When you think of a domain name, you probably think of dot com dot net dot
org or maybe even one of the more popular newer ones like Dot L Y or Dot I O.
But the rabbit hole goes way further than just the ones you're familiar with.
There are even a bunch of categories of domain extensions that you probably
never heard of, including sponsored domains, branded domains, restricted
domains, infrastructure domains and even reserved special use domains.
In fact, at the moment, the total number of top-level domain extensions is 1590.
And yes, I looked through every single one as part of researching this video.
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Before I get into the weirdest domain extensions I found,
let me quickly go through a list all the different domain extension categories.
And then later, I'll go into more detail about them, just so you can get
an idea of what we're getting into.
Now for these different categories, some of them are technically
unofficial, but people still use them.
The distinction doesn't really matter.
The first category, you're probably already very familiar.
They are country code domains.
So these are like .co.uk for the United Kingdom, .ca.
for Canada, .au for Australia.
And country code domains are actually one of the earliest official
categories of domain extensions.
Another big official category of top-level domains are generic
top level domains, or gTLDs.
And in the early days, this basically referred to any of the domains that
basically weren't country codes, that's pretty much what it meant.
But these days, there are plenty of other subcategories that are unofficial.
For example, there are restricted generic domains of which you have
to fulfill some kind of criteria before being able to register for it.
There's also branded domains.
These are ones that are registered by companies, usually.
There's also sponsored domains, which are different than branded domains, and
only certain types of organization could use a certain type of sponsored domain.
And there's geographic domains, which usually refer
to small regions like cities.
And again, I'm going to go into more detail later.
Right now, I'm just kind of giving you a very brief summary.
And for these following categories, I'm literally just going to name
them and I'll explain them later.
So the rest of them are, internationalized country code domains, testing domains,
infrastructure domains and "special use" domains, which are my favorite.
Like I said at the moment, the total number of domains is 1590.
However, only 1489 of them are actually active.
And that's because 82 of them are "Not Assigned" it's called,
basically means they were revoked for whatever reason, maybe the company
didn't want to pay for it anymore.
8 of them are so-called "Retired" and then 11 of them are test domains.
If you want to look at the full list, you can go on the IANA website and this is
the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority.
On their website, they have both the entire full list of
previous and current domains.
And then they also have these so-called root zone database,
which shows all active domains.
And the IANA is basically the organization that runs all the top level domains.
They're a subsidiary of ICANN, but I'm not going to get into all that.
All right so let's finally get into some actual examples,
including some weird ones.
Now, before I just give a purely weird extensions, I do want explain
that a lot of the ones you look through might seem weird, but
they're probably just branded domains
And these are domain extensions that are basically bought by a company, and
are the name of the company or a brand.
For example, there's .FedEx, .Microsoft, .Apple, .Xbox, a bunch of those.
And like I said, this will explain a lot of the ones that seem kind of weird.
For example, .George, I was like, "what is this guy named George, who's super rich
and just wanted his own domain extension"?
No it turns out it's owned by Wal-Mart, so I googled Wal-Mart George, and it
turns out it's a clothing brand owned by Wal-Mart, so that explains it.
Now, I couldn't find a pre-made list of all brand domains, but there are a
lot of them if you look through them.
So armed with that knowledge, we can filter through and only look at
the truly weird, generic domains that really anyone can register and aren't
brands, they're just kind of strange.
One of them is .Meme, another one is .lol there's .fail and even .wtf.
I'm pretty sure the company that made these domain extensions were basically
just hoping that they would be used for different kind of internet trend
websites or something like that, I don't know
Another one I'd consider weird is .Blockbuster.
Now, that's a branded domain.
But what I think is weird about it is, why?
Blockbuster isn't even a thing anymore.
Why even register for this one?
I guess technically you could use it for any movie that you say is
going to be a blockbuster, but then just use movie or something,
I don't know.
Another strange one is .wang.
Yeah, do I have to explain why this one's weird?
Surely it just refers to that Mitchell and Webb sketch, numberwang.
Another weird one is .Dot.
I mean, who thought of this one?
Who thought this was a good idea?
Imagine trying to verbally tell someone what your website is.
They're not going to know what the heck you're talking about.
Is that two periods?
They're not going to think it's the word dot spelled out,
I don't know, it's stupid.
