Domain squatting for auto linking of Java properties files

To no surprise, these days are mostly spent supporting the open source (but commercially backed) QZ Tray printing plugin.

As part of our support offering, we're in constant communication with customers regarding technical matters, and in our case, modifying a Java properties file for various settings in the software, is just par for the course.

In our case specifically, we call our file qz-tray.properties.

What was a surprise is that through a series of email exchanges with end-users, this above filename "qz-tray.properties" had become an automatic-hyperlink between email exchanges. Upon investigation, this TLD (top level domain) of ".properties" was approved way back in 2014 (at time of writing, 10 years ago!), predominantly to fulfill the demand of online namespace for real estate companies.

To put this in context, if someone were curious/inquiring and tried to quickly search "qz-tray.properties" from a browser address bar, it would result in a "This site can't be reached" style page, since ".properties" is a valid, registered TLD.  This same thing will happen if you search for "foo.bar", for the same reason.

Naturally, this got me thinking... What if someone bought this domain?  Is there a scenario where a 3rd party would then be able to retroactively add links into 9+ year old mailing list conversations?  Well, at time of writing this, most applications DON'T yet automatically hyperlink this text, but as a precaution we snagged the URL, in 2022 as a safeguard.  It now redirects to our main commercial website.

But this got me thinking... Are other Java projects concerned?  For example, the widely used Apache tomcat project uses a file called catalina.properties, which can be purchased for the low-price of $49 USD per year.  Furthermore, as more TLDs are approved each year, will there be more and more file extensions affected?

Is this just too obscure to care about?

Should a good sumaritan just buy this and donate this to the Tomcat project?

I did reach out to the Tomcat team (although, sadly, I cannot find the history **facepalm**... perhaps lost to IRC?) and they did not seem immediately concerned.

What do you think?