It must have been a bug in Google Domains, all three domains were registered ~5 years ago.

This isn't isolated to Google Domains, however. GoDaddy's website let me go through the entire checkout process with 2 or 3 registered domain names, followed by a refund an hour later.

My guess is that they were never available and there are doing a poor job of figuring out which domains are taken and which are not. I've been this in several other domain name search sites too, especially if there is no nameserver for a registered domain.

I worked on some registrar-related stuff years ago now and even at that time, Verisign was known for having poor support of providing information about .com registrations.

If people only knew that the internet was held together with bubblegum and duct tape...

Every fundamental layer has just crazy / old legacy foundations that are just incompatible with safe systems. Really opened my eyes when I saw how telco routing worked at the lowest levels.

Can you imagine all the search advertising Google would lose if they allowed just 'nike' and 'att' to resolve the websites in Chrome, rather than search results?

http://to./ used to be a URL shortener.

Either the rules on ccTLDs are different, or it's a recentish crackdown.

Some ccTLDS voluntarily agree to abide by the same rules and operational requirements as the gTLDs - https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/cctld-2012-02-25-en has more details.

This means, for example, than ccTLDs aren’t bound by the findings from SAC053 at https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/sac-053-en.pdf which have been included in the gTLD contracts.

I called my FreeNAS box freenas because I didn't feel very creative, and I can browse to it as http://freenas or http://freenas./ but if they took a domain of 'freenas' suddenly that means I have to do extra work and rename my stuff. Doesn't seem fair!

I maintain a list at captnemo.in/tld-a-record

Google was pointing its TLDs to 127.0.0.53, and once they started using the TLDs actively, they removed the records.

"dk’s server IP address could not be found."

Perhaps that will work.

Regardless, they certainly can register all the names for you, if that's what you ask them to do, but at some point, there's an awful lot of names, and it feels extortiony to pay for them all. I was working for a MarkMonitor client when the 'landrush' for all these new tlds was happening, and we'd get frequent emails about which tlds were going live soon, so we could decide if we wanted foo.bike or foo.sexy or foo.personals, or whatever. And then, if we wanted to pay rediculous prices to get it early, or wait and see if we could get it at normal price (+ hefty MarkMonitor markup). We would almost certainly win a UDRP, but that's expensive too.

Then we got bought, and the new corporate overlords liked throwing money away on dumb domains, so foo.bike got registered by their team (and they had an actual domain team, so I got to shed that hat).

However, that's not really what most companies are worried about, they're worried about phishing or scams or misleading sites with their name; UDRP should allow those to be taken down fairly easily, although the question is always if it's less expensive to register the domain or to leave it unregistered and dispute it if it's misused.

If any of the big names found someone using a clone domain and objected to it, the domain owner - I'd expect - would find themselves having a chat with keenly interested IP attorneys.

[1] https://newgtlds.icann.org/en/about/trademark-clearinghouse

I registered a domain name with a client's trademarked name in it as part of an authorized penetration test of that client a few years ago. At the end of the test, I asked if they wanted me to transfer it to them, and they didn't. A year later, when it expired and the domain privacy stuff went away, all of that automated enforcement machinery started running, and suddenly I was being threatened with all sorts of arbitration/court appearances if I didn't transfer the domain (which I no longer owned) to them. Took weeks to sort out, and that was with documentation that I'd bought the domain as part of a pen test the client had specifically agreed to.

My conclusion was that your domain name must not be in the form of YourName.tld; the tld must be part of your name. You can either use puns like buying yourna.me, but it's a bit weird for non-tech people, or you have to use the weirdness of tlds and go for something like lostin.space. There is less confusion at "what comes after" because there is only one.

It's possible that google and other major brand names don't have to register every extension, the names are just reserved for them alone, should they want them.

There was a temporary bug in Google Domains that made it appear as if he had bought google.com, but he had not.

https://www.verisign.com/en_US/channel-resources/domain-regi... https://krebsonsecurity.com/2020/01/does-your-domain-have-a-...

It's a recommended best-practice for high-value sites, which the main website of any Fortune 500 company certainly falls under.

The guy in the article did in fact buy a google.tld - https://google.xn--9dbq2a/

So because they could do it, anyone who points out it's not possible now should be downvoted and asked to explain themselves with:

Why is it not possible, beside the fact that it's not possible?

[Edited to remove excess frustration/annoyance/snark at people quibbling so much about a totally inconsequential and factual remark.]

Wouldn't surprise me if big tech like Google does the same.