Then there's .Barefoot.
Now there are some other dumb domain extensions in here, but
this one is just so oddly specific.
There's also .Christmas.
I mean, are there really that many Christmas specific websites where it
warrants its own domain extension?
Then there's .OOO, where the company who made this one thought that it would kind
of be a new popular one for companies that couldn't get their own .Com domain.
They'd be able to do "dot triple O", and that would be a thing.
It's not a thing.
Then there are a few blatant cash grab domain extensions, for example .Sucks.
Like, obviously, this one to bait companies into having to buy this
one, in case someone else buys it and makes a critical website.
But on the flip side, there's also .Rocks, so I don't know.
I've never seen either of these, to be honest, though.
And then finally, for what I consider cash grabs is .Exposed again,
it just seems like one that it's going to try and get companies just
to buy it just so they have it.
Now one thing I realize I forgot to mention is, where exactly do
these domain extensions come from?
Now, the IANA manages the list of top level domains,
they kind of approve them and create all the DNS infrastructure
to redirect to them.
However, it's basically private companies that apply to create these
different top-level domains, and then they basically own the licenses or
rights or whatever you want to call it to those top-level of domains.
And they can basically charge people whatever they want to use
a domain with their extension.
For example, if you had the funds to apply for your own domain extension like
.CoolPeopleOnly and you wanted to charge hundred thousand dollars for anyone who
wanted to use that extension per year, and you could only get one if you did
that, well you could technically do it.
Though I don't believe it's very cheap to have your own top-level domain extension,
usually it's a business that's going to be trying to get a lot of volume,
and charge people per one year.
So that's why there are so many seemingly dumb or random top-level
domains, it's usually companies trying to come up with some kind of domain
extension that might be used for some specific purpose and not exactly one
that'll be just popular, but maybe it'll be a trend or something like that.
Alright so now let's go and explain the actual different categories of top-level domain
extensions that I mentioned before.
And some of these are kind of weird and interesting in themselves.
So definitely stick around.
One of these are testing domains, but to explain that when I first need to explain
internationalized country code domains.
So like a regular country code domain, a internationalized country code
domain is for a specific country.
However, it uses a special type of encoding called punycode to actually be
able to display in a browser the actual characters that might be foreign, not
normal Latin characters, to local people.
For example, you could have a domain that actually uses characters that are
Chinese, Arabic, Cyrillic and more.
You would just have to register a domain where the actual raw
domain uses this special type of encoding scheme for the characters.
Though one controversial thing is a lot of these domain extensions kind of took
advantage of the fact that some characters looked similar to Latin characters.
So one example was a security researcher created Apple.com, which
looked exactly like Apple.com, but they encoded it with a Cyrillic A,
that wasn't a real A.
And as a result of this, a lot of browsers now actually display the raw encoding.
So it doesn't make a "look-alike" domain.
But I believe this isn't the case if you are actually in that country.
It'll only apply if you're natively using that language.
Alright so knowing this, I can now go back and explain testing domains, because the eleven testing domains
were simply created as a test for these internationalized domain extensions.
And every single one of these test domains is simply the word test in that
native language encoded in the text.
And these are not actually active, you can't register one of these
test domains if you wanted.
They were just created just kind of like a back end thing.
All right now the next category are infrastructure domain extensions,
and this one's kind of weird because there are only one of them.
Now normally, I would not even consider this a category if there's only one.
However, technically this is an official category by ICANN and the IANA even
though there is only one of them.
And that one infrastructure domain extension is .arpa.
Basically, this category is for domain extensions that aren't for web
sites, but rather used in the actual infrastructure of the internet itself.
So for example, these .arpa domain extensions are used in something
called reverse DNS, which is beyond the scope of this video.
But basically servers and stuff might use it to route different traffic around,
but it's not going to be hosting any web sites, and it can't be as far as I know.
And if you know what ARPA is, you know exactly how old this domain extension is.
ARPANET was literally the precursor to the internet that turned into
the internet, and it was run by the United States organization ARPA
before it was opened up to everybody.
And I guess the name just kind of stuck and it was used for that purpose now.
And I guess the reason this is technically a category is, maybe at
some point if they need to add more.
OK, now the next category are special use domains, which is my personal favorite
because they're kind of interesting.
