Will there ever be a possibility where people can sign up a domain with a programming extension? Such as localhost.php, localhost.aspx, localhost.rb, .etc. So instead of having say sitepoint.com/community/, it would be sitepoint.rb/community/.
Will this ever be possible?
I doubt anything that short would be allowed, as it would look too much like a country-specific tld … but that’s just pure speculation on my part. It’s very expensive to set up one of these fancy tlds, though, so there would have to be a strong demand for it for anyone to bother. Something like .rb would only appeal to a relatively small number of people (Ruby developers), which suggests there’s nowhere near enough of a market for it.
I see. So that basically means there won’t be short TLDs like that anytime soon huh?
I have no idea, really, but I wouldn’t think so.
Where would I go if I were to request for such a domain? Would it be at icann’s website? I know this is highly unlikely, but this is all theoretical.
If you go to the kinds of sites where you register a tld, you’re informed that two-letter tlds are reserved for countries by international agreement. So you’d be looking at something longer, such as .ruby. And then it would cost you a lot of money—say 1/4 to half a million dollars. 
So the people/companies who fork out this kind of money are doing it because they can then sell domain names to others … such as mysite.ruby, yoursite.ruby etc.
You’d obviously only pay for such a tld if you thought it would be popular enough for you to get your money back in sales. Perhaps a company like Apple could hope to make their money back on something like .apple, but I’m not sure. I suspect a lot of companies will fail to make their money back on the investment. I’ve even be surprised if .sex was all that popular. Sure, some people will want it, but a million? I doubt it. 
Why do you want it to be programming specific? There are a lot of new TLD’s out there that can better describe the business or site than the program language. What kind of site or business are you looking for anyway?
I see. So it would be expensive in the end for requesting such a TLD. Very interesting.
This is all theoretical and for educational purposes. I’ve always wondered because it piqued my interest that I haven’t seen programming TLDs before. So I thought I’d ask since I don’t think anyone has asked around these forums before about this kind of topic.
Also, I already have my own site. It’s not running on anything at the moment and just sitting there on the web doing nothing. I have yet to start on it because I’ve been really busy with outside work and all (doesn’t include programming).
This topic was automatically closed 91 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.