Who and how are decided those recent new website extension (.family, .xyz …)
In: Technology
Domain registr**ies**, not registrars apply to ICANN to own and operate TLDs. [This wiki page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top-level_domain) has a little information on the history of it.
>*On 13 June 2012, ICANN announced nearly 2,000 applications for top-level domains, which began installation throughout 2013. The first seven – bike, clothing, guru, holdings, plumbing, singles, and ventures – were released in 2014.*
[This wiki page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_domains) has a full list of TLDs with the registry that operates them.
As of 2012, ICANN (the organization responsible for managing *top-level domains* among other things) allows anyone to create and register a new TLD for the bargain-basement price of $185,000 (plus $25,000 per year to maintain the registration). Once you’ve had your TLD approved by ICANN you’re responsible for registering and routing any domains within your TLD. Different companies and organizations have a lot of different strategies for doing that so it’s tough to generalize.
So if I had sacks of spare cash lying around I could register .rys as a top-level domain (assuming it doesn’t already exist). People could then buy domains from me: hen.rys and ter.rys and what-have-you. I could also broker deals with companies like GoDaddy to sell them on my behalf. I’m then responsible for making sure the DNS tables across the globe get updated in a timely fashion in order to send hen.rys traffic to the IP address they registered with the domain.
Web extensions can essentially be anything as long as they’re provided by the domain name registrars. Essentially companies that people can use to register domain names with to attach them to a certain server for traffic to lead to.
What kind of domains these registrars can offer/register is them controlled by a higher group called Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). Which essentially creates standards everyone follows.
Initially we’d extensions like “com” “gov” “edu” and “org” were used because they were kind of intuitive to tell you what kind of website you were visiting.
But now as the internet has grown people don’t value that as much, and instead value having more creative/unique things. There’s not really much of a difference between “.com” and “.xyz” as long as they’re registered for computer to be Abel to find and connect to them.
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