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The death of a TLD
- firekvz 8y ago> With that, comes the question. Was anything lost? Well, the real question is, is there some regulation from ICANN in regards of terminating a gTLD who is not for private use? I can understand that if I want to waste 185k into my very own gTLD then I can terminate it whenever I want, but what happens when I commercialize it?
- ocdtrekkie 8y agoThat's a great question. There's never really been any likelihood of the operators of .com, .net, etc. going out of business, but a lot of these new TLDs very well could, and many were bought by smaller parties that aren't your Amazons or Googles. Does ICANN have a plan for transition for failed TLDs? It's not unrealistic to suggest the owners of .space or something could just go belly up.
- ci5er 8y ago> There's never really been any likelihood of the operators of .com, .net, etc. going out of business ORLY? Where were you in the summer of '87?
- eropple 8y agoGestating, personally. But I think it was pretty obvious that the poster you're replying to was referring to the commercialized era of the internet.
- ci5er 8y agoThanks, Joke Explainer. I would have never got that. (Although the other theory is that the poster was born after 1994 (not long odds on that one, given the local demographics), and doesn't know much about the Internet's history prior to Eternal September.) EDIT: The Gestating thing was clever. Thank you.
- axaxs 8y agoUsed to work in the space. The long answer is complicated, and to be truthful I don't remember half of it, but the short answer is... EBERO. Essentially, someone else will take the TLD from you. What happens long term if the new operator doesn't want it, I don't quite know.
- profmonocle 8y agoThere's a provision for this. TLD operators have to upload all registry data to an escrow service. If the TLD operator goes out of business or turns out to be technically incapable of running the registry, ICANN can access this data and transfer the domain to another registry. ICANN has contracts with several registry operators to take over in case of an emergency like this. https://icannwiki.org/Data_Escrow https://icannwiki.org/Data_Escrow https://icannwiki.org/Emergency_Back-End_Registry_Operator https://icannwiki.org/Emergency_Back-End_Registry_Operator
- matte_black 8y ago$185k is the price for your own TLD? That sounds super cheap. I would have expected millions.
- nashashmi 8y agoBack then it was expensive especially compared to just setting up a domain. Plus there are other rules too like having a support staff. The rules force applicants to effectively act like a registry company. Just to limit the number of applicants they put all sorts of annoying rules in the books. However companies with too much money in their hands did that and more. Google registered different names just for fun.
- baby 8y agoOn the cryptocurrency equivalent: https://github.com/blockstack/blockstack-core/blob/master/docs/blockstack_naming_service.md https://github.com/blockstack/blockstack-core/blob/master/do... > It cost Blockstack PBC 40 BTC to create the .id namespace in 2015 (in transaction
- icebraining 8y ago$185, plus the infrastructure and know-how to run it.
- dannypgh 8y agoI think the ability to setup BIND is easier to acquire than $185,000.
- mcpherrinm 8y ago185,000 is cheaper than the cost of two full time employees, which is the minimum for 24/7/365 oncall. I assume nobody is going to pay $185k for a hobby project.
- matte_black 8y agoCan’t you just get two Indians employed full time for cheap?
- pdpi 8y agoInterestingly, two of the dead TLDs (.sapo, .meo) were owned by the same Portuguese ISP/media company — both tied to specific brands, neither of which really justified a TLD
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- fipple 8y agoOverall the gTLDs are a good thing because some of them will become legitimized alternatives to .com for consumers, and thus weaken the power of domain squatters.
- duskwuff 8y ago> [...] some of them will become legitimized alternatives to .com for consumers [...] Like what? New gTLDs have been around since 2013 -- five years. I can't think of a single one that I'd consider as legitimate as .com. I can, however, think of a bunch that are frequently used for spam and other abuse...
- nasredin 8y agoHave faith! The Year of the Alternative gTLD is coming! Any day now...
- fastball 8y agoI think .app could have a bright future in the age of web apps. It has only just recently been opened up by Google for public registration[0]. 0: https://get.app/ https://get.app/
- ChristianBundy 8y agoWhy do you need a walled garden around your DNS? I'm not sure that involving Google in everything we do is a good idea. I wonder how many websites are served entirely through Google. Browsing with Chrome or Chromium, custom DNS set to 8.8.8.8, domain name from .app, "cached" by AMP, serving an Angular app with Material UI, originally hosted on Google Cloud.
- Tepix 8y ago... showing Google Maps, using Google Analytics, Google webmaster tools, custom Google search, offering Google payments and some Google docs forms. Google wouldn't even have to index it.. they know everything about it already.
- walrus01 8y agoRegarding Sony specifically, my first thought was "... and nothing of value was lost".
