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I was admin of a country code ccTLD once (let's call it .xx) and I created aliases and a forward for 'i' to my inbox. and put a 5 minute MX record on it. From a shell elsewhere in the world I sent email to i@xx ...

And it arrived! The shortest fully qualified email address in the world!

Against policy tho. I took out the MX record. It was a fun nerd moment.

Reminds me of n@ai ﹣ Goes to someone named Ian.

    ∴dig ai MX
    
    ; <<>> DiG 9.10.6 <<>> ai MX
    ;; global options: +cmd
    ;; Got answer:
    ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 40166
    ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 1
    
    ;; OPT PSEUDOSECTION:
    ; EDNS: version: 0, flags:; udp: 1232
    ;; QUESTION SECTION:
    ;ai.    IN MX
    
    ;; ANSWER SECTION:
    ai.   3600 IN MX 10 mail.offshore.ai.
    
    ;; Query time: 5 msec
    ;; SERVER: 192.168.1.1#53(192.168.1.1)
    ;; WHEN: Sun Jul 07 17:19:47 PDT 2024
    ;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 63
There really was a bit of an enterprise gold rush for these gTLDs in the late 00s.

They saw .google and .mcdonalds and thought "we should have our own one of those"..

And I guess after a while of paying the non-trivial gTLD fees to ICANN, companies eventually looked at the ROI and realized they actually didn't need their own one of those...

Funny how different brands in the same industries figured it out many years before others did.

It's crazy to me that a decision to buy your own gTLD would even be approved outside the most rich and tech literate companies. The evaluation fee alone is $185,000 USD and you have to pay quarterly fees too if I'm not mistaken.
gTLDs went live in 2014

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_top-level_domain

They all have the same oeuvre that typo squatted and oddly hyphenated domains have and immediately make me suspicious just looking at them. Which is bad enough for the commercial purposes most of these were probably purchased for, but I can only imagine that they would be exceptionally useless for sending emails or other communications.

Another "ghost mining town" left behind from the wild west that was the first decades of the commercial internet.

A. It wasn't the 00s.

B. Much better to have it and not need it, than need it and not have it.

As it turns out, they didn't need it, and lost a bit of their marketing budget.

This isn't exactly accurate. Google and McDonalds didn't have some early exclusive launch. There were hundreds that launched at around the same time, when ICANN opened the process, and not in the 00s.

I'm too lazy to research them all here, but I recognize a number of them here from their initial applications, which would have all happened at the same time as the two you mentioned.

This whole scam was so disappointing, although par for ICANN's course. When we heard that they were opening up TLDs, I thought that finally limited TLDs would be abolished.

But nope. ICANN turned the whole thing into another disgraceful money grab... taken to a new level. Now that it has flopped, we can just hope that someday we'll be able to end a domain name with any valid string.

I have a customer with one of these vanity gTLDs. And always go to wonder why... Oh it is cool with all the subdomains and services, but still... Is it really worth the money for profile of company it is... Which is not exactly high profile or known...
After seeing that list it doesn't surprise me anymore that companies like Avianca filled for bankruptcy. I'm sure they paid for than domain per year more than what they spend now in customer support.
You can see a list of current gTLDs here: https://data.iana.org/TLD/tlds-alpha-by-domain.txt

Some of the entries in there are... interesting. Who the hell thought ".travelersinsurance" is a good buy?

How many of those are even routed to anywhere?

Browsers don't like to route directly to TLDs. In theory, Amazon could have a web site at

    amazon
but browsers interpret that as a search request, not a request for a rooted domain name. Even

    amazon.
which means to treat that as a fully qualified domain name doesn't work in browsers any more.

(That's what the trailing "." means. Relative domain names were a thing. If you're on a machine within "bigu.edu", and you want "ourteam.bigu.edu", you can supposedly just use "ourteam" as a domain. This rarely works right, because few clients have domain names any more. Is it even still implemented in most DNS lookup clients?)

https://www.101domain.com/travelersinsurance.htm

They got .travelers and .travelersinsurance , maybe some others.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Travelers_Companies - with a 32 billion dollar yearly revenue, they can afford a lot of boondoggle nonsense projects. They probably assigned a bunch of people with insufficient technical knowledge and a vague project scope the objective of updating their cloud and web presence.

If you're the CTO of Travelers Insurance, I bet you think it's a real banger of a TLD
Travelers Insurance is a huge company 98th on Fortune 500 list
I noticed the one punycode TLD at the bottom: xn--4gq48lf9j (Wal-Mart Stores, Inc). That decodes to "一号店", which is apparently Chinese for "No.1 Store".
Works pretty well in Japanese too :p
Amazon Registry Services is still holding a ton of TLDs hostage: https://ntldstats.com/registry/group/Amazon-Registry-Service...

