https://www.internic.net/domain/root.zone
Some other corporate/brand TLDs that exist are .allstate, .capitalone, .cookingchannel, .fedex, .honda, .lplfinancial, .marriott, .nike, .panasonic, .samsung, .statefarm, .toyota, and many more.
(My name is Andrew Diamond)
If I were Mr. Diamond, my opinion would be "why should I change, they're the ones who suck."
(Couldn't resist)
Answer: To get your own TLD, you need to submit a completed, detailed application and fee (likely around $200,000) to ICANN. Then, ICANN will evaluate the application (and Afilias can help with this). If approved, you can proceed to launching with domain registrars.
Source: https://theaudacitytopodcast.com/afilias-explains-how-to-get...
It looks like we're inching closer to a new round:
https://gac.icann.org/activity/subsequent-rounds-of-new-gtld...
Skimming the recommendations, they want wider participation from the non-western world and I suspect the $185k application fee may go down a bit (there's also an annual fee of $24k, +25 cents per second-level domain)
Anyone know how much a company like Afilias charges for its end of things if you choose to outsource the IT? (e.g. assistance with the application, spinning up the TLD, ongoing costs to maintain)?
EDIT: Some quotes from Instra: https://www.instra.com/en/new-gtlds/pricing
Here are some links to prior ICANN guides and other info if you want a better sense of the application process:
https://newgtlds.icann.org/en/about
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_top-level_domain
And dated from an era when the fee was a mere $5k: https://newgtlds.icann.org/en/applicants/tas
Honestly, my expectation would be that the application fee will go up, because the first round received so many terrible applications (like brand TLDs that the trademark owner had no intention of using).
It's still a scarcity filter by virtue of an absurd pile of money for flipping a few bits and claiming enormous "administrative" expenses.
Highlights one of the pitfalls to custom TLDs: the corporate sponsor might split or even go bankrupt. Then what happens to all those URLs? Talk about link rot… never thought we would have to worry about TLD rot.
ie. this works http://ai.
this does not but could work? http://bestbuy.
http://bestbuy will get re-write to .com by firefox, I don't like that, chrome will not re-rewrite
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24442033 for why it’s allowed on ccTLDs
I would think yes, despite the nomenclature, and that there is technically supposed to be a dot after the tdl.
It's to clearly identify a domain as a FQDN and not as a subdomain of your search domain.
Really? For me Firefox says it couldn't find the site and only asks if I've meant 'www.bestbuy.com'
You can disable this in firefox by setting "browser.fixup.alternate.enabled" to "false" in about:config
You might have to disable autocomplete too...
I always disable that sort of thing. I figure that when I type a URL in the address bar I'm not making a suggestion and I don't want my browser pulling up some other site instead, especially not based on some guess or assumption about what I "actually" wanted.