For the first time in years, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, better known as ICANN, is accepting applications for new top-level domains. These are the suffixes at the end of all URLs and you may know them as .com, .org, and .pizza.
ICANN has just announced the 1,615 applications that have been submitted so far, from 481 different applicants. The trend won’t surprise you: AI is everywhere. Ten different companies, including Meta and OpenAI, applied for the .agent domain. Seven, including OpenAI, applied for .agi. Six, including OpenAI, applied for .asi, clearly trying to meet President Trump’s demand to move from “artificial intelligence” to “superintelligence.” Four companies applied for .intelligence, and Meta is one of two interested in the absurdly long .superintelligence. (OpenAI applied for a total of 15 TLDs; Meta wants a whopping 21.)
Generally speaking, there are two types of domains in these applications. One is more generic, the kind of thing that many people or companies could use. There are hundreds of them in this current batch, from .geek to .haha to .anime to .jackpot. There’s also my new favorite, .itiswhatitis.
The other is purely branding, giving the company its own TLD to use for its own purposes. There are 345 branded apps in this batch, including everything from .applebees and .bankofamerica to .zillow and .zoom. Meta asked for .facebook, .instagram, .messenger, .meta, .frommeta and .threads, which you could use for many purposes; Bluesky applied for .bsky with the apparent intention of including the domain in their usernames; OpenAI requested .chatgpt, .codex, .openai, .gpt and others; Anthropo wants .anthropic and .claude. Ultimately, these chains could lead to memorable product pages, social media usernames, and much more.
Overall, it’s been a rocky road for these alternative TLDs over the past few years. Some, like .ai or .app, have become somewhat popular thanks to various technology trends, but most people never got used to the idea of typing .restaurant or .babysitting, and .com and a few others have become more important than ever. It’s interesting to see so many brands opt for their own domain, something only Google and a few others have achieved before.
This is just one step in the process of creating a new top-level domain, and nothing official will be made before next year. But it seems that even as the world becomes increasingly AI-filled and mediated by it, big domain names are still important. Even artificial intelligence companies think so.