- 1996 8y agoThis is concerning: imagine you have a unique domain opportunity for your company in a smal, up-and-coming gTLD. If you get it, yoj have to worry about the gTLD dying, and still get the .com So you stay in .com with a sucky name
- macintux 8y agoPer other comments there’s a recovery plan in place for public TLDs.
- 1996 8y agoWhen I read it, the other comment said the fate was uncertain if the other company had issues - unless it is recursive, there is only 1 level of redudancy
- CydeWeys 8y agoICANN has access to the escrow files and they will find someone to run it if necessary. There are dozens of registry service providers.
- CaliforniaKarl 8y agoFor those TLDs that had certs, I’m curious: Should those certs have been revoked, since some/all of the associated domains no longer exist?
- djsumdog 8y agoWhy? I mean the certs are still valid, just for a domain that no longer exists on root DNS servers (You can still publish them to internal DNS). I mean, they'll expire and be non-renewable eventually anyway.
- lucb1e 8y agoUntil someone re-registers the TLD and can now MITM some internal traffic, if it is indeed used internally. I can see the argument for invalidation, even if unlikely. The much more realistic scenario is where you get a cert for 2 years for any ordinary domain, even if your domain expires next month.
- johannes1234321 8y agoHow could they - without private key? - By not revoking and having certificate transparency we rather can see if somebody else tries to take over the domain with a new cert.
- lucb1e 8y agoWith a new cert indeed. One would have to proactively look at transparency logs instead of retroactively, which afaik only the biggest companies on the planet (like Google) do, or maybe not even them.
- jfoutz 8y agoBefore I read the article, I thought it was .nato. Sort of a testament to how little I remember non big six or country code tlds.
- exabrial 8y agoThe only purpose for a tld should be like .bank and have it cost $100,000 registration fee and similar verified stuff
- labster 8y agoPay $185k for gTLD, get $100k per second level domain. Nice business sense. And there's still be some random millionaire to register piggy.bank.
- young_unixer 8y agoQuestion: would it be correct to have an email of the type name@TLD? Example: John@com Is this kind of name spec-compliant?
- treve 8y agoYes it would! We used to have a fake TLD for our internal Network. It just works.
- foepys 8y agoYes, it is. But as with many things on the internet, it might be spec compliant but nobody can use it because most programmers didn't actually read the spec and thus implemented what they think is the spec. Most websites will probably validate email addresses with regexes that expect a dot in the host part.
- ehnto 8y agoI still have trouble using .co instead of .com even. No dot would definitely throw a bunch of sites off.
- therein 8y agoThe situation is even worse with more obscure TLDs like .FYI. I honestly cannot register to a good 80% of the sites I want to.
- Qwertie 8y agoI have a .red domain and haven't hit any issues so far.
- walrus01 8y agoThere is also a human problem to consider, my spouse owns surname.com (their address is firstname@lastname.com , we run our own authoritative DNS and manage the MX records for lastname.com) , a bunch of people out there assume that they are such a foolish, technically ignorant person that they don't know how to properly format an email address. To the extent that signing up for some things in person just results in time-wasting questions and "what, really", so they just give a gmail address to some people.
- Lucent 8y agoThis isn't what makes investing in other gTLDs a danger. It's that some are offering registration for pennies, causing them to be almost entirely populated by "bad" domains. For example, .fun is 80% spammy domains, creating a strong incentive for all manner of services to blacklist the entire TLD. https://www.spamhaus.org/statistics/tlds/ https://www.spamhaus.org/statistics/tlds/
- walrus01 8y agoThe other issue is with dark UI patterns in third party resellers, sure you can get some weird gTLD for $1 for the first year. But then if you actually build something that uses it, maybe the next year and the third year you find that the price is now $89/year. Totally undisclosed before you buy it. At least if you buy a traditional ccTLD like .ca , or a regular TLD in .com , .net , whatever, you can expect pricing to remain consistent.
- Qwertie 8y agoI really hate this. It's super scammy. Although namecheap does show a little message letting you know it costs more to renew.
- jolmg 8y agoBut then it sounds like the $89 is not the general price of the TLD but rather your site as determined by the rate on how the registrar's been receiving queries for your domain on their DNS servers. Can't you "reset" the price by transferring to another registrar?
- buckminster 8y agoNo, because it's not actually the resellers doing this. It's the people who own the tld doing the scammy pricing.
- jolmg 8y agoYou mean the registry has the registrars do that? Do registries even have view on the popularity of different domains below their TLD? I didn't realize that they received requests from resolvers that included second-level domains. I thought it was only the registrars that received that, not the registries, but I guess misunderstood DNS if so, because it makes sense.
- ranger207 8y agoThe article says "you can find the letter publicly here" but doesn't provide a link. Typo? I'd like to some of the other "interesting reads."
