One thousand five hundred ninety two TLDs

This year is the 40th anniversary of the internet’s first TLDs: .com, .org, .net, .gov, .edu, and .mil.

You know what a TLD—top-level domain—is, whether or not you knew the acronym. You use .com websites every day, you’ve visited country-based domains like .uk, and you might’ve seen newer ones like .xyz¹. There are well over a thousand domain extensions. These are the “et al” in my working book title, dot com et al (which, btw, is not set in stone, so reply with your honest thoughts: too literary-sounding, you like the staccato, don’t like the staccato, too hard to say aloud, etc.).

So how many TLDs are there, actually?

I counted up 1,592 from the root zone database on IANA’s website. IANA is part of ICANN (mnemonic: “I can(n) give you a name and number on the internet”), and together they are in charge of domain governance. Ok cool, so that must be the true number of TLDs...but wait, IANA’s website also has a plaintext file updated just this morning with 1,439 TLDs. Meanwhile Domainr, the ICANN-accredited API provider for domains, has 1,758 TLDs on its list. It turns out some are retired, others are reserved for future use, and more are stuck in disputes².

Types of TLDs

Ok, so there are about 1.5k TLDs split into two main buckets:

1. Generic (gTLD): 1250
2. Country-code (ccTLD): 316

There are also 14 sponsored domains, 11 active test domains, and one infrastructure domain—.arpa—in case you’re double checking my math. And 169 of the set are non-Latin alphabet TLDs (called IDNs for Internationalized Domain Names—in Arabic, Mandarin, etc.).

gTLDs

That first batch of TLDs in 1985 brought us the household domain names your parents know about. Initially you had to use an appropriate extension for your use (.com for commercial, .net for internet infrastructure, .org for nonprofits), but registrars gave up on enforcing semantics long ago.

Over the next couple decades there was a slow trickle of new gTLDs, like .info and .biz. Generics got a lot more interesting in the last dozen or so years since ICANN opened the flood gates. We went from a couple dozen to over a thousand gTLDs—there’s a good chance one exists for your occupation, whatever it is you do (.doctor, .banker, .lawyer....dentist, .florist, .ninja). Many generics are owned by municipalities and companies, like .taipei and .tjmaxx, which in many cases are not open to the public for registration.

It costs $185k to even apply for a new gTLD plus at least $25k annually, and registries have bid as much as $135m in auctions for the rights to a single TLD³.

ccTLDs

Country-code TLDs came about in the 80s with the earliest batch of generics. As I’ve written about before, these are eminent domains that countries control, so when you buy one you are trusting that country to keep the lights on (and many haven’t, like Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, and Somalia).

ccTLDs are also meaningful assets in many cases, like Tuvalu’s .tv generating 1/12 of its gross national income and Anguilla’s even greater .ai windfall that has hit the mainstream—Morning Brew ran a feature story about it just this week.

As a reminder, any two-letter TLD is a ccTLD, so as you go about your routine keep an eye out for uses. When you see one in the wild you can quickly Google “.[tld] domain” to figure out what country it belongs to. These often turn up places I could absolutely not pick out on a map, or haven’t heard of even. Ask yourself, would I trust this country to competently and ethically operate my domain far into the future? (Or ask me! I like to research ccTLDs.) In most cases it’s pretty low risk.

Is dot com still king?

There’s one question I keep turning over in my head and asking others: how much does .com matter now that all these TLDs exist?

Does Paul Graham’s Change Your Name advice still hold? Is dot com more valuable now with a sea of diluted alternatives? There seems to be consensus among domain brokers I’ve spoken to or follow online that dot com is king, but startup founders and everyday developers like me often seem to prefer vanity TLDs. There could be some wishful thinking from both camps at play: brokers want commissions from high dollar dot com sales; creators want a short, cheap domain that suits their brand.

If you have an opinion or even a knee jerk reaction to the importance of dot com, reply to this email—I am collecting as much data as I can to help answer that question (and really, trying to predict the future).

Footnotes

(1) Cryptographic tangent: you may have also seen .eth addresses that look like domains. Those are part of ENS, or Ethereum Name Service, which is a spin on DNS (Domain Name System) but completely separate. Similar to website domain-IP pairs, ENS maps .eth domains to IP addresses for crypto wallets. Just like you visit dotcom.press instead of 216.198.79.1, you can send crypto to your drug dealer at trevor.eth instead of 0x0b08dA7068b73A579Bd5E8a8290f8.

(2) The root zone database has 153 “Not assigned” extensions, which covers the gap from IANA’s list of valid, operational TLDs (1592-1493=153). The unassigned include country codes like .eh for the disputed Western Sahara territory (that Morocco has tried to claim), branded extensions like .bananarepublic (that Banana Republic owner Gap has applied for), and test domains used to poke and probe DNS. Domainr’s even larger list includes some historically reserved testing TLDs like .example and .invalid that IANA excludes.

(3) That $135m was for .web in 2016. Was it worth it? I haven’t seen many .web-sites. $41.5m for .shop is the second biggest sale to date.