However, "imamat" by itself is a generic term, so it's not clear why it should be controlled by a single organization that happens to have it in the name.
All it takes for a TLD these days is a vaugely-legitimate use and about a million dollars[1]. This isn't hard for a large company or state actor to fund; Why would a
mid-large religion not be able to?
The weird thing is, are they even meaningfully used? I don't think I've ever seen a .google URL in the wild, neither for their websites nor for API endpoints.
Presumably, they submitted a gTLD application to ICANN and paid the — at the time — USD$180k evaluation fee. They likely also made arrangements with some existing registrar to host the actual name servers, rather than doing so themselves.
Wasn't it better when only .com mattered? There are thousands of TLDs now and that forces companies to buy multiple, these domain names are not even memorable anymore specifically because of the TLD part.
do companies even use these in the wild or are they buying these TLDs for nothing? ".brother", ".canon", ".nokia", ".panasonic", ".playstation", ".xbox", ".xerox"... there's even ".sandvikcoromant", which is some sort of Swedish metalwork company.
I wouldn't say it's for nothing. Brands with trademarks have a legal incentive under trademark law to acquire their trademarked name everywhere. Not doing so immediately risks a future legal and bad PR battle if some smaller company acquires it first.
TLDs were a mistake. We should just get rid of them and have the person's domain at the top level. E.g. instead of news.ycombinator.com have just news.ycombinator
This is really interesting, as the chain uses bauhaus.info here in Germany, presumably because the .de and .com domains were already taken, but they didn't bother to register de.bauhaus.
The Ismaili leaders are super influential and have connections everywhere. They are megawealthy socialites. Basically they wanted the TLDs so they knew who to talk to to make it happen.
Right. I wanted to send a pic of the previous Aga Khan to someone recently and the first pic that came up was him hanging out with King Charles. IIRC their HQ in Portugal has a similar semi-autonomous status to the Vatican inside Rome.
I used to have a close Ismaili friend and saw some of the inner workings of the community. They're extremely tight knit due to historical persecution (similar to Judaism). They are very well connected and are always secretly funding schools and factories for communities in need all over the world. The charity and service are never boasted about outside the religious circle to keep eyes off of them. However, they do a fair amount of boasting internally just because they are very proud of their community.
FWIW, Google owns .gle, and I emailed both Sundar Pichai and Charleston Registry, but no response of any kind.
My startup is called MedAngle, and we'd love to get medan.gle, but it just left a sour taste in my mouth. Some of these processes are giant black boxes.
If you want a fun way to spend the rest of your afternoon, just prefix any of these with "nic." and enter in your web browser. Interestingly, for example, it seems that .ninja is ran by what appears to be actual ninjas.
This should be titled Ask HN: because IANA.ORG has nothing to do with the question it's just linkage to an alpha sorted list of TLD present in the root zone.
Anything besides the classic .com, .org, .net, .gov, or well-known ccTLDs usually gets ignored as spam in my search results, so for me, however much they paid for an unusual TLD was of negative value.
Related: It’s only about $5k a year to run your own registrar (which is different than a gTLD). You have to sign agreements with Verisign and others to register domains on TLDs that people actually want but it’s not unduly hard and I think they even offer good payment terms.
if you think that answer too short, then read the list of tlds, and then reread the answer. repeat cycle if you need more training for your neural net.
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 70.2 ms ] thread(https://ismaili.imamat/#introduction)
The Aga Khan is the leader of the Ismaili Imamat.
They have as good a claim to a TLD as Berlin, if not more.
https://icannwiki.org/.agakhan
https://icannwiki.org/.ismaili
https://icannwiki.org/.imamat
[1] https://newgtldprogram.icann.org/en/resources/faqs#6
Blame ICANN for allowing any public or private organization who can meet the requirements to buy and operate a gTLD back in 2012: https://newgtlds.icann.org/en/applicants/global-support/faqs...
And as per another comment in this thread, they’re doing another round of this in 2026: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45068328
They may or may not have then had the evaluation fee refunded to them, under the Applicant Support Program (https://newgtldprogram.icann.org/en/application-rounds/round...).
https://icannwiki.org/.george
do companies even use these in the wild or are they buying these TLDs for nothing? ".brother", ".canon", ".nokia", ".panasonic", ".playstation", ".xbox", ".xerox"... there's even ".sandvikcoromant", which is some sort of Swedish metalwork company.
Much respect for Ismailis.
My startup is called MedAngle, and we'd love to get medan.gle, but it just left a sour taste in my mouth. Some of these processes are giant black boxes.
if you think that answer too short, then read the list of tlds, and then reread the answer. repeat cycle if you need more training for your neural net.