Indian Ocean, Somali, and Anguilla Domains

This is not quite the case anymore. For example, it is common to find tools ending with .so TLD these days. It’s a Somali domain, yet none of the tools are remotely close to Somalia. notion.so, amie.so, tally.so… But why and when did this trend start?

Nomenclatures

• A ccTLD is a country code top-level domain used to identify a country or a sovereign state. .us for the United States, .uk for the United Kingdom, .de for Germany, .jp for Japan…

• A gTLD is a generic top-level domain not tied to any specific country or region. .com for commercial entities, .org for organizations (typically non-profits), .edu for educational institutions…

Saturated domain markets

Before understanding the .so domains, we must understand the domain markets. Any moderately technological company should have an online presence, and that made a gold rush to squat on domains indefinitely, waiting for a one-time moonshot. For example, the domain owner of Meta.com at least earned $60M from Facebook’s rebranding.

Since the initial craze with the .com domain squatting, tech companies have looked for alternative TLDs. Many used clever rhymes or symbolic meanings, such as:

• ly (Libya). You can make it rhyme with adverbs, such as optimize.ly

• .me (Montenegro). It sounds like “me” and is used for microblogs and personal websites.

• .co (Colombia). Visually similar to “Co.,” meaning corporates.

But in the end, .io (British Indian Ocean Territory) stuck the most, spawning over 500K of small to medium tech businesses. Many grew big, like frame.io (2014, Acq. by Adobe), which at one point in Alexa's Top 1 Million had 5% of .io domains, most of them being tech companies. Google even started to treat .io domains as gTLDs (meaning, treated as first-class domains like .com) and .io space repeated history of .com, flooded with domain squatters.

This is circa 2014-2015.

Notion and Somali Domains

Notion was released in 2016. The year 2016 was already too late to snatch a good .io domain, and eventually, they chose .so. While one Notion engineer claimed that they chose .so just because it was the only available one, people have speculated that it could be:

• Short for software.

• Short for social.

• Adverb. “Please do so. Please Notion so.”

In the same comment, though, they said they planned to migrate over to notion.com. Indeed, Notion had to go through many troubles with .so domain that it was a ccTLD from an unstable country where the corporate firewall blocked access to those Somali TLDs or websites going down because of the Somali government.

Even then, Notion’s success created many Remora companies. Remoras are small fish that stick to a shark, sucking the trickled-down residues. A decently big tech company always spawns some remoras, and so did Notion. Notion’s success initially created remora businesses, mainly focusing on what Notion lacks — creating fast, publicly available websites. These include but are not limited to:

• super.so

• bullet.so

• potion.so

This is circa 2018-2019.