10 ms·
How did .agakhan, .ismaili and .imamat get their own TLDs?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- aerodog 1y agoSeriously - how did that go down?
- mikelitoris 1y agolike this: pay the consultants and lawyers, then ICANN. That's it.
- nom 1y agohttps://gtldresult.icann.org/applicationstatus/applicationdetails/1093 https://gtldresult.icann.org/applicationstatus/applicationde...
- dundarious 1y agoIt would be helpful if you would explain why you think it is surprising or confusing or objectionable or whatever else inspired you to ask. Also helpful would be examples that you think are similar in some way, but that are not surprising, etc. As is, your question is practically impossible to answer without just pointing you to the ICANN process.
- gerikson 1y ago> The Ismaili Imamat is a supra-national entity, representing the succession of Imams since the time of the Prophet Muhammad. (https://ismaili.imamat/#introduction 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.
- maxbond 1y agoThere's also .va for the Vatican and .lds for the Mormon faith (and .mormon), and more generic Christian ones like .church. I didn't find any for other religions on a casual search, perhaps because many of them don't have the same degree of centralization.
- mikestorrent 1y agoThe Vatican is a country, so it gets a ccTLD.
- maxbond 1y agoTrue but I don't think the distinction matters to the overall point that it's perfectly ordinary for religious institutions to operate a TLD, regardless of the mechanism that allows for it.
- kevin_thibedeau 1y agoVatican City is a theocracy, not a religion. You'd technically have to add .uk and many more to the list if you're broadening to all nations with a state religion.
- PeterWhittaker 1y ago.uk was one of the first! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/.uk https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/.uk (Or did I miss an "/s"?)
- pests 1y agoI think they mean in the context of a a TLD related to a religious entity. Since uk has a state religion, they meant “add it to the list of religious tlds” along with .va and others mentioned in this thread.
- PeterWhittaker 1y ago
- Tamer 1y ago> ismaili.imamat So, a quite expensive domain hack? Are they trending again? There's even a list on domainhacks.club
- int_19h 1y agoHowever, "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.
- 627467 1y agoAren't there tons of generic terms gTLD controlled by a single organizations now?
- jonesjohnson 1y agoI've just learned here that .man is owned/controlled by the MAN group edit: source: https://icannwiki.org/.man https://icannwiki.org/.man also: walmart applied for .george https://icannwiki.org/.george https://icannwiki.org/.george
- ccgreg 1y agoGiven that this discussion was started by someone mentioning only these 3 related things, I'd guess that the motivation might a negative one.
- gerikson 1y agoAnd indeed, the KSA rep has opposed it: https://slate.com/technology/2012/08/icann-top-level-domain-applications-saudi-arabia-apparently-objects-to-catholic-gay-bible.html https://slate.com/technology/2012/08/icann-top-level-domain-...
- sudhirb 1y agothe icann wiki has some articles for these: https://icannwiki.org/.agakhan https://icannwiki.org/.agakhan https://icannwiki.org/.ismaili https://icannwiki.org/.ismaili https://icannwiki.org/.imamat https://icannwiki.org/.imamat
- GauntletWizard 1y agoAll 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? [1] https://newgtldprogram.icann.org/en/resources/faqs#6 https://newgtldprogram.icann.org/en/resources/faqs#6
- subarctic 1y ago.calvinklein, .homedepot - how do these things get created, can you just go to namecheap.com and make your own tld?
- whalesalad 1y agoyou pay ICANN a hefty fee. https://icannwiki.org/New_gTLD_Program:_Next_Round https://icannwiki.org/New_gTLD_Program:_Next_Round
- input_sh 1y agoIf you pay ICANN hundreds of thousands of dollars, you can get basically any .word domain. I believe the only actual requirement is that it has to be 3 characters or longer, as two characters are reserved for countries.
