It's easy to dismiss Google's big play for a slice of the expanding Internet domain universe as just another side project from the Googleplex. Perhaps too easy.
Google, we learned last week, has applied for 101 domains — or, more precisely, 101 generic top-level domains, or gTLDs — and the number itself (surely the 101 Dalmatians reference was intentional) doesn't exactly suggest a new strategy on par with, say, Google+ or Android. The $18.7 million in applications fees alone would hardly raise a single Larry Page eyebrow.
And yet this is Google, controller of so much of the Web's traffic that it's hard not to speculate — which, to be fair, is all anyone can do at this point. Though the International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has revealed which entities are applying for which new gTLDS, that's just the start. Now come months and months of legal wrangling, negotiations and ICANN-sponsored auctions for the many contested names, also known as strings.
Google's domains-for-all strategy
Among the big tech companies partaking in this digital landgrab, Google stands out for one key reason: It's applying for a slew of generic strings that, should it win some, it plans to open up so that anyone can register any name, just as one currently can with .com (the shortage of available names notwithstanding).
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