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I personally blame ICANN more than the corporations here. No individual entity -- person, place or corporation -- needs a TLD. They're TLDs, they're for giant

I personally blame ICANN more than the corporations here. No individual entity -- person, place or corporation -- needs a TLD. They're TLDs, they're for giant collections of people, places and things. But once ICANN says, "Hey, would you like to buy <.YOURCOMPANY>? It'd be a shame if someone else did.", most any company is going to say, "Goddammit, fine", and then once you've spent the money on it, you might as well start using it, with store.YOURCOMPANY and about.YOURCOMPANY and mail.YOURCOMPANY, and now the conventions of hierarchical domains and the very notion of URLs is meaningless. I do blame all of us webdevs for getting cutesy with with making the TLD part of your company/domain name.

K0SM0S 7y ago
> “No individual entity -- person, place or corporation -- needs a TLD. They're TLDs, they're for giant collections of people, places and things.” I would say it's either no one or everyone — I personally wouldn't mind if we could all get a tld and link that to a personal public IPv6 range and simple enough software to administer it. I think we should all be entitled to get that over internet, it belongs to all of us as a system.
CydeWeys 7y ago
There are some compelling use cases for .brand TLDs, especially when a given brand is a large company that has lots of different websites. Take Barclays for example. They're a bank, so they're obviously especially sensitive to security issues, and they run a bunch of different websites. Just using websites of the form barclaysfoo.co.uk is obviously unsafe, because it's rife with phishing opportunities since you're training customers to accept these kinds of domains and then some phisher goes out and registers barclaysblah.co.uk and users don't think twice about entering their credentials there. Subdomains off barclays.co.uk are also not great, because cookies can be shared up to the domain level (intentionally or accidentally), and you don't want any risk of your potentially less secure marketing websites being compromised through CRSF or something and leaking access to sensitive login cookies on the actual bank's website. So the best solution here really is to get and use the .barclays TLD. That way, there's no possible cookie/session-sharing security exploits since every website is truly a different domain, and only Barclays itself can register .barclays domains so customers can have trust when they see a .barclays domain that it is actually the bank they're dealing with. Additionally, there's fun security things you can do at the TLD level, like globally applying HSTS preloading, that Barclays isn't doing (but should be) and that we are. And as for open TLDs, the existing generic namespaces like .com are heavily mined out and it's very expensive to acquire a decent domain name in them. So having all these other alternatives available now makes it much easier to get a decent domain for a reasonable cost, which is good for users (and bad for domainers, who I have no sympathy for). For example, I managed to pick up cyde.dev at the base registration cost, which I'll be putting some real content on at some point in the future. I think that's a pretty darn good, short, domain-specific domain name, and much better than anything I could've gotten on .com. cyde.com, by contrast, was registered way back in 2002, 4 years before I ended up going with my second choice of cydeweys.com. But I like cyde.dev better, so I'll be migrating stuff over to it. Full disclosure, I run .dev (but not .barclays!).
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- hobs 7y ago
  I'd agree with this except that they are not selling those TLDs for 10 bucks or 12 bucks - if they like the dictionary word for it or its short enough the .dev tld will charge you 720 dollars per year flat even though there's no pressure on the demand of a million different tlds. Just checked google for a word earlier this morning that was free and balked at how stupid this TLD land grab is, unless you own or manage one.
  - gist 7y ago
    Stupid? Why is it 'stupid'? Because to you it's of no interest or need or the cost is more than you would like to spend? So therefore it's 'stupid'?
    - anoncake 7y ago
      Because this is pure rent-seeking.
  - CydeWeys 7y ago
    If that domain didn't cost that much it's not like you'd be able to buy it for $12 now anyway. Instead, some domainer would've bought it milliseconds after launch, along with thousands of other speculative domains, and you'd be looking at a parking page right now with a listed sale price of 4-5 figures. Domainers play a VC-style game; one sale needs to cover the cost of lots of losers, and there are lots of big players out there with deep pockets and specific needs, so prices are high. Economically speaking, an auction is the best way to fairly and efficiently allocate scarce resources.
    - hobs 7y ago
      It's not scarce though, its completely artificial scarcity. Just because an auction means that people cant buy up every domain doesnt help anyone at the end of the system - it just ensures that domain name registrars capture the "value" instead of the scammers, the end user still gets a shitty deal. So yeah, its stupid, and the system has only been fixed enough to keep getting itself paid.
gist 7y ago
> No individual entity -- person, place or corporation -- needs a TLD. The 'nobody needs' standard? That is what and how we think of things? Does anyone 'need' beer or football or 100,000 other things? In a market system if you have money and if you have made money you can use that money to do things and buy things. It's not up to someone else (you, me or comments on HN) to determine that what we want to buy that we can legitimately buy is 'needed' or not. Football is of ZERO interest or need to me. But I do recognize that others get pleasure from watching it. > They're TLDs, they're for giant collections of people, places and things. According to who exactly?
- sedachv 7y ago
  According to RFC 920: "The domain system is a tree-structured global name space that has a few top level domains… While the initial domain name "ARPA" arises from the history of the development of this system and environment, in the future most of the top level names will be very general categories like "government", "education", or "commercial". The motivation is to provide an organization name that is free of undesirable semantics." https://tools.ietf.org/rfc/rfc920.txt https://tools.ietf.org/rfc/rfc920.txt
  - gist 7y ago
    From 1984 that is 36 years ago. And it's a RFC not the constitution or a law. After much discussion ICANN and parties decided to allow companies to own tld's. And they did.
- anoncake 7y ago
  > In a market system The DNS is an obvious natural monopoly.
sedachv 7y ago
ICANN selling corporate TLDs is something akin to the Library of Congress trying to sell Subject Headings. Not content with spamming everything else on the Internet, some people now want to spam root name servers.
FDSGSG 7y ago
Why do you people have such a weird emotional attachment to your concept of what TLDs should be? Like, who cares? and why? It's not like anyone is actually going to use these gTLDs anyway. ICANNs rent seeking scheme sucks, but beyond the rent seeking this is hardly a big deal.
- usrusr 7y ago
  I've seen the shitshow that speculative domain squatting .com had been about twenty years ago and I sure don't want to relive that experience on the root namespace. Particularly since ICANN has repeatedly shown that they would be terrible custodians of an "everyone" namespace.

