Circa 2012, as the world’s attention rapidly moved from the physical to the digital world, every brand needed to find its perfectly matching online identity. We had even started to see a growing trend of brands meant to be digital-first and, in many cases, digital-only.  As the pace of digitization rapidly climbed, the internet addresses that could meet the desired attributes of a good name soon ran out. More than 100 million .coms were already registered, and as a result, any reasonable name one could think of seemed to have already been taken.  At that point, through our registrar business, we could see that more than 70% of the preferred domain names, as customers searched for them, were unavailable.
Thus began the era of .COMpromise – domain names became longer and longer, started to increasingly contain hyphens and digitals, and soon started to look more like phone numbers which needed to be recorded and stored, rather than brand names which can be easily remembered.
This era also marked the awakening of the East – China, along with India and parts of Asia, constituting a majority of the global population, gradually connected vast components of its users to the World Wide Web. Their late arrival meant they mostly missed out on grabbing their ideal online addresses and had to gravitate towards their regional extensions like .cn and .in for China and India, respectively, which is not ideal for any brand or idea with international aspirations.  As the internet juggernaut kept rolling, the gap between one’s ideal, first choice online address and what they had to .COMpromise with kept increasing.   ICANN, after years of debate, discussion, and politics, was able to announce the biggest revolution in domains since the inception of the Internet. Any entity with the right financial, business, and technical competence could apply for and run a top-level domain registry.  That revolution grabbed the attention of a few of our founding Radicals, who were well entrenched in the domain name business, operating leading wholesale, enterprise, and retail brands. They had a deep understanding of customer needs and a robust process for unraveling the new TLDs that would see the most demand.  This approach had an inherent risk. Going for the most popular extensions would mean greater competition from big tech giants like Google and Amazon, along with other enterprises interested in acquiring the best new top-level domains. Most other private applicants would withdraw their bids which clashed with these tech giants, thankfully we did not!  In fact, despite being completely self-funded, we were able to out-bid and win auctions against both Google (for .tech and .site) and Amazon (.store) After several grueling rounds of auctions, Radix would end up with some of the best Top-level domains.  This paved the way for Radix to become the new leading global player in the industry.. Sandeep Ramchandani, CEO of Radix, is a recognized authority in the global domain and web hosting industry, bringing over 20 years of expertise in strategy, policy, and product management within the domain sector.