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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?

#91
post #59

.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.

George is the clothing brand of the ASDA supermarket chain in the UK, which Walmart used to own. I'm not sure if it's a brand they use worldwide though; I don't really go to Walmart when in the US. Either way, that's why they own it, presumably.

At least as far back as the the 90s Walmart was selling George clothing in the US too. IDK what predates what, though. Or if they are currently.

There was also a George magazine, which... I think belonged to RFK (Senior)?

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

#92
post #25

Wasn't it better when only .com mattered? There are thousands of TLDs now and that forces companies to buy multiple, these domain names are not even memorable anymore specifically because of the TLD part.

It's still basically only .com that matters. There are those few others that matter commercially (setting aside the org for nonprofits and edu and gov), such as .io, but for every 'clever domain' startup, I see 6 more who, unable to get say, frog dot com, go with something like "usefrog dot com" or "tryfrog dot com" in their early days and come back and snap up frog dot com after they get their Series C. They could have gotten say, frog dot legal or frog dot engineering but nobody wants those.

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

#93
post #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.

Brother has a similar global website.

https://global.brother/

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

#94
post #68

TLDs were a mistake. We should just get rid of them and have the person's domain at the top level. E.g. instead of news.ycombinator.com have just news.ycombinator

What if there are two people named John Smith? Or two restaurants called Main Street Diner? Or two towns named Springfield?

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

#95
post #87
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But why do they need to do that as a TLD? They have google.com and other iterations.

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

#96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's crazy, why is it so expensive

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

#97
post #94
post #68

TLDs were a mistake. We should just get rid of them and have the person's domain at the top level. E.g. instead of news.ycombinator.com have just news.ycombinator

What if there are two people named John Smith? Or two restaurants called Main Street Diner? Or two towns named Springfield?

Same situation when two people named John Smith want the same john-smith.com domain now. You may argue that in the current situation, if they are from different countries like US and Canada, they would obtain john-smith.us and john-smith.ca respectively. But in the proposed situation, they can also get john-smith-us and john-smith-ca

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

#98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vatican City is a theocracy, not a religion. You'd technically have to add .uk and many more to the list if you're broadening to all nations with a state religion.

.uk was one of the first! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/.uk (Or did I miss an "/s"?)

I think they mean in the context of a a TLD related to a religious entity. Since uk has a state religion, they meant “add it to the list of religious tlds” along with .va and others mentioned in this thread.

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

#99

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 weird thing is, are they even meaningfully used? I don't think I've ever seen a .google URL in the wild, neither for their websites nor for API endpoints.

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

#100
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

From the ICANN site, 154 gTLD agreements have been terminated. I'm not sure how many due to non-payment, but https://domainincite.com/30105-icann-to-terminate-five-new-g... indicates that at least some have been due to non-payment.

https://www.icann.org/en/registry-agreements?sort-column=top...

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