If you have a million dollars a year (rough estimate) burning a hole in your pocket, you too can own a TLD under a liberalized ICANN policy that has existed for many years now. Amazon was only different because there was a conflict about who should own it.

Some of the new TLDs created are actually useful, Russia got a TLD for the IDN value that native Russians would recognise more easily than .ru -- .рф and it's been pretty successful for locals.

Some of them were land grab attempts, people see .com makes a lot of money and imagine that some of that could be theirs, but alas mostly they're wrong. .horse, .aero, .london and so on. Their only value to the wider community is that they allow jokes like http://my.lovely.horse/ or http://ibless.therains.downin.africa/

A few of them are straight up vanity, but whereas your vanity domain might be costing you $25 pa from an expensive vendor with a crappy web site thrown in, operators of TLDs are spending many orders of magnitude more to obey rules

.kerrylogistics .kerryproperties and .kerryhotels all exist for example, and obviously those are completely useless, anybody looking for those outfits will either Google or knows their much shorter "real" domain name - but I guess probably they get a bulk deal on some of the technology needed, maybe the whole lot costs them only $2M per year to maintain.

IDN ccTLD (country code) is not the same as new gTLD, although new gTLD may also be IDN. IDN ccTLD are usually granted to the existing operator of the ccTLD and is a completely different process than sponsored TLD (usually involving government to support the delegation). ccTLD operator may choose to make it available for public use or not once it's granted e.g. Japan's JPRS has both .jp and .日本 (but .日本 is not available to public)

Redirects to https://www.microsoft.com/en-ca/surface though

Actually: https://www.microsoft.com/surface/en-ca

and then to:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-ca/surface

Money well spent there?

Surface.microsoft doesn't have access to your cookies at microsoft.com, so can't check whether you've manually overridden region detection on Microsoft websites. Which suggests we won't be checking our inbox at mail.google or shopping at pantry.amazon for similar reasons.

At least, unless Chrome decides to add even more logic for these corporate gTLDs...

All of Microsoft's sites are a mess of redirects. I swear they do it just to fuck with uMatrix users.

That's in the best case. It's worse when a link gets broken or redirects to an irrelevant page. They seem to break a large chunk of links every year or so.

Yup. Nobody at Microsoft who actually believes in the Web seems to have authority to override when some new executive decides microsoft.com ought to be a Wiki now, or a web forum, or blog site, and throws away all the stuff people have bookmarked, and all the stuff that conscientious employees linked making their documents useful.

Half of the HTTP "Too many redirects, gave up" errors I've ever seen in my whole life were from microsoft.com

These days I have less reason to visit microsoft.com, but I recommend looking for (and retaining when you find them) URLs in the form https://aka.ms/ which seems to be curated by somebody who actually respects the idea of URLs and so end up pointing to wherever the content is now, even years after it has become a Wiki of a Blog Post about a KB article with a Word document in it.

I'm assuming it's manually maintained, since I can't imagine any possible automatic system would keep up with the nonsense at microsoft.com, but so far it has worked.

Possibly some one from Bing needs to have a word about how to do redirects properly :-)

That's a bit embarrassing honestly.

>given that no other corporations have their name as a top-level domain.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.google

I stand corrected!

That tends to happen when you make up facts.

Personal attacks will get you banned here. Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and using this site as intended?

Why would you punish someone for acknowledging when they're wrong? All you're doing is discouraging what is actually good, self-aware behavior.

It's extremely easy for humans to make mistakes and have cognitive distortions from information collected over time. Your comment is completely uncalled for.

.google is another example

Maps.google is not real, what a missed opp