…. But as the internet became a business, businesses came to the internet, and they mostly picked .com. Those companies had the marketing budgets to plaster their full domain names – Amazon.com, Pets.com, Broadcast.com — on TV and billboards everywhere. (There's a reason it's called "the dot-com boom," after all.) Before long, .com was baked into the public understanding of the internet. It no longer meant "commercial." It just meant "website." "It became kind of a self-fulfilling thing," Nicks said. "Everybody was using .com, therefore everybody had to use .com."
The situation became untenable pretty quickly. Every memorable .com domain name was snapped up, and an aftermarket industry grew up around the newly scarce resource. Even the two-word .coms quickly became hard to come by. Large companies would buy tens or hundreds of thousands of domains, hoarding them for possible future products or just for future resale value. (Google, Microsoft and Amazon are three of the world's largest domain owners.) There may be unlimited space on the internet, but the good space became hard to find.
In 2011, ICANN tried to fix the problem by reinventing the way domain names work altogether. Its 16-member board of directors voted to increase the internet's TLDs from 22 to thousands. Websites could suddenly be dot-almost anything. "Today's decision will usher in a new internet age," ICANN Chairman Peter Dengate Thrush said at the time. "We have provided a platform for the next generation of creativity and inspiration."
… Name recognition
The general domains are harder. "It takes a lot of resources to market them," Frank Schilling said. "And there isn't a uniform playbook; it depends on the string."
Most people agree that .xyz is one of the most successful examples so far: It's not nearly at .com levels of fame, but it has attained a certain kind of mainstream understanding. Shayan Rostam, a longtime domain exec who helped launch .xyz, said he spent months making the case for the domain. "If .com were to be launched today, when all these other options are out there, do you think anybody's going to pick a .com in 2021?" he'd say. "I think any pragmatic person is going to say, no, .com doesn't make sense as a domain ending. But .xyz, it's the ending of the alphabet, it's the ending of the domain name."
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The situation became untenable pretty quickly. Every memorable .com domain name was snapped up, and an aftermarket industry grew up around the newly scarce resource. Even the two-word .coms quickly became hard to come by. Large companies would buy tens or hundreds of thousands of domains, hoarding them for possible future products or just for future resale value. (Google, Microsoft and Amazon are three of the world's largest domain owners.) There may be unlimited space on the internet, but the good space became hard to find.
In 2011, ICANN tried to fix the problem by reinventing the way domain names work altogether. Its 16-member board of directors voted to increase the internet's TLDs from 22 to thousands. Websites could suddenly be dot-almost anything. "Today's decision will usher in a new internet age," ICANN Chairman Peter Dengate Thrush said at the time. "We have provided a platform for the next generation of creativity and inspiration."
… Name recognition
The general domains are harder. "It takes a lot of resources to market them," Frank Schilling said. "And there isn't a uniform playbook; it depends on the string."
Most people agree that .xyz is one of the most successful examples so far: It's not nearly at .com levels of fame, but it has attained a certain kind of mainstream understanding. Shayan Rostam, a longtime domain exec who helped launch .xyz, said he spent months making the case for the domain. "If .com were to be launched today, when all these other options are out there, do you think anybody's going to pick a .com in 2021?" he'd say. "I think any pragmatic person is going to say, no, .com doesn't make sense as a domain ending. But .xyz, it's the ending of the alphabet, it's the ending of the domain name."
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