So ".ogle" is still up for grabs then? Ooh, possibilities. An entire .tld dedicated to voyeurism and trolling Google. What could be better?
I wonder if anyone has dibs on "rusty.cars", "old.cars", "crappy.cars"...?
Google has sold its rights to all internet addresses ending in ".car" to a joint partnership of two other registry operators. The deal, for an undisclosed sum, confirms what many in the industry have suspected for some time: that the search giant is concentrating on its brand names and is offloading generic names, despite …
Other than registrars, I don't see who benefits from this TLD proliferation. It's going to mean businesses need to defensively register hundreds or thousands of domains, and it means customers have even less chance of picking the "right" domain.
I guess search engines would benefit from the increased traffic and hence eyeballs for ad impressions.
More draws do not a better filing cabinet make.
We can assume that Google has profited from the experience: financially by being able to find the market price (the initial auction was really only a beauty contest) for generics. But they presumably also gathered information about the kind of market there will be for these kind of domains and decided it wasn't worth committing resources to.
Strange Google would give up .car with all that driverless car business while at the same time paying $25 million for the equally generic but less permanent .app: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/02/27/google_wins_most_popular_new_internet_extension_for_25m/
Seems like the might have wanted to keep that one.
"Oh, how I laughed thinking back at the year 2015, when we still only used .com domains".
Google didn't lose interest in the new gTLDs, they just decided to focus on the important ones. Splashing out USD 25.000.000 for .app proves this. They will still be one of the drivers of changing our user habits.
Strategy-- Buy a bunch of somewhat interesting TLDs with pocket change. A few months later, give them away with some blather about 'refocusing priorities' or such rot. Now the eyeballs can't just slap .com or .co.uk on to a name, they have to search for everything. Profit!