Daniel Negari is the founder of .XYZ, the company that acts as the registry operator for the .xyz domain. When I interviewed him for WIRED's April issue, he told me, “We end the alphabet in ‘xyz’ and we should end domain names the same way.”

It turns out someone agrees with him. Yesterday, Google’s new holding company, Alphabet, revealed that it is making its online home at abc.xyz—a move that could signal an end to .com dominance for good.

Negari launched .XYZ last year to get into the generic top-level domain business. What are gTLDs? Whatever follows the “dot” in a URL: Most notably, “.com,” a term that has come to symbolize a whole lot more than a punctuation mark and three letters might suggest.

The surprise news about Alphabet may dispel concerns about search rankings and shift the thinking about gTLDs.

Over the past two years, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers has slowly released new gTLDs. Though the Internet can seem infinite, Internet real estate is not and most of the “good dot coms” are taken, leaving people struggling to create sites with simple, easy-to-find addresses. (In the case of Alphabet, abc.com routes to the television network site and alphabet.com leads to info about a car-leasing management group.)

The solution: To expand beyond .com, .gov, .net, and .edu with new top-level domains approved by ICANN. The non-profit has introduced more than 700 new gTLDs to the Internet so far. Just submitting an application to operate a new gTLD costs $185,000 and, in cases where more than one entity laid claim to a gTLD, bidding wars skyrocketed into the multi-million-dollar range. Tech giants including Google and Amazon entered bidding wars for hot domains such as .book and .app. But there are new players, too, including companies and entrepreneurs dedicated solely to the gTLD business, like .XYZ. Negari’s group bases its entire business model on selling domains at wholesale to registrars like GoDaddy.

The Dot-Pizza Bubble

Though new gTLDs are filling an obvious need, many have crossed the line into the plain bizarre — there’s .pizza for pizza restaurants, .Kim for people named Kim, .ninja for sites about expertise, and .porn for...well, you get the idea. Even .xyz, which is marketed to the next generation of Internet users, became the butt of a joke on HBO’s Silicon Valley.

There have been other shortcomings, too: Some search engines still push old-school gTLD results above ones with the newer configurations. Search for “.xyz” in Google; the top-ranked site is xyz.com, which was founded in the 1990s and purchased by Negari to reroute visitors to gen.xyz.

But the surprise news about Alphabet may dispel concerns about search rankings and shift the thinking about gTLDs, says Negari, who has control of eight gTLDs, including .college, .rent, and .security. “Obviously, Google believes in it if they’re rebranding on .xyz,” he told me after the news of Alphabet and its new URL broke. “This is the ultimate validation.”

The news hasn’t been bad for business, either: .XYZ normally gets 3,000 new registrants per day. Today, Negari said last night that they were on track to get 10,000.

When I mentioned Negari’s quote to him—the one about the alphabet ending in “xyz”—he laughed. “I guess now Google ends Alphabet with xyz, too."