Google opens .eat, .fly and .here web addresses to everyone

Google Registry, the part of Google that runs web address endings, launched three new top-level domains. A top-level domain is the last chunk of a web address, the part after the final dot. You know the classics: .com, .org, .net.

Google says the new ones help people build addresses that "clearly describe your business or project." The idea is that a visitor can tell what a site is about before clicking.

• .eat: for restaurants, food makers and anyone who feeds people.
• .fly: for travel, airlines, drones and things that move.
• .here: for places, local services and getting things done.

Google also describes .eat as a dedicated namespace for information about food, restaurants and eating. A namespace is just a set of names that all follow one theme.

Companies did not wait for today. Google's announcement lists several that already use the new endings, and it reads like a menu, a departure board and a street directory.

• .eat: Wingstop uses wingstop.eat. Clayton Farms, which runs quick-service restaurants that grow greens on site, uses america.eat to map where Americans can and cannot get fresh food. Ghips, a maker of potato chips cooked in ghee, uses ghips.eat. Xook, a robotic kiosk that makes salads and bowls, uses xook.eat.
• .fly: Caddy, a personal AI assistant that lives in iMessage and WhatsApp, uses caddy.fly to plan trips. Canary, which checks AI-written code for bugs, uses canary.fly. Voltair, which builds long-range drones that inspect power lines, uses voltair.fly.
• .here: Zillow uses rent.here and sell.here. Rocket Lawyer uses lawyer.here. SiPhox Health, a home blood-testing company, uses bloodtest.here. Pocket Worlds uses worlds.here.

Notice the trick. The word before the dot and the ending are meant to be read together. "Rent here." "Sell here." "Eat." It is a sentence in an address bar.

Registration happens in three phases. All of them begin and end at 16:00 UTC, according to Google Registry's launch page.

1. Sunrise, September 1 to November 9. Trademark holders who had submitted their marks to a central database called the Trademark Clearinghouse could register first.
2. Early access, November 10 to 16. Anyone can register available names for an extra one-time fee. The fee drops every day.
3. General availability, November 17. Anyone can register available names at the base yearly price, with no extra fee.

You do not buy these from Google directly. Google says to visit your preferred registrar, which is a company that sells and manages domain names for you.

In real life Say you run a taco truck. On November 10 you could pay a high early fee for a short, catchy .eat name. If you wait until November 17, the same name costs the normal yearly price, as long as nobody else took it first.

Early access works like a countdown sale in reverse. The price starts high and falls each day. Someone who badly wants a short, memorable name can pay to get it first. Someone patient can wait and pay less, and might lose the name.

Google says the extra fee decreases daily until November 17 and then vanishes. Registrars show the actual numbers, and they differ. One registrar lists early access prices falling from $11,999.99 to $149.99 and a general price of $21.99. Another lists general availability at $35. Check the registrar you use before you buy.

The catch: the best short names are the ones most likely to be gone by the time the fee hits zero.

The first phase was built around a problem with a scary name: cybersquatting. That is when someone registers a name that matches a well-known brand, hoping to sell it back at a high price.

To block that, trademark holders got first pick between September 1 and November 9. That is why big brands such as Wingstop and Zillow were able to line up their names before the public could. Google Registry's launch page adds that a claims period will run indefinitely. During it, trademark owners are notified when their marks are registered as domains.

A trademark is a name or logo that a company has legally registered as its own. The notice does not stop every registration, but it tells the owner quickly.

The short answer is that Google asked for these names a long time ago. Google applied for .eat, .fly and .here during ICANN's 2012 expansion of top-level domains. ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, is the group that oversees the web's address system. That round let companies beyond the traditional registries run their own endings.

So these names waited about fourteen years for a public launch. Google is not new to this. It has run a set of its own endings, including .dev, .app and .page, and the new three are built on the same infrastructure as those.

Google has said HTTPS will be required for all three. HTTPS is the secure way a browser talks to a site. It scrambles the data so that other people on the same network cannot read it.

For you, this means a site on .eat, .fly or .here is set up to load over a secure connection by default. It does not make a site trustworthy. A bad site can still use HTTPS. It only means the connection itself is encrypted.

Yes, and the playbook looks familiar. On May 3, 2023, Google Registry launched eight endings at once: .dad, .phd, .prof, .esq, .foo, .zip, .mov and .nexus. It used the same early access idea then, with an extra one-time fee that dropped daily until public availability on May 10 at 16:00 UTC.

The best-known earlier example is .dev. Within its first year, over 150,000 .dev domains had been registered, Google reported. Companies used it for real work: the Go programming language team built go.dev as a hub for learning resources, and Cloudflare launched workers.dev for its serverless apps. Serverless means the company runs the servers so developers do not have to.

Google also said .dev sits on the HSTS preload list. That is a list built into browsers, so they only open those sites over a secure connection. It is the same idea behind the HTTPS rule for .eat, .fly and .here, and it protects visitors from things like tracking injected by ISPs (internet providers) and spying on open Wi-Fi.

The pattern is simple. Google opens a batch of endings, a few big names jump in early, and the rest of the internet works out what to do with them.

• If you run a business: check your registrar for a .eat, .fly or .here name that matches your brand, and decide whether to pay the early fee or wait for November 17.
• If you are a trademark owner: the claims period notifies you when someone registers your mark, so watch for the notices.
• If you are just browsing: expect to see odd-looking addresses such as wingstop.eat. They are real, and you can read them out loud.
• If you are buying: compare registrar prices, because they differ.