iana – Terence Eden’s Blog

How much would it cost to buy every domain name?

@edent — Sun, 19 May 2019 11:18:38 +0000

The ridiculous proliferation of TLDs (Top Level Domains) continues unabated. I wondered how much you'd have to spend to secure your name on every TLD.

tl;dr;tld

Over $300,000!

(Roughly €280.000 / £245,000.)

But...

This estimate is pretty rough. A few caveats:

This only covers one version of your domain name - it doesn't cover misspellings.
I've assumed a single year of registration. Some domains give discounts for multiple years, or only offer multi-year registration.
Some TLDs have a discount for the first year.
Some TLDs only let you register if you're a citizen of that country, or have a business presence there. I've assumed that you do.
There are several TLDs which only let you register using a specific language for your domain - for example Chinese domains require Chinese characters. I've assumed that you're buying one of those as well.
Some TLDs can't be registered - for example .gov, .mil, .int - they have been excluded.
Bulk domain purchases may result in a discount. I'm using retail pricing rather than wholesale.
Depending on where you live, different countries' prices and tax rates may vary considerably.

Data

It is surprisingly hard to find what the base cost is of all the domains. There are currently over 1,500 possible TLDs!

The number of domains available to register is even higher because some TLDs allow for 2nd level registration. For example, .org.uk, .co.uk, or .co.in, etc.

The Registry which controls a set of specific TLDs is more-or-less free to set any pricing policy they want. I couldn't find any official data for those policies. If you do know, please leave a comment.

Data Sources

The Registrar - the entity which sells you the domain - is free to set its own pricing. There are many retailers of domain names - let's look at some popular ones.

Cloudflare

Some, like Cloudflare promise to only charge you the wholesale cost, but refuse to tell you what the costs are unless you have a domain to transfer to them. They also only support 200 TLDs.

Google

Google supports 273 TLDs - but they do list prices for each one.

If you were to register a domain on all 273 TLDs it would cost you £8,550 per year!

Gandi

I looked at Gandi - who provide a full price list. Sadly, it is in PDF, so I had to use Tabula to extract the data. They sell 747 TLDs - from .abogado (£42) to .yt (£12).

If you bought every TLD that Gandi sell, it would cost you a whopping £92,131.08!

Fun fact: Gandi's most expensive domain is .makeup for £7,146.76.

101domains

According to TLD List, the registrar with the most TLDs offered is 101domains with 1,836 possible names!

There is an API available for 101domains pricelist! You can parse through it alphabetically using:

And grab the International Domain Names with:

Sadly, it doesn't list all domains on one call, so you have to grab each one. It only provides prices in USD.

But, when you add up all the domain names provided, the total cost to register them all would be $311,852.42!

The most expensive TLD on 101domains is .hoteles for $65,000!

What's the point?

It's unlikely that anyone would actually go ahead and do this. You'd need more money than sense if you wanted to protect your brand across every domain. It's probably cheaper to register a name once and then issue legal threats against anyone registering your name on an obscure TLD.

It costs $185,000 to own your own TLD. Plus you also have to show that you have the resources to maintain it.

That's exactly what Sony did. They bought the .xperia TLD - presumably so that they wouldn't have to register domains in every country. But, as Ben Cox pointed out, they then dropped it.

So, $185k to run your own domain - or $300k to buy your domain name everywhere. Which would you choose?

IANA Insanity - or, how I learned to stop .worrying and .love the .new .internet

@edent — Wed, 27 Jul 2016 16:15:59 +0000

In The Beginning

There was the .com and the .org and the .net and it was good.

And, I mean, there were probably a few others - but that's all people cared about.

Go Forth And Multiply

And THE LORD sayeth "Hey, do people want country codes? Like .UK, .FR, .DE?"

And the people were all like "Duh! Yeah!"

Except for the people of the American United States. For they gnashed their teeth and wailed "We invented the Internet. There's no way we are going to use .US. We'll take the top level, thanks."

And many did wonder if they should have let them have .USAUSAUSA!

The Descent Into Madness

And some people were not satisfied. And lo! They asked for more domains and THE LORD shrugged and said "Eh. Sure. Why not?"

And thus .mobi and .biz and .tel and their brethren were born. Yet no one used them. Dust returned to the land. Still the people cried out for more.

The End Of Days

In that time, a certain man was heard to say "Wouldn't it be cool if we could have .Nokia? Or, like, any top level domain we wanted?"

The wise elders spat on the ground and sang as one "That is the dumbest idea that we ever heard. Literally, what is the point?"

But the people of the valley were vain, and each man wanted his own top level domain.

So rang out the cry "Open up your wallets and prepare to have them emptied."

And the people of the valley emptied their wallets. And it was bad.

The Great Confusion

In the great accounting house, a young scribe grew weary. "Why do I not have a domain, oh Lord?" he prayed.

And THE LORD appeared in front of him in the vision of a burning bunch of pink-carbon-paper which really should have gone to Janice in Accounts-Receivable last week.

"ALL COUNTERS OF MONEY SHALL HAVE A DOMAIN!"

And so it was that the young man was asked if he wanted a .accountant domain managed by Famous Four Media Limited, or if he would prefer an almost identical but subtly different .accountants domain managed by Donuts Inc.

The boy trembled. "How am I to tell the difference, oh Lord? Won't there be a confusion upon the land?"

"THAT'S A GOOD POINT. YOU'D BETTER BUY BOTH JUST TO BE ON THE SAFE SIDE." And THE LORD did vanish.

And their was much confusion.

How Much Confusion?

(I've stopped writing in that spoof-Biblical style now)

Take a look at the latest list of top level domains.

Here are all the domains which I think are easily confusable - or seemingly duplicates. Some are brand new, some are not.

.accountant
.accountants
.chanel
.channel (As in "TV Channel" not the French Fashion House)
.fan
.fans
.game
.games
.loan
.loans
.market
.markets
.mobi
.mobily (Completely unrelated, but quite similar)
.onl
.online (seriously, .onl's advert says "As short and catchy as .com - As universal and practical as .online"!)
.paris
.pars (An easy typo to make)
.photo
.photography
.photos
.prod
.productions
.review
.reviews
.sex
.sexy
.tech
.technology (Again, separate companies managing these similar domains)
.theatre
.theater (OK, the Yanks and the Brits spell this differently!)
.tkmaxx
.tjmaxx (These are both the same store group, but it's called TK Maxx in the UK to avoid confusion with the similarly names TJ Hughes)
.watch
.watches
.win
.wine
.vin (This is a controversial issue in the wine world)
.work
.works

I'm sure there are a few I've missed - but that's already a huge scope for confusion, impersonation, and duplication.

To be fair, some of the domains will only allow registration from authorised parties. So you won't be able to register "Clippy.microsoft" - unless you work there.

Oh, and my favourite?

.zip

Because it will be the cause of great parsing confusion.

The Internet is broken - let's throw it out and start again.