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There is one thing that annoys me about generic TLDs like .dev, .website, .cloud, .network etc. For example, Salesforce have https://crm.dev https://crm.dev - a

There is one thing that annoys me about generic TLDs like .dev, .website, .cloud, .network etc. For example, Salesforce have https://crm.dev https://crm.dev - are they the only CRM in the world? Hell no, but they're the biggest, so they can be the only one in the .dev space. Same with workers.dev.

stanleydrew 8y ago
What's your proposed alternative? That generic category names should be disallowed within a TLD? Or that some public or community-driven version of a for-profit service should control the generic names?
- ianai 8y ago
  Probably the former as it doesn’t require as much aggrandizement. I wonder whether a different approach would work. Instead of basing TLD name spacing on nebulous terms (com,net,org,io,edu,etc) create a naming system that better reflects the real world. The abstracted terms lead to clashing. So addressing actually reflects physical addressing. There’s only ever going to be one company at Apple’s corporate address. Not sure how it’d work. Edit-the tech to do this via gps even exists today.
  - baud147258 8y ago
    So there would an .apple tld, with address like dev.apple, buy.apple and so on?
    - CydeWeys 8y ago
      Indeed there is a .apple TLD: https://icannwiki.org/.apple https://icannwiki.org/.apple I haven't seen any uses of it in the wild though.
      - mises 8y ago
        https://experience.apple/ipad-pro/ https://experience.apple/ipad-pro/ https://share.newsroom.apple/ https://share.newsroom.apple/ For future reference, search Google for "site:*.dev"
  - icebraining 8y ago
    The irrelevance of physical location is one of the advantages of the Internet; adding that to addresses just to provide an unique key seems absurd. Would a company have to change all their addresses if they move their headquarters? What if the country's street system changes? And what about individuals? I don't see a need to change the current system, but I'd rather move to random strings than tying them to some irrelevant and mutable piece of data.
  - TheDong 8y ago
    We could just give everyone who wants a domain a UUID. My site could be 'uuid://09953e01-8164-4e40-8504-ed5507b50b03'. This seems to solve all of your complaints. No clashing, reflects the real world (names are all meaningless is reality, and physical locations are nebulous). > There’s only ever going to be one company at Apple’s corporate address. On the other hand, there are corporate addresses that have many companies, and many domains, and many distinct technical departments with different needs. What you're missing here is that domain names are meant to be easy to remember. That is their only goal. They were created so people didn't have to memorize ipv4 addresses. Proposing that we use corporate addresses or gps coordinates is absolutely unrealistic and against the spirit of the domain name system in the first place.
    - fwip 8y ago
      Go checkout Beaker Browser (using dat) or IPFS.
    - marksomnian 8y ago
      > They were created so people didn't have to memorize ipv4 addresses New problem: memorising a UUID is even harder than memorising an IP address. Someone will eventually invent a DNS for the UUID-space, and we'll have this problem all over again.
    - WorldMaker 8y ago
      If anyone actually wants to test this: IPv6 is already a modified version of this UUID plan. The designers were even kind enough in designing IPv6 to provide some nice memory shortcuts over UUID in the IPv6 address style, such as :: to fill runs of zeroes. It might~ be fun to see how much of the web you can explore just memorizing IPv6 addresses rather than using DNS.
      - TheDong 8y ago
        I know we're both just joking, but unfortunately due to SNI headers and load balancers, memorizing ipv6 addresses doesn't necessarily get you the right site. The DNS system has also managed to make ip addresses less stable over time.
