It’s interesting to look at what they’ve carved in stone for themselves … because it’s a display of TLD priorities … and because others too are looking.
Country codes I’ll deal with later. For now, let’s digest what’s on our plate already. Beyond the no-brainer automotive keywords, it’s interesting to see what else Google thought of: customer service and jobs. Next, public relations with .COMPANY and .PRESS. Notice their embrace of .BLOG, which is barely a month old. And .TECH is no surprise, considering the New York Times referred to “tech” and “technology” 17 times in their story about Waymo.
Amusing that both Google or its advisors apparently forgot about India and Australia until weeks after they had registered domains for Kazakhstan and New Zealand! But so it goes. Those omissions are just the tip of the iceberg.
Will domains like Waymo.blog and Waymo.careers be put to use or merely warehoused? Because Google was so selective, going after barely a dozen nTLDs, it seems clear that they were thinking in terms of applicability. This wasn’t a shotgun approach. We’ve all seen companies much smaller than Google dig deeper into defensive registrations. So I think there’s a realistic chance that Alphabet will promote web pages using .BLOG, .CAREERS, .CARS, .SUPPORT, .TECH, .CAREERS, etc. in the future. We’ll see.
Read MoreOrdinarily, I find myself criticizing companies for excessive domain registrations. It’s significant that this Waymo launch has been, if anything, bare-bones and scrawny. This may indicate a more judicious approach to nTLDs on the part of companies, unlike the ill-considered splurges we’ve sometimes seen...
