Top Level Domains

Podcast Transcript

Every day, everyone who uses the internet uses the Domain Name System.

The key to the domain name system lies in the highest level of the system, the top-level domains. These are the domains such as .com, .org, and .net.

While you are probably very familiar with a few of these, there are actually a lot more. A whole lot more.

A lucky few top-level domain name holders actually managed to hit the jackpot.

Learn more about top-level domain names and how they are organized and distributed on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

In a previous episode, I covered how the Domain Name System works. It is basically like a glorified phone book, for people who remember phone books. You put in an easy-to-remember name, and it will then forward you to an Internet Protocol address, which is a not so easy to remember string of numbers.

The Domain Name System is a hierarchical system. You have top-level domain names or TLDs, then second-level domain names, and so on.

Usually, you just need two levels, but you can have more.

In this episode, I’m going to take a different approach and do a deeper dive on just top-level domain names, because the story behind them is really interesting.

For starters, there are way more top-level domain names than most people realize. Depending on how you define it, there are between 1,400 and 1,500 top-level domain names. Most of us only recognize a small handful of these.

Broadly speaking, there are two types of top-level domain names: generic TLDs and country TLDs.

Generic TLDs are the ones you are familiar with, such as .com, .org, .gov, .edu, and others.

Country TLDs are those like .uk, .us, .ru, .cn, and others, all of which have exactly two letters.

The origin of this system dates back not only before the creation of the internet, but even to the origin of computers.

It dates back to the years immediately after the Second World War.

This era witnessed the creation of numerous multinational organizations and treaties, including the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, and NATO.

One of the problems that was addressed in the post-war period was standards. Standards are vital in any industry or system that has a multinational reach.

Perhaps the best example of a system that didn’t have standards is electricity. When electrical standards were developed, they were developed on the national level. The result is that today we have a hodgepodge of different voltages and electrical outlet types.

Anyone who has traveled internationally has had to deal with the confusing mess of adapters that exist all over the world.

There were various industries that required the development of technical standards to facilitate trade and manufacturing. To that end, the International Organization for Standardization, or ISO, was established in 1947.

If you’ve ever seen something that said they were ISO certified, that is the same organization.

ISO covers a wide range of different industry standards; however, for the purpose of this episode, one of the first things they addressed was the issue of country names.

Before the ISO, naming conventions for international postal services and record-keeping were inconsistent.

The United States could be referred to as “US”, “U.S.A.”, or “USA”. Germany might appear as “DE”, “GER”, “GE”, or “D”. Switzerland was “CH” in some systems, “SUI” in others.

Then there was the problem of countries that had similar names. Switzerland and Sweden. Austria and Australia.

If you wrote down the abbreviation Aus, which country were you referring to?

This was something that was begging for a standard. In early 1970s, the ISO finally got around to solving the problem. ISO’s Technical Committee 46, Information and Documentation, and later Technical Committee 37, Terminology and Language Resources, developed the framework that became ISO 3166.

ISO 3166 was published in 1974, titled “Codes for the representation of names of countries”.

It established two-letter and three-letter codes as concise identifiers for countries and territories.

The two-letter form was modeled partly on the international vehicle registration codes and postal abbreviations, which were already familiar in cross-border use.

The two-letter codes went well beyond formal sovereign states and included territories and other sub-national regions such as Puerto Rico, Aruba, Gibraltar, and Antarctica.

The ISO has also updated the list as new countries were created and some were deleted as they were dissolved. For example, Zaire used to be ZR, and when it became the Democratic Republic of Congo, it was changed to CD.

None of this has anything to do with the Internet. In fact, the domain name system is not under the purview of the International Organization for Standardization.

Fast forward to 1984. The early internet was literally a list of IP addresses that you had to know to connect to another computer.

The Domain Name System hierarchy was designed in 1983 and 1984, led by UCLA computer scientist Jon Postel.

The proposal that they came up with had a limited number of generic top-level domain names. These included arpa, com, edu, gov, mil, and org. When it was finally implemented, the .net TLD was included as well.

In addition to the generic TLDs, they also added country TLDS.

Here, Postel faced a problem. Coming up with a list of countries, especially for something as official as the internet, is a potential political landmine.

His solution was to avoid making a list of counties. Instead, they just adopted the ISO list of two-letter country codes. By doing so, they just let ISO, a neutral third party, deal with the problem.

For the most part, when the ISO makes a change to its list, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, updates the associated top-level domain.

However, there are some exceptions.

.SU, the TLD for the Soviet Union, still exists…but, ICANN has announced recently that it is going to be phased out and will be gone by 2030.

In 1986, the .int TLD was added, which was intended for international organizations such as the World Health Organization and the African Union. It is still in use, but only a very small number of organizations can utilize it.

As the internet exploded in popularity in the 1990s, it became obvious that there was a need for more top-level domain names. The .com TLD was becoming crowded, and other TLDs had such niche uses that they were hardly used.

