Singular data point, but I don't think I've ever seen a company that I would take seriously use .xyz.

Double data point here.

In fact, unless you're selling to techies, it's dubious to operate a US business on anything but .com.

Aussie here, we try to get both the .com and the .com.au (and now also the .au), because people will just use one or the other, regardless of what the link says.

I think opening up .au was criminal. Same as the .uk one.

Investor value at the cost of hurting small business by increasing cost or creating confusion.

I realize you're referring specifically to general .au, but I don't think the average person will think to try foo.au instead of foo.com.au and .com.au isn't opened up to my knowledge. The name must be derived from your registered Australian business (ACN or ABN).

I've had a .net.au since 1999 and the same rules apply there.

The domain does not have to be derived form anything, only associated (owned?) with an ABN/ACN. And the bar for registering an ABN is as low as signing up for an email account.

People in Australia use .com.au all the time, domain.au almost looks broken to my eye.

abc.xyz?

Alphabet is not a company most people interact with directly so their website address doesn't matter at all.

I only seem to see .xyz in the crypto space (and alphabet inc). Generally it's a crypto scam pushed at me in a twitter/x ad. What are some other players on the .xyz tld?

I've used .xyz because the domains go for a few cents per year. And then I moved away from them because it felt so unprofessional.

i've seen lots of devs using it for their personal blogs, i guess because it's cheap. personally, im excited to buy an .lol tonight!

.lol is overpriced and worse, can arbitrarily increase the price in the future. Using anything other than an ICANN-controld gTLD (com,net,org,etc.) or a ccTLD (be very careful about ones from countries other than your own) is a fool.

the domain i was looking at is $1.80/yr so im not upset at the price, and its just for silly personal stuff so if they increase price i could just switch to something else.

good to know about the risks of price hikes though!

First registration is $2 but any renewal is $20 after. A lot of first year domains use different pricing and they are charged differently I think by the TLD holders, so it's not just stupid marketing by like GoDaddy who hopes you don't transfer to another registrar after them taking a loss the first year and huge hike after

A lot of super cheap ones have expensive renewals.

“A fool” is beyond dramatic.

One of the lecturers at my faculty has his academic website on an .xyz domain.

Does he speak any Slavic languages? I know a Russian lecturer who does that in part because he considers it funny to use a TLD that looks similar to the obscene word "хуй".

That's a bit weird of an association. I'm Russian and хуй doesn't usually come to my mind when I see xyz.

> Does he speak any Slavic languages?

Well yes, but not one that uses the Cyrillic alphabet or has this word.