Dot-com – which has long been synonymous with the Internet itself – is king of domain names, and it’s also the leader in domain name disputes, as I discuss in a new video.
Out of 11,799 domain names in UDRP decisions last year, 8,543 of them – or more than 72 percent of the total – were dot-coms.
That shouldn’t be surprising, especially when you consider that dot-com is also the most popular top-level domain, or TLD, for registrations in general. According to the most recent Domain Name Industry Brief from Verisign, for the third quarter of 2021, there were a total of 364.6 million domain name registrations across all TLDs, and 158.6 million of those were in the dot-com space.
In any event, as I explain in the video, it starts to get a little more interesting when you look beyond dot-com, and here’s a list I compiled of the top 10 gTLDs in UDRP decisions in 2021. In order, they are:
.com
.shop
.org
.net
.xyz
.bar
.store
.info
.online
.club
But after dot-com, no one TLD really accounts for relatively many domain name disputes, with the number two TLD, dot-shop, appearing in only for 4.9 percent of all disputed domains.
It’s hard to know exactly why any one of these TLDs shows up on this list, but I’ve got some thoughts about a few of them, which I share in the video.
