We recently wrote about the new TLD application round and why it represents such a rare moment in the evolution of the web.
But there’s another question worth asking:
Why would a company like Automattic want to operate a top-level domain in the first place?
The obvious answer might be business. Our answer is a little different.
For us, it starts with control—not control over our users, but giving our users greater control over their experience online.
We learned a lot from .blog
When Automattic applied for .blog during the previous TLD round, we weren’t trying to create the next .com. We applied because it made sense for the people we serve.
WordPress began as blogging software. It has evolved enormously since then, and today you can use WordPress to build almost any kind of website. But blogging remains an important part of its history and its community.
Every day, people still come to WordPress.com because they want to start a blog. For those people, .blog is an obvious fit. And that’s partly because it isn’t an obvious fit for everyone.
If someone tells you their website ends in .blog, you already have some idea of what you’ll find there. That’s the strength of a meaningful domain extension: it tells you something before you’ve even visited the site. But that strength also creates a limitation.
If you’re opening an online store, building a website for a restaurant, or creating a site where patients can book appointments with your dental practice, .blog probably isn’t the domain you would choose.
And that’s perfectly fine.
A good TLD doesn’t have to work for everyone. It should work particularly well for the people it was meant to serve.
WordPress has changed
That’s an important part of how we’re thinking about this new application round.
The people using WordPress today are building far more than blogs. They’re creating businesses, stores, portfolios, communities, publications, restaurants, services, and just about everything else you can imagine. So we’re not looking for one domain extension that can somehow describe all of them.
We’re asking which additional TLDs could give more of those people an address that genuinely makes sense for what they’re building. That doesn’t mean applying for dozens of extensions.
It means thinking carefully about a small number of meaningful options that could complement .blog and better reflect the different ways people use WordPress today.
There’s another reason this matters
Choosing the right name is only one part of owning your place online.
We’ve written before about why owning a domain gives you greater independence. Your website platform can change. Your email provider can change. The services behind your domain can change. But the address can remain yours.
There’s another layer of that independence that most domain owners never see.
When we offer a domain operated by another registry, part of our customers’ experience ultimately depends on that registry. We don’t control its pricing or every decision it may make in the future.
If its costs increase, ours may have to increase too. If its policies change, we have to work within those policies.
When we operate the TLD ourselves, we have much greater control over that experience.
.blog is a good example. In nearly ten years of operating it, we haven’t increased its registry price.
That consistency isn’t simply a pricing decision. It’s part of a larger philosophy about the kind of experience we want to provide.
Owning your part of the web
Automattic has long supported the idea of an open web: one where people can own their content, choose the tools they use, move between services, and build an online presence that isn’t entirely dependent on somebody else’s platform. Domains are an important part of that.
And if we’re going to encourage people to own their address on the web, we also want to be able to stand behind as much of the experience surrounding that address as possible.
That’s ultimately how we’re approaching this new TLD round. We’re not trying to find the next .com.
We’re not trying to collect as many extensions as possible.
We’re asking a much more practical question:
Which domain extensions could help us give more people an online home that fits what they’re building, while giving them as much control over that home as possible?
Because expanding the web isn’t simply about creating more addresses, it’s about creating better choices.
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