How does a single company go about buying an entire TLD? Doesn't seem very "forward looking" for ICANN. Pretty soon it will turn out like our .com issue which all "premium" domains already purchased and/or squatted on.<p>As an aside, I really don't like all these "cutsy" TLD's that are showing up. To me, whenever I see a .info or .biz, I'm already wary of the link... now there's things like .ninja, .technology, .academy, .bargains, .bid, .build, .builders, etc etc etc...
"Currently Google lets people register for ".how," ".soy," and ".minna" domains one its own ICANN-accredited domain registry."<p>So this is what google has planned for these TLDs? reselling domain names. That piece from a couple of days ago describing how google and Microsoft have switched places makes more sense now. google is using it's cash to create some additional revenue streams. such a basic play, a la network solutions circa 1998. wow.
All these new gTLDs area obnoxious. They are poisoning the reputation of legitimate and important TLDs like .coop which has been around nearly 15 years and is a legitimate domain that people now guess is one of these new crop of crap<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.coop" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.coop</a>
To be fair, this might be the best of a bad world. Google plans to make this TLD available for people to register (like they have with .how). One of other companies in the bidding for the TLD was Amazon, who had no intention of letting outside parties register domains.
The official news was released a long time ago <a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.in/2012/05/expanding-internet-domain-space.html" rel="nofollow">http://googleblog.blogspot.in/2012/05/expanding-internet-dom...</a>
If you're curious about how ICANN's "New generic Top-Level Domain (gTLD) Program" works, check out <a href="http://newgtlds.icann.org/en/about" rel="nofollow">http://newgtlds.icann.org/en/about</a>
How does bidding for something like this work?<p>Say I am an individual and I heard about the new .app domain coming online and I just wanted my own brianeatworld.app domain, but Google sets out to buy the entire space. Is my bid simply ignored?<p>If my bid for the single domain ended up being higher than Google's on a per domain basis, would I be able to get my domain? Is that even possible given that there are theoretically an infinite number of domains for any given TLD? Doesn't the infinite number of domains mean that the price Google is paying for an individual domain in the TLD approaches zero?
why are they buying TLD's? why is anyone allowed to buy TLD's? This doesn't seem like it will bode well for consumers; .app seems like it would have a lot of demand.<p>I think the broader naming options are good to have, though they should have done this way sooner.<p>Trying to register a .com today and its just impossible to find a name that's already taken. most all you find are squatters. I know some people don't like the new ones but its necessary at this point - we're running out of room.
How will that TLD work when people want to <i>search</i> for an app instead of hitting a url? How could you distinguish between them in Chrome's omnibar?