.com is so 1990s. Make way for.ing web domains.
Google has rolled out a new top-level domain that will let companies build websites that reflect a single word, such as writ.ing or play.ing. To get one, though, businesses and people are going to be pay.ing big bucks.
Early registration for the domains run as high as $13,000 a year, depending on the prefix. (Writ.ing, for instance, will cost you that amount. So will that other “ing” word that we’re not going to print, since we’re a family site.) Some go for just a couple hundred dollars. The new suffix is in an early-access period right now with Google, meaning you’ll have to pay a one-time fee to be among the first to use it.
Starting Dec. 5, they’ll be broadly available and likely a bit cheaper.
The.ing domains come 38 years after the original.com domains made their debut. Those predated the World Wide Web, as we know it, by six years.
In that time, all sorts of new domain suffixes have popped up, from.ly to the more controversial.sucks. While an online presence has long been an important part of most companies’ business plans, e-commerce operations became essential to many during the pandemic, leading to a surge in registrations with web hosting service and registrar GoDaddy.
New domains also often force corporations to play defense, scooping up any URLs that might be associated with their business before squatters do, potentially hurting the brand. (Alphabet, famously, failed to secure many.xyz domains before it changed its name from Google.)
Early adopters of the new domain so far include Adobe Acrobat, which snagged edit.ing and sign.ing; Giving Tuesday, which took giv.ing; and travel discount site Going, which went with go.ing, naturally.