And these are also reserved domain extensions, so you cannot go and register
anything on one of these extensions.
And here is a list of these special use domains.
.Example and .Test are really similar.
They basically don't actually do anything, they're just kind of used if you need to
use a placeholder for a domain extension.
So say you are doing some kind of testing of a server and you just want
to send a bunch of packets into a black hole that doesn't go anywhere,
it's just for testing, it doesn't matter.
But you don't want to accidentally send the data to a real place.
Like, you type in a random IP address, it might actually be real.
So what you could do is use that test and then, you know, because it's a reserve
domain that is specifically reserved for testing purposes or example purposes
that it is going to go just nowhere.
There's also .Invalid, which actually is also kind of
similar to .Example and .Test.
It basically is just one you might put in there if a domain is invalid,
or it's meant to signify some kind of invalid address, you just use that.
Then there are .local and .localhost, which you may have actually heard, and
these are actually used for things,
these aren't just reserved for nothing.
Specifically, localhost is used to refer to the same device or computer you're
on, which is also the same as 127.0.0.1.
So what that means, is if there is a program that is running on your computer
that runs a sort of web host, behind the scenes to access that other program, what
one program might do is use localhost and then the port number used by that other
program, or 127.0.0.1 for that program.
But if you don't know what that means, don't worry about it.
.local is kind of sort of similar at a bigger scale, and for my understanding,
it's used for sort of larger DNS queries and networks and stuff.
I tried looking it up, and apparently it just always refers to 224.0.0.251.
But again, I don't really understand the details here, so
you can just look it up yourself.
Then finally, there is .onion, which is for "The Onion Router" websites.
If you're not familiar, The Onion Router is basically what is usually
referred to as the dark web.
It basically allows you to connect to the internet through a bunch of
different proxies called nodes, which are basically in themselves, just
computers hosted by random people.
So the idea is that you'll instead of just connecting directly to a website,
you'll first connect to somewhere and a random guy here, who will
pass it on to this random guy here, and a whole bunch of them, so that
there's almost no way for anyone to track where the real thing came from.
However, there's also a cool feature which are .Onion websites, which are basically
websites that can only be accessed through The Onion Router, also called Tor.
And again, this is not a domain you can actually register.
It's just one that basically allows the computer to refer to a certain
address in the onion router.
OK, now we got a few more categories.
The next one is generic restricted domains, which are basically
extensions that can only be used if you meet a certain criteria.
And I believe there are only three of these at the moment.
one of them is .biz, which supposedly can only be registered by businesses.
Another one is .pro, which can only be registered if you are a professional
who is accredited by a government agency, I believe the criteria.
So for example, if you're a CPA, an accountant who has a accounting
license, or maybe a certified financial advisor again, who has a license.
If you have some kind of government license to practice some profession,
then you can register for this.
And apparently, yes, they do actually check, and if you don't meet the criteria,
they'll literally take away the domain.
And the third one is .Name, which is apparently meant
to be used for individuals.
But I've never seen anyone actually use it.
All right, we're almost done, we got two more categories.
And the next one is sponsored Top-Level Domain extensions.
And these are pretty similar to the restricted domains we just talked
about, and they are only allowed to be registered by certain organizations.
For example, .gov obviously can only be registered by government organizations,
specifically in the United States.
.mil is for dot "military", .edu is for educational institutions
that are accredited, so universities or schools and stuff.
But then there are some other interesting ones you may not have heard of, such
as .post, which is for Postal Service organizations like the US Post Office
or Canadian Post or the Royal Post,
I forget what they call it in other places.
I guess they could get a post extension if they want it.
Or there's .museum.
So if you're a museum, you can get a special one.
And there are several other ones, but I'm not going to go over every single one.
Finally, we can mention geographic top-level domains, which just
refer to a specific regional location, usually a city.
And there are a whole bunch of these four major metropolitan areas like
.nyc, obviously for New York City.
There's also .Vegas, .Berlin, .London, .Paris, .Tokyo, .Moscow, .Budapest,
and I guess these cities just decided they had the funds to get their own
domain extension if they wanted it.
And there are plenty more, of course,
so you might be able to look up if your own city has an extension.
And there might be a rule that if you live in the city, you can register
for one of them, I don't know.
So I think that pretty much covers it.
You might have learned more than he bargained for on this one.
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