It's not even a rounding error on their income statement so they don't care. ICANN, in their infinite wisdom, somehow couldn't foresee corporations squatting on TLDs.

ICANN has staunchly refused to even think about combatting squatting.

Have you ever participated in ICANN? My company did. ICANN's mailing-list traffic was pathetic; never accomplishing anything, as members endlessly bickered about procedure. I don't recall that we ever made a single decision on anything.

I expect the french railway one will join the illustrious list soon enough (https://www.icann.org/en/registry-agreements/details/sncf).

They registered oui.sncf initially during their rebrand. Once the guy who initiated that left, they switched back to .com domain (https://www.sncf-connect.com/).

The only one I’ve actually seen used is .fage (e.g https://uk.fage). They seemed to go all in on it and it’s their main web presence. I believe they use it internally as well.
These change _very_ often.

On one library I work on, we ended up writing a bot to fetch the list for us and open a pr in order to maintain it. I suspect anyone having to validate TLDs faces a similar problem.

I assume you’re using Mozilla’s public suffix list? https://publicsuffix.org/

We have something similar that keeps it updated on a regular basis as well. We used to wait until someone complained, but it changes so often it’s the only reasonable way to deal with it.

I use one of the gTLD for my email, don’t recommend it. A lot of places don’t accept it.
Agreed. I use .works and maybe 5% of places don't accept it (the biggest I can think of off the top of my head is Ubisoft). There are some, like my local groceries store chain, that accepts it for account registration but it fails somewhere in the sign-in process. This is not the first time it has happened either.
Which gTLD? I was thinking of using .land for email aliasing?
The linked PDFs contain censored sections, but it's just a black rectangle placed above the content. So by removing that rectangle the original content is still visible below...
It's even worse, the censored sections are added as annotations on top of the PDF, not an actual part of the document, so:

* The name of the person who inserted them is rendered when clicking on the black boxes.

* Even basic PDF readers will allow modifying and deleting the boxes, you don't even need Acrobat or another PDF editor.

If you're bored for a few hours, I can only recommend to take a look at the ICANN Zone File Access / CZDS. [1]

There you can get a list of all delegated second-level domain names of most vanity TLDs. Most are quite small (less than 10 entries, most or all technical like nic.<whatever>), i.e. the domain is basically unused.

(They, however, sometimes also contains obviously internal domains which sometimes resolve to public IPs. One company also allows an enumeration of all sales staff, as everyone gets their own domain. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)

[1] https://czds.icann.org/home

i love that gap registered .bananarepublic and .oldnavy as TLDs. those brands aren't even the top level of navigation structure on their own websites!
Hey those could be sold to an actual banana republic with an old navy someday for some real cash!
This is a monument to a phenomenal amount of money wasted on lawyers and hype. Look upon my TLDs and despair.
I'm surprised that they didn't find a market for the `.off` TLD.
Was the idea that typing the word “McDonalds” into my browser’s URL box would take me directly to that company’s website, instead of to a search query for the same term?

That seems like a scurrilous end-run around default search behaviour that one could hardly believe the major browsers would allow it. (For example, only treating your text as a domain lookup if the location had a dot in it, and was free of spaces or other punctuation.)

When I was knee high to an elf I recall that a couple browsers (IE5 and Netscape were the ones I tested) did seem to lookup .com for the term. This was before the URL bar became a search box. But you could reliably type something like hotmail or cute or joke and get to the correct website. The problems from there are super obvious and I am not surprised this no longer works.
I can't say I've ever seen many of these "vanity TLDs" in browsing through search results; and the ones I do see, tend to be SEO spam.
Getting redirected to maintenance.icann.org

https://web.archive.org/web/20240205121324if_/https://www.ic...

ICANN should open registrations to the public.
ABSOLUTELY. TLDs other than government and educational ones should be abolished at this point. Trademark disputes are already accommodated, so we needn't pretend that a trademark crisis would result.

You should be able to register something.whatever at the same registrar you'd use for something.com.

Of the 134 entries, I find only two where ICANN decided to keep the tld and transition it. For .wed and .desi. I guess these are tlds that actually allowed others / third parties to have domains, while for instance .wolkswagen was mostly enterprise use by themselves?
It's a good thing having a fancy domain isn't important anymore. Domain squatting must be so much less profitable.
What's with Lifestyle Domain Holdings? Did they fold, or something?
This one is odd:

xn--mgbaakc7dvf

(Emirates Telecommunications Corporation (trading as Etisalat))

Anyone have any idea why that would be a TLD? I'm assuming it displays in Arabic somehow?

it seems like companies did this to avoid someone else getting the TLD. Does this sound right?
In 2014 it wasn't all that obvious yet that the future internet would largely abandon the Web and become mostly apps talking to JSON APIs.