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Comment by BrianEatWorld | Hacker News Reader

How does bidding for something like this work?

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?

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?

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> 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?

It doesn't work that way. They are petitioned for and auctioned off as TLDs, its only after that has occurred that the new TLD is announced as "coming online". Google and others bid for the .app TLD, and auction occurred, and Google won the auction. If they use it to allow registrations (as some on this thread have said they intend to, but I haven't seen anything official -- for some of their new gTLDs they have announced this, e.g., .how, for others they have said they are using them for their own products, e.g., .plus), then you will be able to register a domain like brianeatworld.app through Google or one of their registration partners.

This process isn't for individual domains. They're bidding to own(?)/run/operate the entire TLD. Similar to how, eg, the entire .uk ccTLD is administered by Nominet.

So they're not buying "every .app domain". They're buying (the rights to?) the administer the entire TLD.

Google is buying the TLD, not all the subdomains under it. They will then have control over the namespacing for the TLD and be able to distribute subdomains as they see fit. This is how most TLDs work because "app" itself is a domain, not just an extension.

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