ICANN has reported that Google is now the official owner of the .app Top Level Domain (TLD). Google wasn’t the only major player who wanted in on .app; Amazon was in on the action early on, but ultimately no one else wanted the domain quite a badly as Google. Amazon decided to spend their money elsewhere, dropping $5 million on .buy and another $2.2 million on .spot.
.app wasn’t the only domain that Google wanted to lock up. When ICANN started accepting applications, the folks in Mountain View had their eyes on a hundred others, too. Some they were after to protect existing products, like .chrome and .youtube. Other were less specific, like .home, .cloud, and .site.
The final results of the auction won’t be announced by ICANN until April or May. Google probably won’t end up taking home every TLD that was on their shopping list, but clearly .app was the big prize they were after and they’ve nailed that down.
