So by now you've almost certainly heard that Google isn't really "Google" anymore, or at least not in the way it used to be. Monday morning Larry Page dropped a blog post titled "G is for Google" announcing that Google is being restructured under a new parent company called Alphabet, with Google itself becoming just one subsidiary alongside things like Nest, Calico, and the X moonshot lab. I'm not going to spend 800 words re-explaining the org chart, because if you read any tech site at all this week you've already seen six versions of that post. What I actually want to talk about is the domain name, because it's the funniest part of this whole thing and almost nobody is treating it as the headline it deserves to be.
Alphabet's new website isn't alphabet.com. It's abc.xyz.
Why? Because alphabet.com was already taken. Not by a squatter, not by some rival company trying to be cute, but by an actual fleet leasing and car financing business that's part of BMW Group, one that's been called Alphabet since long before Google was a Stanford research project. So the second-most-valuable company on earth, worth something like $450 billion, got completely boxed out of the .com for its own new name by a European car-leasing outfit nobody outside of corporate fleet management has ever heard of. They didn't even try to buy it, as far as anyone can tell. They just went and grabbed abc.xyz instead and called it a day.
I love this. I love it in a genuinely unironic way, and I've been telling anyone who'll listen about it since Monday afternoon.
Part of why I love it is personal. I've spent probably four separate years of this blog's life periodically checking whether a five-letter .com I wanted was still parked by some domain reseller sitting on it for a few hundred bucks a year, waiting for somebody bigger than me to come along and pay real money. Spoiler: it's still parked. Domain squatting culture got so out of hand over the 2000s that even a trillion-dollar-adjacent company just shrugs and picks a weird alternate extension instead of fighting for the "real" one. If Google can't be bothered to chase down a domain, I think that officially means the rest of us are allowed to stop feeling bad about it too.
The other part is the .xyz thing itself. This is one of those newer top-level domains that got rolled out starting last year as part of ICANN opening the floodgates on alternatives to .com, .net, .org, and so on. Before this week, .xyz was mostly known, if it was known at all, as the extension spam sites and sketchy affiliate pages used because it was cheap and nobody had claimed the good words yet. Now it's the domain of one of the biggest corporate restructurings in tech history. That's a genuinely strange bit of legitimacy laundering to watch happen in real time. I'd bet real money that .xyz registrations spike over the next month just because founders want to say their startup shares a domain extension with Google's parent company.
None of this changes what Alphabet actually is, obviously. It's a holding company structure, mostly built so Wall Street can value the search-and-ads business separately from the expensive experimental stuff like self-driving cars and life-extension research, and so Sundar Pichai can run Google day-to-day while Page and Sergey Brin float up a level and get to be visionary chairmen types who show up to give a talk twice a year. Fine. Reasonable. Boring, even, as far as corporate reshuffles go.
But every big serious announcement like this always has one small dumb detail buried in it that the executives clearly didn't think too hard about, and this time it's the URL. Somewhere in Mountain View there was presumably a meeting where somebody said "wait, we don't own alphabet.com?" and everyone just sort of collectively decided that abc.xyz was close enough. I keep picturing that meeting. I hope it was a short one.
Anyway. Go type abc.xyz into your browser sometime today if you haven't. It's mostly just the letter and a link to Larry's post, which feels about right for something that took a car-leasing company's domain hostage without even a fight.