anderegg.ca

"New" TLDs are weird

August 26, 2025

When I bought my first domain, there were only a handful of choices for top level domains (TLDs). Today I came across a blog hosted on a domain ending in .ooo. I haven’t thought about what TLD options were available in a while, and had some questions about this one in particular.

First, I wondered when the .ooo TLD was created. I went to Wikipedia, only to find that it’s not listed on the “List of Internet top-level domains” entry, but instead in the “List of English-language generic Internet top-level domains” entry. I tried looking around for a Wikipedia page that referenced the .zone TLD (which is one I am partial to), but I wasn’t able to find it. While looking, I did see that spooky.ooo is registered, but sadly doesn’t host anything at the moment.

A better resource is the Root Zone Database from the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority. This is an exhaustive list of TLDs, and each TLD links to a page with more details. From there I learned that .ooo was registered in 2014! There are just so many of these, and .ooo is so infrequently used, that I assumed it was new.

I also wondered why it was created. The Root Zone Database entry mentioned Infibeam Avenues Limited (turns out to be a fintech firm), but it wasn’t clear why they’d want .ooo. I found an entry on the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) Wiki 1 which referenced the original application, saying:

“Our goal is nothing less than providing a billion stores for a billion people. With the .ooo gTLD we intend to expand, on a global scale, the valued service we already provide to brick-and-mortar retailers, specifically delivering a dedicated online platform to market their goods and services.”

It goes on for much longer than that, but nothing in the description gives me any idea why .ooo would help anyone with shopping. The wiki page did link to this ICANN resource that you can use to find the original application. 2 The application linked here is significantly longer than the excerpt from the wiki, but I still didn’t find anything to explain how three ‘o’s at the end of a URL relates to shopping. Oh well. At the very least, this was a fun diversion into the land of rare TLDs.

  1. I’m linking to this via Archive.org because the original page kept timing out for me. ↩

  2. On this page you need to click the “download public portion of application” text, which strangely starts a download for an HTML document instead of navigating to it. ↩