OnlineDomain.com Domain Name News & Opinions
GMO Registry announced that .tokyo (https://hello.tokyo/en), the Top Level Domain (hereafter “TLD”) representing Tokyo, the capital city of Japan, reached 100,000 domain names. This milestone comes just over 4 years since .tokyo opened for business in July 2014.
Since its debut, .tokyo has attracted both individuals and businesses with affinity to the City of Tokyo. As a result, .tokyo became the No.1 Geographic TLD on August 20 by registration volume ahead of 33 other Geographic TLDs including .london, .nyc, and .paris, which are TLDs for the cities of London, New York and Paris respectively.
Source: nTLDStats (https://ntldstats.com/tlds) as of August 23, 2018
Namestat has .tokyo at just under 100k registrations. It is at 99,139 domains today.
What seems concerning is that one registrar, and specifically one that the registry owns (GMO Internet, Inc. d/b/a Onamae.com), has 94,843 of these domains. That is 95.7% of all registered domains.
.Tokyo Usage
| Tokyo Marathon | https://www.marathon.tokyo/ |
| Tokyo Metro (Major Subway) | http://findmy.tokyo/ |
| GINZA SIX (Major Department Store) | https://ginza6.tokyo/ |
| km Taxi (Major Taxi Service) | https://www.km-taxi.tokyo/ |
| Shikinejima Tourism Association | http://shikinejima.tokyo/ |
OnlineDomain.com - © Copyright 2012-2024 - All Rights Reserved
Why does it seem concerning?
Onamae is the leading registrar with a thorough interface in Japanese, its sorta default one for Japan, so its obvious most customers would be there.
Besides, there seem to be some specific rules for .tokyo (like extra docs or something), so the service would be naturally preferred through the party which can provide maximal smoothness of the process.
Because it is a monopoly and it is also a registry monopoly.