Nah. It’s more ridiculous that ICANN gives out domains other than stuff like edu/com/org/gov in the first place.
this post was submitted on 12 Jan 2026
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Gives? They charged a high price for these TLDs.
I think it was fine to expand the number, but they probably shouldn't have approved company names.
I think gtlds are pretty good. All the good .com/net domains are taken by now
Yup. Remaining with just the few means everyone will eventually be using “thisismyextremelylongexampleurlbecauseallofthegoodonesweretaken40fuckingyearsago.com” types of URLs.
You must admit some are kinda niche though, like .cooking for recipe sites
It's not that they are gigantic companies, it's that they are big companies with lots of techies. Other organisations can have them as well.
The BBC (British Broadcasting Company) has it's own TLD for example. their Mastodon account uses it: https://social.bbc/
Oh! I thought that was a different kind of BBC.
Glad I wasn't the only one disappointed
Anyone with $150K to blow can have a vanity TLD it's not that big a feat. And it's about as douchy as vanity plates.
.assman
Apple and some other companies own entire /8 blocks of IPv4 addresses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_address_blocks
Ford owning an /8 block is one of my favorite “internet designers didn’t really plan that far ahead” tidbit. For the unaware, every single company device on Ford’s corporate networks uses a WAN IPv4 address in the 19.x.x.x range. They don’t have LAN addresses at all. Because why not, they own the whole fucking /8 block and have like twelve million spare addresses to play around with.
This just seems like a repeat of these companies buying all the similar/unicode like domains to ensure no one can grab a domain with resemblance to the name.
Considering a most of them aren't even used for anything practical, I wonder if this was just another ploy by ICANN to make money lmao.
Can a moron get some context? I don't know much about internet or TLD... I'd ask AI but I want the right answer lol.
The last part of a Web address is a "TLD", or "top-level domain". There used to be relatively few of them, namely .com, .org, .edu, .net, .gov, and .mil. One of the functions of TLDs is to categorise websites so you know what sort of site you're visiting. The list of valid TLDs is a Web standard and creating a new TLD is not easy.
As time progressed, more and more TLDs were created. You have familiar ones like country-code TLDs which are for each individual country or region, such as .ca for Canada or .es for Spain.
In the past decade, several weirder and more arbitrary TLDs which are just random words with no categorisation purpose whatsoever have popped up, like .party, .xyz, or whatever.
The fact that Google, a private company, can have its own TLD (.google), is an indicator of how supremely influential the company is over the creation of Web standards. Not only does that TLD mean nothing and has no categorisation potential whatsoever (the company largely does not even use it), but based on the original model of only six TLDs, a private company wanting to have its own TLD would have then been considered the pinnacle of hubris.
Thank-you so much, that was very informative and helpful!
"Well actually..." I understand that some of the large companies are leveraging it to ease filtering for customers. No one wants to block all .com, but you can opt to unblock/block all of .microsoft or .google, that would be useful.
Third or fourth hand information, so I don't know how far along any of these companies in implementing, but... It kinda feels like they're trying to build a centralized version a la CompuServe or Prodigy or even AOL over the internet that a company can choose to connect to.
You can block *.google.com as easily as *.google, so I don't think that makes much sense.
It's so that you can approve .Google and only .Google .
Equally, you can only allow *.google.com as easily as *.google, so I still don’t think that makes much sense.
Lots of companies have TLD's. It's mostly a reflection of starting early, before TLD camping became a business model.
.bbc also exists, their fediverse instance is social.bbc
A TLD dedicated to Big Black Cock? What will they think of next?
I think you're thinking of D's, not TLD's.
Yeah, D's NUTS!
Terrifyingly Large Dongs