You wouldn't take Google seriously? I'm sure they didn't fork out just for today, they will be using it for their products at some point.
In a few years, it will probably the standard domain for big corps. iphone.apple, macbook.apple, etc. It looks weird now (or an intranet address at best), but once people get used to it, it will be recognisable as a domain just as any.com is now.
Not to mention, an explosion of TLDs for reselling (.futbol .enterprise etc) means people will just equate . on billboards etc with a domain.
The fact that a company needs their own gTLD is silly. Sites like google have a perfectly good domain. Why use iphone.apple if apple can already do iphone.apple.com or apple.com/iphone? At the end of the day the consumer will not start guessing what domain he/she has to use to get what they want. The average consumer uses a search engine and types in "apple iphone". They don't care about iphone.apple they just want to go to the product page.
Well, it's not about need. It's about a story that goes like this:
ICANN: Hey, has anyone noticed that our wallets aren't
very heavy?
Google: We have a bucketload of money just laying around
that will fill your wallets, and wouldn't mind
our own gTLD. It'd be cute.
ICANN: You had us at 'bucketload of money'
We needed more gTLDs anyway. So what if a few mega-companies get their own versions?
> Google isn't going to abandon their perfectly good domains.
Good thing icann just increased the available domain-space from "limited" to "unlimited" then. That sounds good for almost everyone, or at least icann.
The TLD system is arguably broken, because it never turned out as hierarchical as it was supposed to. All the new TLDs do is force people to shell out more money to squat on pointless domains to avoid them being used for fraud (or, worse, by the competition).
Not happening in my experience. As long as everyone in the industry is earning their share from this madness they'll happily "suggest optimizations to the domain portfolio" of their vict^Wcustomers.
This battle was lost the second people started using .net and .org for things that wheren't related network technologies and non-profit orgranizations respectively. The nail was driven into the coffin when people started using country tld's for sites that had nothing to do with that country.
If anything this might be step back in the right direction. Whereas I cannot tell anything about the nature or origin of a site based on the fact that it has a .net or .ly tld, I will be able to tell something about nature and origin of a site if it has a .google or .apple tld.
More generally, as part of ICANN's gTLD approval process, if the gTLD being applied for is a trademark, then it can't go to anyone else besides the trademark holder. So there's actually a lot more assurances that you are dealing with who you expect to be dealing with with gTLDs versus random domain names on .com.
Honest question, trademarked according to who? The Internet is a global thing now, so who wins if there's two entities that happen to both have valid claims to a trademark?
