not really? nic.* is just an "About this TLD"

The question wasn't "what's nic mean?", it was "is buying your own top level domain going to be the new normal?" Presumably if you have enough cash, I'd say yes.

So what does "nic" stand for? And why not www.* or about.*?

(Google search wasn't too helpful)

"NIC" stands for "Network Information Center".

For basic information, check out https://www.sri.com/hoi/domain-names-the-network-information... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InterNIC

For the second question nic.* is conventionally the domain utilized by the TLD operator. So nic.brand may contain info and functions related to the .brand TLD and then www.brand and about.brand be other sites. E.g. nic.google redirects to registry.google, Google's domain registrar whose engineers also operate .google, whereas about.google can be considered the actual brand home site.

> E.g. nic.google redirects to registry.google, Google's domain registrar whose engineers also operate .google

Negative. Google's TLDs are operated by Google Registry, as shown on that site, which is an entirely separate team from Google Domains (the registrar).

Yeah, true. Was deceived by the check domain field and mixed them up.

Network Information Center. They did DNS stuff before ICANN

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InterNIC

Network Information Center.