Incidentally, if you're interested in a full list of technologies and products Google has nixed, rock on over to the. Anyway, the odd bit here is that it was just four weeks ago that Google Domains rolled eight new TLD or Top Level Domains, including .dad, .phd, .prof, .esq, .foo, .mov and .nexus to join old favourites like .com and .org.
Of all the new TLDs, it was .zip that caused the most controversy, enabling as it does some fairly obvious. It could be all too easy to make a link look like a legitimate .zip file download while actually linking to something nasty—threatening to catch out the least internet savvy among us—though as Jacob's article explains expert opinion is split on just how dangerous the .zip TLD may prove to be.
Still, by most measures rolling out a major new initiative within weeks of giving up on the entire enterprise seems pretty odd. But this is Google, a huge and sprawling megaconglomerate of technology subsidiaries which often gives the impression of heading off in about eight different contradictory directions at the same time.
Of course, it's also pretty normal for a large outfit like Google to roll the dice on numerous experimental technologies at the same time. It's ye olde"throw a load of different stuff at the wall and hope some of it sticks approach."for fully seven years. It was only upgraded to full product status—General Availability or GA in Google parlance—in March last year. And now Google is giving up on the whole enterprise entirely.
It's unclear what impact all of this will have on those aforementioned new TLDs including .zip and whether they will survive the transition. But it probably wouldn't be the end of the world if .zip went dot-gone.