- h4ck_th3_pl4n3t 1y agoImagine having the domain cyber[.]threat Would be kind of cool, most attacked domain on the web, probably
- derefr 1y agoActually, no — it's an evaluation fee, simply to review your application; and they will reject applications that don't meet their criteria. One of those criteria is that you actually do something with the gTLD — per their FAQ: > ICANN expects all new gTLDs to be operational. One of the reasons ICANN is opening the top-level space is to allow for competition and innovation in the marketplace. The application process requires applicants to provide a detailed plan for the launch and operation of the proposed gTLD. gTLDs are expected to be delegated within one year of signing a registry agreement with ICANN. A few highlights from the full evaluation criteria (https://newgtlds.icann.org/sites/default/files/evaluation-questions-criteria-04jun12-en.pdf https://newgtlds.icann.org/sites/default/files/evaluation-qu...): - They will reject applications made by known cybersquatters - They will reject your TLD string if it has rendering problems on major OSes (e.g. if its codepoints aren't covered by at least fallback fonts) - They will reject your registration policies if they're incoherent or unenforceable - They will reject your application on behalf of a community if you can't provide sufficient references establishing that you actually represent the interests of that community - They will reject your application if you haven't outlined to their satisfaction a plan for continuity/migration of control of the gTLD from your organization to some other organization in case of the bankruptcy/dissolution/etc of your organization (note: this is a separate thing from the technical considerations of registry fail-over et al, which are more something that most applicants would have a technical registry partner fill out on their behalf) --- In all, the process actually seems quite thorough — but as with regular domain-name registration, it's a default-accept, not a default-deny, policy. The more arbitrary gTLDs that have been established so far all just-so-happen to be "innocent" of all of the disqualifiers. Specifically, I think, given the criteria, that any multinational company could probably expect to be able to acquire its own name and trademarks as gTLDs without much fuss; and recognized leaders/stewards of any major religion (or other non-country-endemic sociocultural group) could likely get any jargon term specific to that religion/subculture as a gTLD. Those two cases together cover most of the "weirdness" in approved applications. One assertion I might make after reviewing the evaluation criteria, is that very few of the criteria look at the gTLD string itself. Almost any gTLD string is a potentially valid registration. Almost all of the evaluation process is set up to establish whether you, the applicant, have a valid claim for stewardship over the given gTLD string.
- jkaplowitz 1y agoPresumably way the same as .google and all the other special-purpose organization-specific domains. 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/faqs-en 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45068328
- carl_dr 1y agoGenuine question: why “blame”? Does it really matter?
- ionwake 1y agoyes blame. ofcourse it matters. tld use to be good insight into the purpose of the website. IE, google.com, or wikipedia.org
- jrflowers 1y agoThose tlds still exist. The existence of butts.adult doesn’t create confusion about oxfam.org
- portaouflop 1y agoYou misled me, butts.adult does in fact not exist.
- jrflowers 1y agoOh wow. That seems like an oversight. Somebody with $400 to burn could either support or refute my point on this matter
- justusthane 1y agoWith some exceptions (.gov, .edu, for example), it has never actually meant anything. Anyone can register a .com, .net, or .org for any purpose.
- derefr 1y agoPresumably, 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. 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/round2/asp https://newgtldprogram.icann.org/en/application-rounds/round...).
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- mr_mitm 1y agoEven this random German insurance reseller (some call it a pyramid scheme) DVAG has its own TLD. You can buy anything with money.
- whatsupdog 1y agoHow did .catholic and .church get their own gTLDs?
- hn_go_brrrrr 1y agoSomeone paid to register them.
- andunie 1y agoWasn'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.
- dc396 1y agoWell, it depends. If all you were interested in was getting a "good" (e.g., short) name in .COM, no. In the late 90s, when NSF allowed Network Solutions to charge for domain names, people complained that they (now Verisign) had a monopoly, so after a number of fine lunches and dinners in far off exotic places (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAHC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAHC), there was a proposal to create more top-level domains, created the registry/registrar split, proposed the Uniform Dispute Resolution Policy (primarily for Intellectual Property owners), etc. Then, the US government stepped in and started a process that led to the creation of ICANN. The whole point of this exercise was to introduce competition into the domain name system. It did with the registry/registrar split and tried with the registries by having multiple rounds of a limited number of new top-level domains. However, the latter was kind of stupid (IMHO): the switching costs for changing TLDs is way too high for the existence of new TLDs to significantly impact Verisign's monopoly -- instead, it created a bunch of monopolies. However, people weren't happy with the "limited number" part of ICANN's efforts to introduce competition in the TLD space, so in 2012, the ICANN community (which anyone can be a part of) opened the flood gates, removed the arbitrary restrictions on how new top-level domains could be created, and we now have over 1500 TLDs.