In 1998, the previously mentioned ICANN was established to manage the Domain Name System. They put out a call for proposals for new TLDs in August of 2000, and in November, they announced new generic TLDs: aero, biz, coop, info, museum, name, and pro.

They went through the same process in 2003, and in March of 2004, they announced .asia, .cat, .jobs, .mobi, .tel, and .travel.

The .xxx TLD was introduced in 2011, and .post in 2012.

However, the question was now being raised: was it really necessary to go through this process every time to make new TLDs? Why couldn’t any organization just create its own TLD? There was no technical reason why they couldn’t just do that.

In 2012, they vastly increased the number of top-level domains by allowing organizations to bid on their own TLDs. When the application window opened on January 12, 2012, it drew 1,930 applications for 1,409 distinct TLDs.

The current fee for a custom TLD is an upfront payment of $185,000, and then a fixed annual fee of $25,000 and a variable fee $0.25 per domain registration under the TLD.

Some of the TLDs went up for competitive bidding. .app was famously won by Google for $25 million in 2015, .shop sold for $41.5 million, and .web was auctioned for $135 million.

This is why there are so many top-level domains, the vast majority of which you have probably never heard of. Apple bought the rights to .apple, and they never really use it. They purchased it so no one else could have it.

So, of the 1400 and something TDLs that exist, the most popular are the ones that you are familiar with: .com, .org, .net, and .info, etc.

However, some have a shocking number of domains registered under them that you have probably never come across, or if you did, it was probably spam or a phishing attack. These include .top, .loan, and .xyz.

Now I want to go back to the country TLDs. Every country, no matter how big or how small, has its own TLD.

When the ISO created the country codes back in 1974, they had nothing special in mind. They certainly didn’t know that the internet would exist.

As each of these countries can do with their TLDs as they see fit, some of them have utilized their TLDs as a significant source of revenue.

In particular, two small countries, Tuvalu and Micronesia, hit the TLD jackpot. Their TLDs were .TV, and .FM.

For Tuvalu, the breakthrough came in 1998 and 2000. Tuvalu granted exclusive .tv rights to commercial partners in deals that delivered tens of millions of dollars to the government and transformed a tiny national asset into a major revenue source.

Early arrangements involved Information.CA and then dotTV, which was acquired by VeriSign in 2001. Media reports at the time described headline figures around 50 million dollars across the initial term and noted that the income helped with expenses such as United Nations dues.

Tuvalu has a population of slightly less than 10,000 people, and having been there, I can tell you the country is basically a village.

After VeriSign’s contract ended in 2021, Tuvalu selected GoDaddy as the new registry operator, with reports indicating annual government revenue of approximately $ 10 million. Government budgets and press coverage indicate that .tv royalties accounted for a notable share of national income in the late 2010s and early 2020s.

Micronesia receives slightly less, on the order of around $ 2 to $ 4.5 million per year, mostly from radio stations and podcasts.

There are a host of other countries that sell their TLDs to lesser effect. Armenia has .AM, and Djibouti has .DJ.

Of interesting note is the small island territory of Tokelau. Tokelau is a territory of New Zealand, with a population of approximately 1,500 people. Its TLD is .TK, which really doesn’t have any meaning.

In the early 2000s, Dutch entrepreneur Joost Zuurbier proposed using .tk for free domain registrations subsidized by advertising.

Around 2001, Zuurbier negotiated with Tokelauan authorities to obtain the rights to operate the .tk registry. He offered to provide free or subsidized internet connectivity and pay licensing fees.

Because .tk registrations were free and globally available, the domain experienced explosive growth in numbers. By the late 2000s and 2010s, it was often reported as one of the largest ccTLDs by the number of registrations.

However, the free model also led to abuse: many .tk domains were used for phishing, spam, and other malicious behavior. Security researchers have noted that .tk has a disproportionately high abuse rate compared to more restrictive TLDs.

Revenue figures aren’t known, but for three tiny, extremely difficult to reach islands in the Pacific with almost no resources, their top-level domain has become their greatest asset.

The Central African Republic and Equatorial Guinea have created similar free website schemes with their TLDs.

I would like to conclude with the country that has experienced an incredible surge in its fortunes over just the last year, largely due to its TLD—the Caribbean island of Anguilla.

Anguilla’s TLD happens to be .AI.

With the rise of artificial intelligence companies, there has been a corresponding increase in companies interested in acquiring a .AI domain name.

Since the launch of ChatGPT in 2023, the number of .AI domains has exploded. There were fewer than 200,000 registered just two years ago, and given current trends, there will be about a million in 2026.

In 2022, sales of their domain name accounted for just 5% of Anguilla’s government revenues. In 2025, it is estimated to be just under 50%.

Most people who need a domain name tend to stick with the basic .com or .org, depending on what it is for. However, there is a world of other top-level domains out there that most people don’t realize are options.

However, the list of TLDs isn’t comprehensive. For example, oddly enough, there is no top-level domain for .pod or .podcast, which seems like a massive oversight.

So, if anyone out there has $185,000 burning a hole in their pocket and is willing to pony up another $25,000 every year, you too can have your very own top-level domain name.