K0SM0S 7y ago

> “No individual entity -- person, place or corporation -- needs a TLD. They're TLDs, they're for giant collections of people, places and things.” I would say it's either no one or everyone — I personally wouldn't mind if we could all get a tld and link that to a personal public IPv6 range and simple enough software to administer it. I think we should all be entitled to get that over internet, it belongs to all of us as a system.

CydeWeys 7y ago

There are some compelling use cases for .brand TLDs, especially when a given brand is a large company that has lots of different websites. Take Barclays for example. They're a bank, so they're obviously especially sensitive to security issues, and they run a bunch of different websites. Just using websites of the form barclaysfoo.co.uk is obviously unsafe, because it's rife with phishing opportunities since you're training customers to accept these kinds of domains and then some phisher goes out and registers barclaysblah.co.uk and users don't think twice about entering their credentials there. Subdomains off barclays.co.uk are also not great, because cookies can be shared up to the domain level (intentionally or accidentally), and you don't want any risk of your potentially less secure marketing websites being compromised through CRSF or something and leaking access to sensitive login cookies on the actual bank's website. So the best solution here really is to get and use the .barclays TLD. That way, there's no possible cookie/session-sharing security exploits since every website is truly a different domain, and only Barclays itself can register .barclays domains so customers can have trust when they see a .barclays domain that it is actually the bank they're dealing with. Additionally, there's fun security things you can do at the TLD level, like globally applying HSTS preloading, that Barclays isn't doing (but should be) and that we are. And as for open TLDs, the existing generic namespaces like .com are heavily mined out and it's very expensive to acquire a decent domain name in them. So having all these other alternatives available now makes it much easier to get a decent domain for a reasonable cost, which is good for users (and bad for domainers, who I have no sympathy for). For example, I managed to pick up cyde.dev at the base registration cost, which I'll be putting some real content on at some point in the future. I think that's a pretty darn good, short, domain-specific domain name, and much better than anything I could've gotten on .com. cyde.com, by contrast, was registered way back in 2002, 4 years before I ended up going with my second choice of cydeweys.com. But I like cyde.dev better, so I'll be migrating stuff over to it. Full disclosure, I run .dev (but not .barclays!).

