Google just dumped $25 million on an acquisition, but the money wasn’t spent on a hot new startup. No, all that cash was earmarked for a period and three little letters.
ICANN has reported that Google is now the official owner of the .app Top Level Domain (TLD). It was one of the most-prized additions, and it’s easy to see why. Unless you were OK with dropping those annoying little vowels from the name of your app, it’s gotten pretty difficult to snag a decent domain name over the years. There’s no sign that the app explosion is going to slow down any time soon, so a relevant TLD was bound to be a hot commodity.
Plenty of companies felt that way, too. Google wasn’t the only major player who wanted in on .app; Amazon was in on the action early on, but ultimately no one else wanted the domain quite a badly as Google. Amazon decided to spend their money elsewhere, dropping $5 million on .buy and another $2.2 million on .spot.
.app wasn’t the only domain that Google wanted to lock up. When ICANN started accepting applications, the folks in Mountain View had their eyes on a hundred others, too. Some they were after to protect existing products, like .chrome and .youtube. Other were less specific, like .home, .cloud, and .site.
The final results of the auction won’t be announced by ICANN until April or May. Google probably won’t end up taking home every TLD that was on their shopping list, but clearly .app was the big prize they were after… and they've nailed that down.
ICANN has reported that Google is now the official owner of the .app Top Level Domain (TLD). It was one of the most-prized additions, and it’s easy to see why. Unless you were OK with dropping those annoying little vowels from the name of your app, it’s gotten pretty difficult to snag a decent domain name over the years. There’s no sign that the app explosion is going to slow down any time soon, so a relevant TLD was bound to be a hot commodity.
Plenty of companies felt that way, too. Google wasn’t the only major player who wanted in on .app; Amazon was in on the action early on, but ultimately no one else wanted the domain quite a badly as Google. Amazon decided to spend their money elsewhere, dropping $5 million on .buy and another $2.2 million on .spot.
.app wasn’t the only domain that Google wanted to lock up. When ICANN started accepting applications, the folks in Mountain View had their eyes on a hundred others, too. Some they were after to protect existing products, like .chrome and .youtube. Other were less specific, like .home, .cloud, and .site.
The final results of the auction won’t be announced by ICANN until April or May. Google probably won’t end up taking home every TLD that was on their shopping list, but clearly .app was the big prize they were after… and they've nailed that down.
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