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- ipsin 8y agoIf I'm reading this [1] right, some TLDs can be renewed by a different party. In that case, "link rot" might become wholesale link poisoning. [1] https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/gtld-registry-agreement-termination-2015-10-09-en https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/gtld-registry-agreemen... "...ICANN's Preliminary Determination shall not prohibit ICANN from delegating the gTLD pursuant to a future application process for the delegation of top-level-domains, subject to any processes ... intended to protect the rights of third parties."
- perl4ever 8y agoI wish there was a TLD that corresponded to the last two letters of my surname, so I could register a domain and have an email like John@D.oe.
- minieggs 8y ago.es for the Jones’ :-)
- robinson-wall 8y agoMy HN username is my surname... so naturally I snapped up https://nick.rw/ https://nick.rw/ I wondered if they'd refuse it, for being close to "nic.rw" but they don't seem to use it.
- PrimeDirective 8y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17557295 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17557295 Similar stuff
- skrebbel 8y agoI don't understand this. Eg in the Sony case, why wouldn't they just hold on to it? They did the hard work, they paid up, keeping it on is not a bigger burden than keeping a registered trademark globally, I'd assume? Does anybody understand?
- zeristor 8y agoWas the .boots TLD for the Boots chemists? Companies are quick to register domains, I had to manage about 1200 or so at my last job, and migrate them to Route53. Perhaps a manager thought it was a good idea, and IT said No!
- dingo_bat 8y agoI never understood why a TLD is a big deal in any real sense. If ICANN wanted they could make the whole web address a single string. No need for a separate TLD. It's like the filename's extension.
- federicoponzi 8y agoNot sure about the answer, but one thing that comes into my mind is about decentralization, in the sense of load balancing the DNS queries.
- zeeZ 8y agoBut then the DNS root servers would have to know every single domain in existence. The current system works because the higher level servers only need to know who below them in the hirarchy is responsible for the next subdomain. How would you resolve a single string?
- afandian 8y agoReplace hierarchical partitioning with keyspace partitioning (eg hash buckets). A fundamental difference in architecture, but so was GP's idea.
- arkitaip 8y agoBecause the current system with hundreds of TLDs is a multi-billion dollar industry.
- ezequiel-garzon 8y agoAs a suggestion for the author, the omission of apostrophes in contractions is annoyingly distracting. Is this a new trend?
- dudul 8y agoI really hope not.
- bsimpson 8y agoI'm amazed both that so many brands bought TLDs and that so many are rescinding them so soon, especially relatively tech-savvy ones like HTC.
- kilon 8y agoin other news google is integrated in the browsers address bar, scientists are baffled how it managed to fit in such small space and how it got there.
- Jaruzel 8y agoI'm probably alone in this... but I would like to see the registration of a new TLD that has restrictions on it where you cannot run ads on sites that use that TLD, or domain park, or re-sell at profit. It could become a nice little corner of the internet where people like us can run stuff for each other, and the unwashed masses never visit. Our own little club under one TLD as it were...
- pavel_lishin 8y ago> or re-sell at profit That's not really enforceable, is it? > It could become a nice little corner of the internet where people like us can run stuff for each other, and the unwashed masses never visit. Why not register a domain and offer subdomains for sale?
- Jaruzel 8y agotbh, I was actually thinking of this. However, a full TLD would be so much nicer.
- ballenf 8y agoEach person could have their own 'city' and being geographically-based, you could call it something like geocities. Or, if everyone has their own 'space' that they think of as 'my'...
- Jaruzel 8y agoGreat Idea. Do you think the users would like animated gifs and sparkly background images?
- pavel_lishin 8y agoThat's the best part! We let them style their own website, so they can show off their own aesthetic!
- jolmg 8y ago> That's not really enforceable, is it? I think so. It's just a matter of the registrar removing the feature that allows transfers of domains between accounts. I guess you can still try "selling" a domain by actually putting a price on forfeiting a domain back to the registrar and giving a chance to the "buyer" to buy it from the registrar at its price. This, however, puts the buyer at risk that the registrar might put an elevated price on the domain and also that someone else that was watching for a domain to be let go might buy it first. In order to ensure that all registrars do remove the feature for this domain, the registry for that domain would have to include such a clause in the contract it would have with these registrars.
- LambdaComplex 8y agoMy personal opinion is that TLDs should be "generic"--.com for commercial, .org for organizations, country-specific TLDs, etc.--and that allowing private corporations to register TLDs for their own brands (like .xperia for instance) was a mistake
- OnlyRepliesToBS 8y agoSnakeoil.
- aembleton 8y agoFull list of TLDs https://data.iana.org/TLD/tlds-alpha-by-domain.txt https://data.iana.org/TLD/tlds-alpha-by-domain.txt