The Internet's naming system is expanding beyond the traditional domains like .com and .org — and this week Google paid $25 million for ".app" in an auction.
Google beat out a dozen competitors, including Amazon, for the rights to .app. Ultimately "Charleston Road Registry," the name Google uses for its domain registry, won the .app domain for a cool $25,001,000.
The domain auction is part of a years-long effort by the the nonprofit group Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which in 2011 approved the expansion of "generic top-level domains" — everything to the right of the dot in a web address. So you may soon begin to see websites that end in .bank, .tech and .sport instead of regular old .com and .biz.
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