The author mentioned that creating a new tld costs a minimum of 185k USD. This makes me wonder who would pay this kind of money for this completely useless tld.
It's a gold mine offering. There was a long queue of people quite sure that .binglebongle would be the new .com. Sometimes it was a marginally less stupid plan, like we can be a regional alternative - and Russia even has one that's actually making money - it isn't taking over the world, but it's Cyrillic and was never intended to. But most gold mines never produce gold, they just suck up people's money and dreams and spit out the bones.
The obscure brand TLDs are funnier. Not brands you've heard of like google, brands who are their own tiny corner of the non-IT world and figured they ought to have a TLD, so now they do to the tune of maybe six figures a year.
The Kerry Group for example owns several, as do some US financial outfits. Why? Because nobody who knew this was a stupid idea was in the room when it got decided.
While everyone here has certainly heard of Softbank, I find it amusing that they have their own TLD too (with sites like https://group.softbank/).
not until your comment had I heard of "softbank"
.lk registry, for example, also controls .ලංකා and .இலங்கை (sounding "Lanka" "Ilangei" in Sinhalese and Tamil, the two other official languages in Sri Lanka), and they do not cost $185K. In fact, ccTLDs don't cost any money as far as I'm aware. DNS servers are run by the government funding but there is no cost to pay to ICANN.
That actually seems quite useful, if people are typing not realizing the keyboard is set to Hebrew.
It appears that they don't match to the TLD letters here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebrew_keyboard
The Hebrew keyboard layout has no relation to QWERTY in terms of phonetics.
Usually used by non-native Hebrew speakers.
> 'בםצ' (which is not even pronounceable)
Sounds like a new snack from Osem :)
[0]: https://icannwiki.org/.%D7%A7%D7%95%D6%B9%D7%9D
[1]: https://gtldresult.icann.org/applicationstatus/applicationde...