Browsers don't like to route directly to TLDs. In theory, Amazon could have a web site at

    amazon

    amazon.

(That's what the trailing "." means. Relative domain names were a thing. If you're on a machine within "bigu.edu", and you want "ourteam.bigu.edu", you can supposedly just use "ourteam" as a domain. This rarely works right, because few clients have domain names any more. Is it even still implemented in most DNS lookup clients?)

Bonus fact: https://. works on Firefox (triggers an A/AAAA DNS query for root) but not Chrome.

hence under a properly set up DNS and application: system with search domain for `.internal` and a host named `amazon` will be hit the internal host for `https://amazon` and `https://amazon.internal` but not `https://amazon.`

Maps is a little weird because while originally they were bundling maps and search and a bunch of products together they have had to back off on that strategy due to the recent antitrust concerns and bundling so now they are purposefully separating the products and the domains further.

    $ curl -v maps.google.com
    [...]
    < HTTP/1.1 302 Found
    < Location: http://maps.google.com/maps
    [...]

For example, I can type “opnsense” and hit enter, which loads https://opnsense, whose FQDN is opnsense.home.my.domain. This works on all machines on my network; most are configured to use home.my.domain as the primary search domain (through DHCP), but my DNS server also properly responds to queries for just the host portion. And, I’ve configured opnsense to hijack all (standard) DNS traffic on my network, so even if a device is specifically ignoring the DHCP-provided search domain and DNS server, it should be able to query all local hosts.

I liked alway having a rule in the web server to redirect to the fully qualified hostname on requests to the internal ones, so links could be shared and would always work even if the search domain wasn’t set up (could happen on the VPN for example).

Basically no one outside of big tech has the volume of domain names to justify paying for their own gTLD, Fortune 500 or not.

How much money did they light on fire to have a tld and what utility does it provide?

I could see a world where GTLDs were given extreme preference by search engines and browsers, but that world isn't ours.

They got .travelers and .travelersinsurance , maybe some others.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Travelers_Companies - with a 32 billion dollar yearly revenue, they can afford a lot of boondoggle nonsense projects. They probably assigned a bunch of people with insufficient technical knowledge and a vague project scope the objective of updating their cloud and web presence.

Your link says Travelers Companies had ~$3 billion of net income (profit) on ~$42 billion in revenue.

That’s still not enough information to say what they can “afford” because opportunity cost exists.

Project managers and MBAs get to rationalize their degrees and theories, because after all, they wouldn't be getting paid by ABCXYZ, Inc and managing million dollar budgets if their project wasn't top-class and 100% justified. You might have to keep firing new hires that mention anything about the whole TLD thing being ridiculous, but they were just negative energy anti-social people who wouldn't have fit the company culture anyway.