On April 19, 2001, the first three today existing EMOJI.com domains were registered (The Hot Springs, Peace Sign and Male Symbol). ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) had made available a couple of hundred SYMBOL.com domain names. Symbols for “Registrered” and “Copyright”, was released that same day.

At that moment in time, these where not emojis but symbol characters that were standardized in Unicode in 1993. ICANN stopped registrations for these kind of domains in 2008.

In 2015 many of the registered symbols became adopted as emojis by Unicode. Of the SYMBOL.com domain registrations made before 2008, only 33 of them are EMOJI.com domains today, among them the Airplane, Watch and Snowflake.

Since then, other TLDs (top-level domains) not under the control of ICANN (who controls .com and .net), have open registrations for Emoji domains, such as .ws, .kz, .fm and .to.