in revenue. Their cutting tools almost certainly made some things you use daily. Not that it has any bearing on them having a tld, but they’re not some random local metal shop, heh.

Re: How did .agakhan, .ismaili and .imamat get their own TLDs?

#87
post #40

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…

This requiring it to be open to everybody is an odd wish, to me. It would seem to discourage something that I don't think is a harm to anyone else: Getting your brand as a TLD (.google being a great example). Google has a trademark on "Google," so no one else can make non-mischeivous use of .google anyway. If they had to let random internet critics and trolls register theworst.google and ihate.google they just wouldn't make one, but that wouldn't make anyone else any better off, especially in the real world we live in where most people still do a double take at TLDs that aren't com, org, edu, or gov (or their nearest country code).

Maybe if we'd always had .yahoo and .aol from the beginning these brand TLDs would be a big signifier of legitimacy and thus we'd be worried about how only big corporations can afford them, but not being able to afford one in our current universe is no handicap in my humble opinion.

Re: How did .agakhan, .ismaili and .imamat get their own TLDs?

#88
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

.islam is proposed but contested: https://icannwiki.org/.islam

I struggled to find a non-sarcastic, non-flippant way to say it so I'll just go with factual: I am not surprised that there are entities willing to fight over such an important name.

Re: How did .agakhan, .ismaili and .imamat get their own TLDs?

#89
post #80

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.

I don't think Sundar is likely to go through with your request personally. Your best bet might be if you know an internal engineer working close to their domain management, but even then I'd doubt they'd register it for an external startup. There are currently 21 domains under gle, all related to Google products.

Re: How did .agakhan, .ismaili and .imamat get their own TLDs?

#90
post #60
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon/AWS use them (.aws), so does Google (.google) but I agree, it is pretty funny how many companies seemed to get on board (out of fear of being left out?) and then...didn't use them for some reason?

Google does use theirs for public-facing landing pages even [1], just not uniformly, but that's very on-brand for Google as an org. Where have you seen .aws in use though? [1] e.g. https://quantumai.google/

notebooklm.google too

yeah if I had to guess there's too much that's already pointed at google.com and with their main business being leveraging cookie data for ad money I bet whoever in the org might think it'd be rad to switch to mail.google, search.google, android.google, etc. gets beaten over the head with a stack of $100 bills anytime he brings it up.

I wonder, would the other browser vendors agree to treat all of .google as one entity in terms of 'same domain rule' if Google promised they aren't selling subdomains to anyone else? I'm not aware of any TLD treated like that presently. So yeah, seems like the corporate domains, at least of adtech titans, will never be used for much but redirects.

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