A lot of the new TLDs are brand names. https://data.iana.org/TLD/tlds-alpha-by-domain.txt

What does it take to create a new TLD?

You apply to ICANN. The registration paperwork and associated work will be fairly expensive, figure on spending $1M for a relatively uncontentious proposal, like maybe you want .pier25 that seems plausible unless there's some big community out there which feels they own it (see .amazon)

There are two routes, the key differentiator is are the resulting name hierarchy public (like .com) or is it yours and jealously to be guarded from all others (like .mil) ?

If the former ICANN will also require you to do a bunch of legal work to ensure that when you fail (because realistically you will) any names can be scooped up and preserved by a new operator of the TLD.

If the latter you're likely to have a tougher time defending why you should own this, unless you're a huge global brand.

Then you need to either spend a lot of money (again estimate $1M a year at least at first) yourself on infrastructure to serve your TLD, or you need to pay somebody else with relevant experience to do it for you.

A surprising number of companies bought vanity TLDs which they then don't use at all because of course they're much less convenient than a short name in an existing TLD. For example the KerryProperties TLD isn't used at all, kerryprops.com is much easier.

> Then you need to either spend a lot of money (again estimate $1M a year at least at first) yourself on infrastructure to serve your TLD

Why so much money?

Money

There are many brand TLDs but few companies seem to actually be using them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_dom...

Here's one I was surprised to see in use recently:

https://www.help.aarp

Google does too: https://domains.google (registrar), https://dns.google (public-dns, supports DoH and DoT), and https://ai.google.

I wish there was something up at https://google.google or https://apple.apple

Besides .google there's also .goog though.

    $ whois goog
    % IANA WHOIS server
    % for more information on IANA, visit http://www.iana.org
    % This query returned 1 object
    
    domain:       GOOG
    
    organisation: Charleston Road Registry Inc.
    address:      1600 Amphitheatre Parkway Mountain View, CA 94043 US
    address:      United States
    
    contact:      administrative
    name:         Domains Policy and Compliance
    organisation: Google Inc
    address:      601 N. 34th Street
    address:      Seattle, WA 98103
    address:      United States
    phone:        1 202 642 2325
    fax-no:       1 650 492 5631
    e-mail:       iana-contact@google.com

Google also own .new which seems like the sort of ridiculously expensive experiment only one of the big startups with cash to burn would do. It allows you to type docs.new or sheets.new (etc) into your address bar and instantly get an empty document.

Sadly it always defaults to the first logged in user, which makes it almost entirely useless to me.

You can also type design.new to get a Canva design.

Only if you’re Apple - they own it and afaik don’t sell domains on it.