For the first time in years, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers — better known as ICANN — is accepting applications for new top-level domains. These are the suffixes at the end of all URLs, and you may know them as things like .com, .org, and .pizza.
ICANN just announced the 1,615 applications that have been submitted so far, from 481 different applicants. The trend will not surprise you: AI is everywhere. Ten different companies, including both Meta and OpenAI, applied for the .agent domain. Seven, including OpenAI, applied for .agi. Six, including OpenAI, applied for .asi, clearly attempting to get in on President Trump’s demand to switch from “artificial intelligence” to “super intelligence.” Four companies applied for .intelligence, and Meta is one of two interested in the preposterously long .superintelligence. (OpenAI applied for a total of 15 TLDs; Meta wants a whopping 21.)
There are, broadly, two types of domains in these applications. One is more generic, the kind of thing lots of people or companies might use. There are hundreds of those in this current batch, from .geek to .haha to .anime to .jackpot. There’s also my personal favorite new one, .itiswhatitis.
The other is purely branded, giving a company its own TLD to use for its own purposes. There are 345 brand applications in this batch, including everything from .applebees and .bankofamerica to .zillow and .zoom. Meta applied for .facebook, .instagram, .messenger, .meta, .frommeta, and .threads, which it could use for many purposes; Bluesky applied for .bsky with the apparent intention of weaving the domain into its usernames; OpenAI applied for .chatgpt, .codex, .openai, .gpt, and others; Anthropic wants .anthropic and .claude. These strings could ultimately make for memorable product pages, social media usernames, and much more besides.
It has mostly been a tough road for these alternate TLDs over the last few years. Some, like .ai or .app, have become somewhat popular thanks to various tech trends, but most people just never got used to the idea of typing .restaurant or .babysitting, and .com and a few others have actually become more important than ever. It’s interesting to see so many brands go for their own domain, which only Google and a few others have accomplished before.
This is but one step in the process of creating a new top-level domain, and nothing will be made official before sometime next year. But it appears that even as the world becomes more filled with and mediated by AI, great domain names continue to matter. Even the AI companies think so.
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