The Fascinating World of Domains
Pete Millspaugh has a lovely article over on WIRED that peers into the world of domains. (If you’re as interested in the esoteric details of domains as I am, follow Pete’s writing at Dot Com Press.)
You should just read the article, but here are a few things that stood out to me.
The .com Registry
Did you know who the registry for .com is? I didn’t.
The registry that owns .com, Verisign, makes a billion and a half dollars every year just by keeping the lights on. To Verisign’s credit, the lights never go out: It reports 100 percent uptime over the past 28 years. It’s a pretty slick business model, watching over a database of words and collecting annual renewal fees. Warren Buffett thought so too, investing in Verisign in 2012, when its stock price was about one-eighth what it is today.
Why is it simultaneously surprising and not surprising that the company running .com makes billions and has 100% uptime over almost three decades?
Maybe GitHub should reach out for some advice, lol.
Buying Domains Is a Spy Thriller
Apparently the last time you could buy generic top-level domains (gTLDs) was in 2012.
So now that ICANN is providing another window of purchases in 2026 — and nobody knows when another window will open — there’s a lot of interest in capitalizing on these moments for new gTLDs.
most organizations [are] extremely secretive about their plans. One applicant from the last round tells me companies were flying around the world, meeting in person to avoid any risk of digital leaks, avoiding Gmail for fear of Google spying. Instead of email or video calls, she flew to London, then to Madrid. “We did it all in person. People got a little weird and scary, super paranoid.”
There’s a certain irony to this — people flying around the world to conduct business on owning a piece of the internet because they don’t trust the internet.
It appears the future of the internet is to be negotiated offline lol.
More Domains = More Online Handles
We haven’t had new gTLDs since 2012. Why do we need more?
I can imagine a future where expressive top-level domains become our personal brands, identities on the internet. This is already true in some nerdy corners of the web, like on Bluesky, where your domain is your username. I don’t call my internet friends Neal and Luke, I call them neal.fun and luke.zip. Instead of joining the land rush to grab our username on each new social media site, we’ll carry our domain around the web with us.
I’m telling you, .
More domains mean more opportunities for individual expression at the root layer of internet infrastructure — that makes sense for a web that’s meant to be worldwide!
You Think You Have a Domain Vice?
As developers, we often joke about our addiction to buying domain names for our side projects.
But buying a domain name — e.g. my-side-project.com — is child’s play compared to buying a generic top-level domain name (gTLD). That’s where the domain whales are.
ICANN charges a $227,000 application fee for each string, to recover the cost of running the program. The $36 million or so that Nova will need to cover those fees is coming from the personal bank account of Yoni Belousov, a reclusive domain investor (industry jargon: “domainer”) who’s been in the business since he was 14 years old.
Next time somebody asks me what I’d do with an insane amount of wealth, I now have the jargon for an answer: “I’d become a domainer.”
A Few Fun Facts to Close
A few things about domains I didn’t know until I read this:
all two-letter extensions are off the table. Those belong to countries, like .co in Colombia and .me in Montenegro and .ai in Anguilla.
If you want to run a geographic TLD, like .nyc or .paris, you need approval from that municipality
your string can’t be too similar to an existing one (.corn is a no-go; looks too much like .com)
certain special strings are off limits, like .icann and .www (wouldn’t that be a trip).
www.www would be a baller domain! Just think of the recursion you could do with that on the subdomain level.
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