- xp84 1y agoIt's still basically only .com that matters. There are those few others that matter commercially (setting aside the org for nonprofits and edu and gov), such as .io, but for every 'clever domain' startup, I see 6 more who, unable to get say, frog dot com, go with something like "usefrog dot com" or "tryfrog dot com" in their early days and come back and snap up frog dot com after they get their Series C. They could have gotten say, frog dot legal or frog dot engineering but nobody wants those.
- uz3snolc3t6fnrq 1y ago.george is a pretty funny one. apparently Walmart owns it, so you probably won't be able to register a .george domain any time soon. https://icannwiki.org/.george 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.
- arcfour 1y agoAmazon/AWS use them (.aws), so does Google (.google) but I agree, it is pretty funny how many companies seemed to get on board (out of fear of being left out?) and then...didn't use them for some reason?
- 0x3f 1y agoGoogle does use theirs for public-facing landing pages even [1], just not uniformly, but that's very on-brand for Google as an org. Where have you seen .aws in use though? [1] e.g. https://quantumai.google/ https://quantumai.google/
- zoover2020 1y agoAWS uses the TLD internally
- serv0id 1y agohttps://skillbuilder.aws/ https://skillbuilder.aws/
- xp84 1y agonotebooklm.google too yeah if I had to guess there's too much that's already pointed at google.com and with their main business being leveraging cookie data for ad money I bet whoever in the org might think it'd be rad to switch to mail.google, search.google, android.google, etc. gets beaten over the head with a stack of $100 bills anytime he brings it up. I wonder, would the other browser vendors agree to treat all of .google as one entity in terms of 'same domain rule' if Google promised they aren't selling subdomains to anyone else? I'm not aware of any TLD treated like that presently. So yeah, seems like the corporate domains, at least of adtech titans, will never be used for much but redirects.
- ChrisArchitect 1y agoAsk HN:
- jlarocco 1y agoIs there even a good reason to have TLDs at this point?
- dc396 1y agoThe DNS is hierarchical. How would you replace TLDs?
- withinboredom 1y agonamebase.io if you want a crypto backed one.
- bawolff 1y agoTLDs 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
- treyd 1y agoWhat if there are two people named John Smith? Or two restaurants called Main Street Diner? Or two towns named Springfield?
- blahgeek 1y agoSame situation when two people named John Smith want the same john-smith.com domain now. You may argue that in the current situation, if they are from different countries like US and Canada, they would obtain john-smith.us and john-smith.ca respectively. But in the proposed situation, they can also get john-smith-us and john-smith-ca
- treyd 1y agoBut who gets john-smith?
- ali1ism 1y agoI find the the Dutch Bauhaus website ridiculously unnecessary: https://nl.bauhaus https://nl.bauhaus
- j0hax 1y agoThis 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.
- steviedotboston 1y agoThe 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.
- qingcharles 1y agoRight. 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.
- petesergeant 1y agoThe British monarchy and the Aga Khan have very strong associations. Weird trivia: the right for the Aga Khan to call himself "His Highness" is by title granted by the British monarchy, like some kind of weird accreditation. https://www.royal.uk/news-and-activity/2025-02-10/the-king-is-pleased-to-grant-the-new-aga-khan-the-title-his-highness https://www.royal.uk/news-and-activity/2025-02-10/the-king-i...
- d0gsg0w00f 1y agoI 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. Much respect for Ismailis.
- maz1b 1y agoFWIW, 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.
- poly2it 1y agoI don't think Sundar is likely to go through with your request personally. Your best bet might be if you know an internal engineer working close to their domain management, but even then I'd doubt they'd register it for an external startup. There are currently 21 domains under gle, all related to Google products.
- captn3m0 1y agoGoogle is the biggest squatter. https://captnemo.in/tld-squatting/ https://captnemo.in/tld-squatting/
- hansjorg 1y agoIf 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.
- kmoser 1y agoActual ninjas? How so? http://nic.ninja http://nic.ninja (not https!) redirects to https://www.identity.digital/ https://www.identity.digital/
- ggm 1y agoThis 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.
- patrickwalton 1y agoFor another fun one: .weather is entirely owned by the weather channel...
- userbinator 1y agoAnything 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.
- costco 1y agoRelated: 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.
- sim7c00 1y agomoney. 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.