Be wary of vanity TLDs and even some country codes, they may be available but once the renewal rolls around and you've invested time and effort into establishing a presence there, you may be in for a price shock.
Which is an even worse problem than speculators. My domain was once held by some kind of speculator who wanted like $2k for it. I registered a .net instead. At some point they just dropped the .com domain, no idea why. Now I have the .com all to myself. Now that registrars are doing this, there's no way out.
It's always struck me as odd that TLDs are not just, well, freely configurable? Domains have always been subject to so much artificial scarcity for seemingly no reason. Why can't a DNS resolver handle .whatever?
The social fabric of the system would fall apart if people could trivially buy top level domains. Even the not so trivial buying that ICANN began in 2015 in order to profiteer was a serious mistake (to everyone besides ICANN).
it would be a global first come first serve namespace. Everything conceivable would be registered. Only the diversity of TLDs and SLDs saves the current DNS from this. In fact ICANN's money-grubbing TLD spam actually improved this, since there are now far too many TLDs to squat them all.
This wouldn’t really reduce the scarcity though. Right now everyone wants a “.com”, because it’s the convention. If you could buy the TLD “widget” for the same price as “widget.com”, then you would just move up one level in the domain hierarchy and have the same scarcity? If anything, the fact that there are several legitimate TLD options reduces the scarcity a tiny bit?
As an aside (I’m also annoyed by domain squatters etc), it is a fascinating market study how domains are artificially scarce the way they are when everyone can easily and cheaply buy them. I am not sure there is any reasonable solution to it.
Maybe it's useful for ICANN to delegate management to different orgs (mostly corporations) so they don't have to control every single website on earth directly
I would actually prefer for the ICANN to have even less power and for the whole system to be even more distributed
What we should have is a root zone consisting only of country codes, and technical TLDs like .arpa, and no central authority on this file. It should be reasonable enough to get consensus on who runs the DNS root for each country. These don't change too frequently. And then each country can do whatever it wants inside its own TLD.
The problem is the US is grandfathered in without staying inside its TLD. This was manageable when it was just .com .org .net etc. but now ICANN has abused this position to mint thousands of new US TLDs outside of .us. If they were inside .us this would only be a problem for whoever runs .us but because they are top-level it makes it difficult to have a decentralised root zone and not just rely on what ICANN publishes. Which is part of the point I'm sure.
What's odd is there seems to be no viable alternatives to DNS at all. Everybody just standardized on this ancient phone book technology managed by some rent seeking "assigned numbers" organization and now there is no escape from it.
These are fun but regular people have so much difficulty with them.
I once snagged a 4 letter .net address that was the last 3 letters of my first name with the first initial of my last name as the last character.
I thought I was so clever. I had the shortest email address you could ever imagine and it was basically just my first name and last initial. Amazing!
Nobody got it. It was confusing. I got blank stares and confused looks. People basically refused to email me at my new address.
Sometimes long is better, and sometimes unique and easy to spell is better, too.
Examples like Pinterest or Expedia are good demonstrators. They are easy to spell when you hear the word, and they were unique words that at the time were obviously going be available. Sure, Expedia is a very old domain, but if the company didn’t exist today I’d almost guarantee you a new company looking to buy the domain would be able to find it in 2026.
Ya, I have an .st domain with is <my-first-name>@<first-three-letters-of-last-name>.st and I've had a few people have a lot of trouble with it. With one, it took about 6 or 7 tries to explain it to him before I just took over and typed it for him. Most people do get it, though, and sometimes think it's neat.
Very true, I found a similar issue with vanity/hack domains too. Picked up https://jo.hn a couple of years ago and the confusion it causes isn't really worth the cool-factor most of the time!
They tend to really just be suitable as a supplementary domain for short links and the like (youtu.be, goo.gl, etc.)
i have a 3-letter .onl domain that is the first 3 letters of my last name
I have actually needed to use it, because my cell provider (Visible) has absolutely moronic form validation that doesn't recognize a hyphen as a valid character in an email address, even though it very much is. (My main .net domain has a hyphen in it)
You could've found an EU person to hold the domains for you btw.
Regardless, it's usually politically safest to put your domains under your own country's ccTLD. That way, you're exposed to one fewer country's dumb politics.
You could get jail time for hosting memes if you're in the UK no matter what domain you use. However, if you use a .me domain, then it can also be taken down for violating any law of Montenegro.
dot org is right there and is at least run by a non profit. The SAVE .ORG campaign succeeded in preventing private equity from buying it out. Thanks to EFF, Wikipedia, NPR, Greenpeace, the YMCA, and even the Girl Scouts!