- derefr 8y ago
  Maybe names that have obvious “generic” squatter value—i.e. names that (at the time of their attempted purchase) describe entire verticals, rather than uniquely identifying a business—should be put up for auction rather than being first-come-first-served. (That would also include names that describe a vertical that someone tried to trademark into being the name of a business anyway: pets.com and the like. If that trademark isn’t already well known, then this is just an attempt to end-run the auction system, rather than a valid claim.) Given that TLDs can decide their own allocation policies, I’m surprised none of them have tried this yet.
  - Klathmon 8y ago
    Well the .dev domains are going up in a "dutch auction" style. The price starts off at an insane $11,500 per domain, and then slowly over the course of 2 weeks goes down to $12 per domain, first come first serve. It's a pretty good solution in my opinion to the problem of how to "fairly" distribute domain names. I want to pick up a few, but I'm going to wait until they are down to the lowest tier as i'm pretty sure nobody is going to pay even $100 for them. And if they do, well then they probably want it more than I do!
    - everdev 8y ago
      > The price starts off at an insane $11,500 per domain It's only insane if no one wants to pay that much. I bet tons of companies are willing to pay that for premium .dev domains.
  - joshuamorton 8y ago
    They are, the domains are reverse-dutch auctioned. Buying a .dev domain today is like ~$10000, it'll be $12 in 2 weeks. Edit: Normal dutch, not reverse.
    - ulucs 8y ago
      > reverse-dutch auction Why? Even if it's "cute", it serves no other purpose than racking up prices and keeping buyers second-guessing themselves. Just run a normal Dutch or a second-price auction.
CUViper 8y ago
Some computer company gets to have apple.com, the car company does not have nissan.com, etc. etc.
- djsumdog 8y ago
  I'm really glad the Nissan case went the way it did. It was the guy's family name after all, as well as a word in Hebrew.
- jakejarvis 8y ago
  For those who haven’t heard about it, the nissan.com fiasco was a crazy yet fascinating story: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissan_Motors_vs._Nissan_Computer https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissan_Motors_vs._Nissan_Com...
morpheuskafka 8y ago
First come, first served. Just like real estate. It's not a trademark or anything.
- OedipusRex 8y ago
  Except it's not, Google has price ranges for registration dates. So if you wanted to registered today (Feb 19th) that's gonna cost you $11,500, but if you want to wait until it's free, that's 10 days from now. https://domains.google/tld/dev/ https://domains.google/tld/dev/
  - joemi 8y ago
    That's still first come first served.
    - strunz 8y ago
      No it isn't. It's first come with tons of money served.
      - joemi 8y ago
        At what dollar value does something for sale to the general public cease being first come first serve?
zavi 8y ago
You can buy it from Salesforce if you like it.
TheDong 8y ago
> There is one thing that annoys me about generic TLDs like .dev, .website, .cloud, .network And this doesn't annoy you about '.com' or '.org'? 'pets.com' is owned by petsmart, and they're sure not the only pet store. Practically every generic sounding '.com' has been taken and has the "issue" you cite. 'x.org' was registered in the early 90s, and the Xorg foundation certainly isn't the only 'X' out there. It's a little too late to protest now, this problem has existed since the dawn of the domain name system.
austenallred 8y ago
If I own box.com can no one else sell boxes? It's just a namespace.
everdev 8y ago
Owning a category domain name is not a guarantee of success or market position. (ex. pets.com) Think of all the companies with domain names that do not reference their product category. (ex. google.com, amazon.com, etc.). It's not like they needed search.com or shopping.com to be successful.

