.htc Domain

Smartphones, mobile devices, and virtual reality hardware framed the .htc application in ICANN's 2012 New gTLD Program. Consumer device manufacturers face the driver and firmware abuse pattern familiar across hardware: update and support pages are searched for constantly by owners of devices bought years earlier, and counterfeit versions distributing malware rank stubbornly well.

Three-character strings were the round's scarcest asset, which made this application valuable independent of its sector, and correspondingly costly to leave unclaimed. The extension is not currently active in the DNS root zone and is not available for registration by any party.