there's a clear (to the general public, it's absolutely not at all clear) separation of concerns between registries, registrars, and registrants.

Google Domains was a registrar.

the Registry itself has some arcane and obfuscated corporate name that was something entirely different from Google LLC (Charleston Road Registry Inc)

> the Registry itself has some arcane and obfuscated corporate name that was something entirely different from Google LLC (Charleston Road Registry Inc)

That's interesting, more interesting is that Google created this Inc to workaround ICANN requirements

"Charleston Road Registry (CRR), also known as Google Registry, is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Google. Because ICANN requires that registrars and registries remain separate entities, and Google is an ICANN-accredited registrar, CRR exists as a separate company from Google. We offer equivalent terms to all registrars in terms of pricing, awarding domains, or any other domain operations; we'll partner with any ICANN-accredited registrars that are interested in our domains and meet any additional criteria that we set for a TLD." [1]

[1] https://www.registry.google/faqs/

This is pretty common, as far as I understand. Many registries will run their own registrar, but I don’t believe they can give any special anything for their registrars compared to other registrars.

I get the idea sometimes that the "concept" of a TLD is being destroyed. Whether that be intentionally or unintentionally, I get the hints that we're headed toward AOL keywords all over again.

The "concept" of tlds was already pretty much destroyed with .com boom. Even in late 90s there was basically no true organization or hierarchy on the top level, .com/.org/.net etc were all free for all and most cctlds did not establish any 2nd level domains either (uk being prominent counter-example)

The only hierarchy that really exists and makes sense is the ccTLDs, but only some of them. .de, .cn, .fr, .uk, etc., these are mostly registered by people and businesses within the actual country and used within the country as well. But there's so many other ccTLDs like .us, .io, .ai, .ly, .me, .co, etc., where they're functionally just two-letter generic TLDs, and the hierarchy doesn't work for them.

.me in particular is moving to square space, and Google shut off all of my automatic renews because of it, wreaking havoc when a few of them expired recently.

Just as a heads up.

They're adding ".mov" too. Freaking amazing from a threat actor's point of view.

I am genuinely surprised that ICANN allowed .zip and now .mov. That was a very serious failing of their job. dot .. local? or something? was another huge miss on their part.