7,000 does seem REALLY high, but I can imagine them needing the TLD for every possible spelling of Apple. Maybe applesucks as well. appl3, 8ppl3 and so on. Anything close to apple. Same goes for icloud, and I anything else. I guess you get to 1k pretty quick just covering typo squatters. They must have a team of people just to manage domain names!

It's probably semi-random domain names. Like "auth-8e3fe.icloud.apple.com" type stuff.

That's probably right. A quick internet search shows up domains like applecoronavirus.com and similar, as well as this court case [1] where they acquired a bunch of ipod related names.

I suspect they are only parking those names after recovering them or buying them preemptively. Domain names are cheap, so why not. I don't think that's any argument for the possession of the /8 though.

I remember Google had ownership of duck.com until recently, so they probably participate in the wholesale acquisition of random domains as well [2].

[1]: https://techcrunch.com/2010/01/07/apple-domain-names/ [2]: https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/12/18137369/duckduckgo-duck...

All parked domains could lead to the same IP. A single web server could distinguish which domain it’s contacted for, using the HTTP headers for example, and serve different content (probably all 301-redirects, but to relevant other websites of Apple).

In this case it looks like a lot of them don't have A records at all.