6 ms·

Not agreeing or disagreeing, but I don't see the relevance of your point.

hn_throwaway_99 9y ago
kuschku's comment makes it sound like he was unaware of what happened in 2012, and he is fundamentally misunderstanding the current state of gTLDs, so I was informing him. Furthermore, the ship has sailed on the debate of whether these expanded TLDs are a good thing, so it's not a productive discussion. We might as well talk about whether commerce should be banned on the internet - that was a raging debate in the early/mid 90s, and that debate is over.
- kuschku 9y ago
  > Furthermore, the ship has sailed on the debate of whether these expanded TLDs are a good thing Why? We could simply remove all of them again. Or we could open TLDs to be affordable for everyone. But the current situation has literally Google domainsquatting on TLDs. That’s... insane.
  - CydeWeys 9y ago
    > Why? We could simply remove all of them again. No, we couldn't. That would break the Internet in a large variety of horrible ways. You can't remove entire TLDs once delegated and widely linked to. That's closing the barn door after the horse has escaped.
    - kuschku 9y ago
      > You can't remove entire TLDs once delegated and widely linked to. That's closing the barn door after the horse has escaped. Why not? We can also remove domains once registered and widely linked to. The NIC of .eu just removed over 10'000 due to squatting. Why shouldn’t we just remove Google’s TLDs where it’s squatting?
      - CydeWeys 9y ago
        TLDs are qualitatively quite different than second-level domain names. Do you have a link to the .eu actions you're referring to? And the simplest answer is contracts. Every operator of a new gTLD has paid ICANN a substantial amount of money, has a contract to operate the TLD, and thus has certain legal rights. The TLDs cannot be taken away without good cause. There is no language in the contracts requiring a certain number of domains be launched by a certain date, so that cannot be justification for removing the operation grant. And of course contracts cannot be unilaterally changed. I am not a lawyer, this is my personal opinion and not my employer's, all other disclaimers, please consult your own lawyer or Wikipedia if you have questions about contract law, etc.
        kuschku 9y ago
        Here’s the example case: https://www.out-law.com/page-8457 https://www.out-law.com/page-8457 But EURid also de-registers almost all other domain squatters, as they actually wrote that into the contract. > And the simplest answer is contracts. Contracts are simply something enforced by law. Law can be changed. If not, law is simply something enforced by society and constitutions, constitutions can be changed. The German constitution, for example, says that the right to own property only exists as long as that property is used for public good. In any other case, it can be seized. Seizing the TLDs, or requiring DNS servers in your country to redirect the TLDs to other operators, would be an option. And, as drastic as this sounds, it’s preferable over the current situation. Corporate squatting is inacceptable.
        CydeWeys 9y ago
        Yes, that case is an example of a qualitative difference between TLDs and SLDs. .eu, as a ccTLD for the European Union, has a TLD-wide policy that all registrants must be based in the European Economic Area. Those 10K domain names were all registered by a Chinese woman who used a fake address in London to register the domain names. So they are being fought over in court not because of "squatting", but because she violated the registry policy. Note that it is up to the registry operator to set said policy (which ICANN must approve). So that mechanism does not even exist to take away a TLD. Good luck in getting international law passed to take away TLDs from corporations. I just don't see it happening. > Seizing the TLDs, or requiring DNS servers in your country to redirect the TLDs to other operators, would be an option. This would break the Internet. Domain names have to work the same everywhere. You cannot have domain names pointing to different DNS zones entirely depending on where you access them from.
    - nebabyte 9y ago
      > That would break the Internet in a large variety of horrible ways Scare talk aside, no, it wouldn't. In most cases people would be unaffected; at worst people've dealt with broken links before and will continue to do so. It would only truly "break" anything for early adopters who dove in without thinking, and knew the risks of doing so. Ask your bosses (the ones you cite here [1] as being the ones calling the actual shots) why everything isn't already .google etc. :) [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14490271 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14490271
      - CydeWeys 9y ago
        The 2012 round of gTLDs aren't provisional and they aren't used by "early adopters". They are part of the Internet now. There are millions of sites using them now, and any business owner creating a new site on, e.g., .design, is simply buying a domain name through a registrar; they are not "diving in without thinking" or being "early adopters" or "taking risks". There were many years of discussion prior to releasing the latest gTLDs. This is not a continually ongoing process; the discussion was completed, and the new gTLDs were released. That can't be gone back on, not without causing harm to millions of website owners and network operators. It's simply not ever going to happen, and trying to argue otherwise isn't a fruitful use of time. Though, by all means, your time is yours to do with what you will, and if you really want to start a movement to try to roll back all the new gTLDs, godspeed. It seems like tilting at windmills to me though. I've already addressed why everything isn't on .google already -- domain names are sticky, and it takes a lot of work to change the domain name of an established product. It tends not to be worth it. For new webpages though, e.g. environment.google, you're starting to see it being used.
        CydeWeys 9y ago
        Correction: There are 27.4M domains on new gTLDs registered; full stats here: https://ntldstats.com/tld https://ntldstats.com/tld The total economic cost of yanking all of those from the existing established sites would easily run into the billions of dollars. Those domain names are on business cards, on sides of vans, on buildings, on advertising, etc. Untold amounts of money have already been spent building up reputations for sites on these new gTLDs, much of which would be lost if the domain name were yanked. The economic damage would be massive. And of course all existing links in press, blogs, social media, etc., would all die. That's why it won't ever happen.

