On Thu, Jul 25, 2024 at 8:46 AM Giles Orr via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
For example: .black and .green are apparently "cool" colours, because their registration cost is in the $50-$60 range.
Think like a marketer. Because it's marketers who are peddling domains as branding tools, and choosing which gTLDs to create. Dot-green was sold as a way for companies to demonstrate eco-awareness (think "exxon.green"), some would call this greenwashing. Originally there were some standards required from anyone wanting a dot-green domain but those are gone and anyone can get one. Dot-black is intended to be used by an identified cultural community, similarly to dot-gay or dot-mormon. Sometimes there is confusion. The dot-la domain is actually the country TLD for Laos, but has been marketed first as a Latino community TLD, and when that didn't work the marketers shifted focus and it's now being peddled as the TLD for Los Angeles <https://www.la/>. There might even be Laotians using it too. Indeed, there are many countries that have allowed marketers to peddle their TLDs like generics. The Columbian TLD, dot-CO, has been used by GoDaddy and others as a fallback to those who can't get what they want under dot-com. Others have famously brought revenue to tiny jurisdictions such as Tuvalu (dot-TV) and French Micronesia (dot-FM). And how many people using bit.ly know that some of the revenue from that company funnels back to Libya? I'm curious: what's your pick for weirdest TLD? What's the strangest one
you've actually seen in use?
I think my favourites are dot-wtf and dot-sucks, though neither is living up to potential. Weirdest to me is dot-cat because it has nothing to do with felines but is instead used for Catalonia. - Evan