stanleydrew 8y ago

What's your proposed alternative? That generic category names should be disallowed within a TLD? Or that some public or community-driven version of a for-profit service should control the generic names?

ianai 8y ago
Probably the former as it doesn’t require as much aggrandizement. I wonder whether a different approach would work. Instead of basing TLD name spacing on nebulous terms (com,net,org,io,edu,etc) create a naming system that better reflects the real world. The abstracted terms lead to clashing. So addressing actually reflects physical addressing. There’s only ever going to be one company at Apple’s corporate address. Not sure how it’d work. Edit-the tech to do this via gps even exists today.
- baud147258 8y ago
  So there would an .apple tld, with address like dev.apple, buy.apple and so on?
  - CydeWeys 8y ago
    Indeed there is a .apple TLD: https://icannwiki.org/.apple https://icannwiki.org/.apple I haven't seen any uses of it in the wild though.
    - mises 8y ago
      https://experience.apple/ipad-pro/ https://experience.apple/ipad-pro/ https://share.newsroom.apple/ https://share.newsroom.apple/ For future reference, search Google for "site:*.dev"
- icebraining 8y ago
  The irrelevance of physical location is one of the advantages of the Internet; adding that to addresses just to provide an unique key seems absurd. Would a company have to change all their addresses if they move their headquarters? What if the country's street system changes? And what about individuals? I don't see a need to change the current system, but I'd rather move to random strings than tying them to some irrelevant and mutable piece of data.
- TheDong 8y ago
  We could just give everyone who wants a domain a UUID. My site could be 'uuid://09953e01-8164-4e40-8504-ed5507b50b03'. This seems to solve all of your complaints. No clashing, reflects the real world (names are all meaningless is reality, and physical locations are nebulous). > There’s only ever going to be one company at Apple’s corporate address. On the other hand, there are corporate addresses that have many companies, and many domains, and many distinct technical departments with different needs. What you're missing here is that domain names are meant to be easy to remember. That is their only goal. They were created so people didn't have to memorize ipv4 addresses. Proposing that we use corporate addresses or gps coordinates is absolutely unrealistic and against the spirit of the domain name system in the first place.
  - fwip 8y ago
    Go checkout Beaker Browser (using dat) or IPFS.
  - marksomnian 8y ago
    > They were created so people didn't have to memorize ipv4 addresses New problem: memorising a UUID is even harder than memorising an IP address. Someone will eventually invent a DNS for the UUID-space, and we'll have this problem all over again.
  - WorldMaker 8y ago
    If anyone actually wants to test this: IPv6 is already a modified version of this UUID plan. The designers were even kind enough in designing IPv6 to provide some nice memory shortcuts over UUID in the IPv6 address style, such as :: to fill runs of zeroes. It might~ be fun to see how much of the web you can explore just memorizing IPv6 addresses rather than using DNS.
    - TheDong 8y ago
      I know we're both just joking, but unfortunately due to SNI headers and load balancers, memorizing ipv6 addresses doesn't necessarily get you the right site. The DNS system has also managed to make ip addresses less stable over time.
derefr 8y ago
Maybe names that have obvious “generic” squatter value—i.e. names that (at the time of their attempted purchase) describe entire verticals, rather than uniquely identifying a business—should be put up for auction rather than being first-come-first-served. (That would also include names that describe a vertical that someone tried to trademark into being the name of a business anyway: pets.com and the like. If that trademark isn’t already well known, then this is just an attempt to end-run the auction system, rather than a valid claim.) Given that TLDs can decide their own allocation policies, I’m surprised none of them have tried this yet.
- Klathmon 8y ago
  Well the .dev domains are going up in a "dutch auction" style. The price starts off at an insane $11,500 per domain, and then slowly over the course of 2 weeks goes down to $12 per domain, first come first serve. It's a pretty good solution in my opinion to the problem of how to "fairly" distribute domain names. I want to pick up a few, but I'm going to wait until they are down to the lowest tier as i'm pretty sure nobody is going to pay even $100 for them. And if they do, well then they probably want it more than I do!
  - everdev 8y ago
    > The price starts off at an insane $11,500 per domain It's only insane if no one wants to pay that much. I bet tons of companies are willing to pay that for premium .dev domains.
- joshuamorton 8y ago
  They are, the domains are reverse-dutch auctioned. Buying a .dev domain today is like ~$10000, it'll be $12 in 2 weeks. Edit: Normal dutch, not reverse.
  - ulucs 8y ago
    > reverse-dutch auction Why? Even if it's "cute", it serves no other purpose than racking up prices and keeping buyers second-guessing themselves. Just run a normal Dutch or a second-price auction.

CUViper 8y ago

Some computer company gets to have apple.com, the car company does not have nissan.com, etc. etc.

djsumdog 8y ago
I'm really glad the Nissan case went the way it did. It was the guy's family name after all, as well as a word in Hebrew.
jakejarvis 8y ago
For those who haven’t heard about it, the nissan.com fiasco was a crazy yet fascinating story: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissan_Motors_vs._Nissan_Computer https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissan_Motors_vs._Nissan_Com...

morpheuskafka 8y ago

First come, first served. Just like real estate. It's not a trademark or anything.

OedipusRex 8y ago
Except it's not, Google has price ranges for registration dates. So if you wanted to registered today (Feb 19th) that's gonna cost you $11,500, but if you want to wait until it's free, that's 10 days from now. https://domains.google/tld/dev/ https://domains.google/tld/dev/
- joemi 8y ago
  That's still first come first served.
  - strunz 8y ago
    No it isn't. It's first come with tons of money served.
    - joemi 8y ago
      At what dollar value does something for sale to the general public cease being first come first serve?

zavi 8y ago

You can buy it from Salesforce if you like it.

TheDong 8y ago

> There is one thing that annoys me about generic TLDs like .dev, .website, .cloud, .network And this doesn't annoy you about '.com' or '.org'? 'pets.com' is owned by petsmart, and they're sure not the only pet store. Practically every generic sounding '.com' has been taken and has the "issue" you cite. 'x.org' was registered in the early 90s, and the Xorg foundation certainly isn't the only 'X' out there. It's a little too late to protest now, this problem has existed since the dawn of the domain name system.

austenallred 8y ago

If I own box.com can no one else sell boxes? It's just a namespace.

everdev 8y ago

Owning a category domain name is not a guarantee of success or market position. (ex. pets.com) Think of all the companies with domain names that do not reference their product category. (ex. google.com, amazon.com, etc.). It's not like they needed search.com or shopping.com to be successful.