.int is more exclusive.

.gov is restricted to US government, but consider the immense sprawl that is the US federal government, and then consider that US state and US local governments are allowed in the club too, and it doesn't look so exclusive any more

.mil is restricted to the US military, but that is a gargantuan entity with countless agencies and bases and divisions and whatnot all of whom seem to want to have publicly accessible websites (even for stuff that is obviously only useful for people actually in the US military), and .mil turns out to be a dime a dozen too

.int – under current rules, you need to be an international organization established by international treaty, or else you need observer status with the UN General Assembly. Numerically that is smaller than either of the above two categories. (It also has some random stuff that doesn't belong under current rules, like the YMCA – which wasn't established by treaty, and doesn't have UN General Assembly observer status – but those are grandfathered registrations.)

Dot int is basically non-existent compared to mil and gov. Also being attached to the UN makes it uncool instantly.

nato.int is the coolest domain in the world for me.

It is also the first ever .int domain, and indeed the original motivation for creating .int (to replace the short lived .nato)

Remember tpc.int?

Has it gone now? Yeah I remember it.

Maybe that is because NATO actually has capabilities to act, rather than just sitting around writing lofty platitudes ;).

.aq perhaps?

“AQ domain names are available to government organisations who are signatories to the Antarctic Treaty and to other registrants who have a physical presence in Antarctica.“

Perhaps (if you may classify it as exclusive) .arpa which is still in use I think but you cannot register new domains.

There's also .aero which is pretty exclusive: "only those in various categories of air-travel-related entities may register." - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_d...

.arpa is in use, but only as an internal detail for reverse name resolution (i.e. looking up the PTR record for 1.2.3.4 queries the server 4.3.2.1.in-addr.arpa)

Which also yields one of the more interesting backronyms of the internet, as .arpa today is understood to mean "Address and Routing Parameter Area" as opposed to the Advanced Research Projects Agency that was involved in the early internet (ARPANET).

> There's also .aero which is pretty exclusive

Makes me feel like I belong to an exclusive club, but I think the list of people and companies that have .aero is fairly long.

I suspect .va (Vatican City) is up high on the list.

I think one of the most exclusive tld's is .er, you can't register a domain with this tld because there is no registrar for it.

Probably one of the corporate ones like .xyz, .amazon, .bananarepublic, etc.

"As of June 2016, .xyz was the fourth most registered global top-level domain (gTLD) name on the Internet, after .com, .net, and .org." -- Wikipedia.

.xyz is pretty easy to get, it doesn't even cost that much, it's affordable even for individuals

.xyz is easy to get. Also cheap.

I believe anyone can register the .xyz domains. They're typically on sale for $0.99 on GoDaddy for the first year, so there seems to be a lot of junk, volume registrations using it.

My bad, my main point is that likely the most restrictive would be one of the corporate/private TLDs that are for internal use mainly. .xyz was a bad example. Maybe better is .bananarepublic

There's literally hundreds of new gTLDs like this that only have the one required nic.tld on them and nothing else (because they haven't launched yet and might never). My team runs a couple dozen of these.

For comparison's sake, we should probably restrict ourselves to legacy gTLDs, ccTLDs, and open, launched new gTLDs.

.duck, sadly.

Not top-level, but .co.ck is rather well-protected for obvious reasons.

is it really that bad if people use tlds to make immature puns?

trashbat

.gb, the old UK ccTLD, which still exists, but isn't open for registrations. AFAIK there are no websites in it, but you can ping hermes.dra.hmg.gb and friends.

.gle - owned by Google and only for Google properties

I tried to search goo.gle on their whois and it seems like they even support private registration! All the fields are filled with "REDACTED FOR PRIVACY". Unaccessible except by Google, yet private!

Assigned to Google, but I could not find any examples of it actually being used unlike .google

Google Forms direct links use forms.gle

I imagine just for goo.gle

Isn't that goo.gl?

They use it for Google Form/Survey short links.

I'd say .arpa

.in-addr.arpa is widely used for reverse dns

.cancerresearch is near empty. Hard to say on some of the restricted ones since you can't usually AXFR anymore.

I get .arpa in my logs sometimes. But I think that might be a legacy routing thing.

Price-wise the gTLDs for $3-$4,000/year like .Cars or .Security are exclusive.