No matter how many new TLDs emerge, once a brand reaches a certain scale, it inevitably attempts to acquire its .com. Twitter acquired x.com, Meta secured Meta.com, and countless startups migrate to .com as they grow.

This isn’t mere convention. It’s a gravitational field created by the compound effect of infrastructure and cognition — browsers auto-completing .com in address bars, users defaulting to “.com assumption” behavior.

The mechanics of this gravitational field can be decomposed:

1. Cognitive default — Most users unconsciously append .com when trying to recall a URL
2. Browser auto-completion — Many browsers have built-in functionality to auto-append .com to domain names
3. Email assumption — company@.com has become the implicit standard for business email
4. Aftermarket liquidity — .com domains are traded more actively than any other TLD, functioning as investment vehicles

This gravity perpetually reproduces the problem where new TLDs are “not as trusted as .com.” The dominance of .com is self-reinforcing — it is the network effect itself.