kuschku's comment makes it sound like he was unaware of what happened in 2012, and he is fundamentally misunderstanding the current state of gTLDs, so I was informing him. Furthermore, the ship has sailed on the debate of whether these expanded TLDs are a good thing, so it's not a productive discussion. We might as well talk about whether commerce should be banned on the internet - that was a raging debate in the early/mid 90s, and that debate is over.

kuschku 9y ago
> Furthermore, the ship has sailed on the debate of whether these expanded TLDs are a good thing Why? We could simply remove all of them again. Or we could open TLDs to be affordable for everyone. But the current situation has literally Google domainsquatting on TLDs. That’s... insane.
- CydeWeys 9y ago
  > Why? We could simply remove all of them again. No, we couldn't. That would break the Internet in a large variety of horrible ways. You can't remove entire TLDs once delegated and widely linked to. That's closing the barn door after the horse has escaped.
  - kuschku 9y ago
    > You can't remove entire TLDs once delegated and widely linked to. That's closing the barn door after the horse has escaped. Why not? We can also remove domains once registered and widely linked to. The NIC of .eu just removed over 10'000 due to squatting. Why shouldn’t we just remove Google’s TLDs where it’s squatting?
    - CydeWeys 9y ago
      TLDs are qualitatively quite different than second-level domain names. Do you have a link to the .eu actions you're referring to? And the simplest answer is contracts. Every operator of a new gTLD has paid ICANN a substantial amount of money, has a contract to operate the TLD, and thus has certain legal rights. The TLDs cannot be taken away without good cause. There is no language in the contracts requiring a certain number of domains be launched by a certain date, so that cannot be justification for removing the operation grant. And of course contracts cannot be unilaterally changed. I am not a lawyer, this is my personal opinion and not my employer's, all other disclaimers, please consult your own lawyer or Wikipedia if you have questions about contract law, etc.
      - kuschku 9y ago
        Here’s the example case: https://www.out-law.com/page-8457 https://www.out-law.com/page-8457 But EURid also de-registers almost all other domain squatters, as they actually wrote that into the contract. > And the simplest answer is contracts. Contracts are simply something enforced by law. Law can be changed. If not, law is simply something enforced by society and constitutions, constitutions can be changed. The German constitution, for example, says that the right to own property only exists as long as that property is used for public good. In any other case, it can be seized. Seizing the TLDs, or requiring DNS servers in your country to redirect the TLDs to other operators, would be an option. And, as drastic as this sounds, it’s preferable over the current situation. Corporate squatting is inacceptable.
        CydeWeys 9y ago
        Yes, that case is an example of a qualitative difference between TLDs and SLDs. .eu, as a ccTLD for the European Union, has a TLD-wide policy that all registrants must be based in the European Economic Area. Those 10K domain names were all registered by a Chinese woman who used a fake address in London to register the domain names. So they are being fought over in court not because of "squatting", but because she violated the registry policy. Note that it is up to the registry operator to set said policy (which ICANN must approve). So that mechanism does not even exist to take away a TLD. Good luck in getting international law passed to take away TLDs from corporations. I just don't see it happening. > Seizing the TLDs, or requiring DNS servers in your country to redirect the TLDs to other operators, would be an option. This would break the Internet. Domain names have to work the same everywhere. You cannot have domain names pointing to different DNS zones entirely depending on where you access them from.
  - nebabyte 9y ago
    > That would break the Internet in a large variety of horrible ways Scare talk aside, no, it wouldn't. In most cases people would be unaffected; at worst people've dealt with broken links before and will continue to do so. It would only truly "break" anything for early adopters who dove in without thinking, and knew the risks of doing so. Ask your bosses (the ones you cite here [1] as being the ones calling the actual shots) why everything isn't already .google etc. :) [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14490271 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14490271
    - CydeWeys 9y ago
      The 2012 round of gTLDs aren't provisional and they aren't used by "early adopters". They are part of the Internet now. There are millions of sites using them now, and any business owner creating a new site on, e.g., .design, is simply buying a domain name through a registrar; they are not "diving in without thinking" or being "early adopters" or "taking risks". There were many years of discussion prior to releasing the latest gTLDs. This is not a continually ongoing process; the discussion was completed, and the new gTLDs were released. That can't be gone back on, not without causing harm to millions of website owners and network operators. It's simply not ever going to happen, and trying to argue otherwise isn't a fruitful use of time. Though, by all means, your time is yours to do with what you will, and if you really want to start a movement to try to roll back all the new gTLDs, godspeed. It seems like tilting at windmills to me though. I've already addressed why everything isn't on .google already -- domain names are sticky, and it takes a lot of work to change the domain name of an established product. It tends not to be worth it. For new webpages though, e.g. environment.google, you're starting to see it being used.
      - CydeWeys 9y ago
        Correction: There are 27.4M domains on new gTLDs registered; full stats here: https://ntldstats.com/tld https://ntldstats.com/tld The total economic cost of yanking all of those from the existing established sites would easily run into the billions of dollars. Those domain names are on business cards, on sides of vans, on buildings, on advertising, etc. Untold amounts of money have already been spent building up reputations for sites on these new gTLDs, much of which would be lost if the domain name were yanked. The economic damage would be massive. And of course all existing links in press, blogs, social media, etc., would all die. That's why it won't ever happen.