[walrus01]

a number of the largest companies that used to be 'clients' of markmonitor have now basically become their own domain registrars and have a direct relationship with ICANN. Amazon for instance. It's curious that google was one and has offloaded it to squarespace.

[SahAssar]

I'm pretty sure google never used them for their own domains, and the whole markmonitor/squarespace thing was their "google domains" product where they sold registrar services to others. Besides that they also are a registry for .app/.dev and others, but don't sell them via their own registrar anymore.

[whh]

This is the best approach IMHO if you're a large, extremely valuable company registering a lot of domains.