Comment by zamadatix
3 hours ago
I'll never cease to be amazed at what large companies will throw hundreds of thousands of dollars at just to _apply_ for a new gTLD. I mean what's the demand for whatever.superintelligence? Nobody is going to type that or notice it in a URL bar and think anything but "damn, that's a long TLD" while the dozens of other shorter AI focused TLDs sit there too.
It is not an exaggeration that tech companies have far, far more money than they know what to do with. Not all spending looks good to investors, so layoffs must happen, but this is nothing compared to the amounts of money Google, Meta, etc, blow on completely inexplicable / SVP vanity projects every year.
Non-tech companies are getting sucked in, too - see, for example, the applications for .airliquide, .capitalgroup, .dinebrands, .massimodutti, .newbalance, .stubhub, .warhammer, .zarahome, and so on.
From what I've seen thus far, most brand TLDs never get used. (The only significant exception that comes to mind is .google, and even they never really committed to using it.) Who's been going around convincing these companies to apply for this round?
Google mainly uses .goog for infrastructure (from cloud, gclb, gke, pki, to printer.in) while .google is more of the about page of services.
The pharmaceutical company Hisamitsu uses its TLD:
https://us.hisamitsu
Checked all primary strings for length, the 3 longest (excluding punycode notations):
.superintelligence (17)
.registeredagent (15)
.meditativemind (14)
.intelligence (12) is also in the top 10 longest primary strings.