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
hobs 7y ago
I'd agree with this except that they are not selling those TLDs for 10 bucks or 12 bucks - if they like the dictionary word for it or its short enough the .dev tld will charge you 720 dollars per year flat even though there's no pressure on the demand of a million different tlds. Just checked google for a word earlier this morning that was free and balked at how stupid this TLD land grab is, unless you own or manage one.
- gist 7y ago
  Stupid? Why is it 'stupid'? Because to you it's of no interest or need or the cost is more than you would like to spend? So therefore it's 'stupid'?
  - anoncake 7y ago
    Because this is pure rent-seeking.
- CydeWeys 7y ago
  If that domain didn't cost that much it's not like you'd be able to buy it for $12 now anyway. Instead, some domainer would've bought it milliseconds after launch, along with thousands of other speculative domains, and you'd be looking at a parking page right now with a listed sale price of 4-5 figures. Domainers play a VC-style game; one sale needs to cover the cost of lots of losers, and there are lots of big players out there with deep pockets and specific needs, so prices are high. Economically speaking, an auction is the best way to fairly and efficiently allocate scarce resources.
  - hobs 7y ago
    It's not scarce though, its completely artificial scarcity. Just because an auction means that people cant buy up every domain doesnt help anyone at the end of the system - it just ensures that domain name registrars capture the "value" instead of the scammers, the end user still gets a shitty deal. So yeah, its stupid, and the system has only been fixed enough to keep getting itself paid.

gist 7y ago

> No individual entity -- person, place or corporation -- needs a TLD. The 'nobody needs' standard? That is what and how we think of things? Does anyone 'need' beer or football or 100,000 other things? In a market system if you have money and if you have made money you can use that money to do things and buy things. It's not up to someone else (you, me or comments on HN) to determine that what we want to buy that we can legitimately buy is 'needed' or not. Football is of ZERO interest or need to me. But I do recognize that others get pleasure from watching it. > They're TLDs, they're for giant collections of people, places and things. According to who exactly?

sedachv 7y ago
According to RFC 920: "The domain system is a tree-structured global name space that has a few top level domains… While the initial domain name "ARPA" arises from the history of the development of this system and environment, in the future most of the top level names will be very general categories like "government", "education", or "commercial". The motivation is to provide an organization name that is free of undesirable semantics." https://tools.ietf.org/rfc/rfc920.txt https://tools.ietf.org/rfc/rfc920.txt
- gist 7y ago
  From 1984 that is 36 years ago. And it's a RFC not the constitution or a law. After much discussion ICANN and parties decided to allow companies to own tld's. And they did.
anoncake 7y ago
> In a market system The DNS is an obvious natural monopoly.

sedachv 7y ago

ICANN selling corporate TLDs is something akin to the Library of Congress trying to sell Subject Headings. Not content with spamming everything else on the Internet, some people now want to spam root name servers.

FDSGSG 7y ago

Why do you people have such a weird emotional attachment to your concept of what TLDs should be? Like, who cares? and why? It's not like anyone is actually going to use these gTLDs anyway. ICANNs rent seeking scheme sucks, but beyond the rent seeking this is hardly a big deal.

usrusr 7y ago
I've seen the shitshow that speculative domain squatting .com had been about twenty years ago and I sure don't want to relive that experience on the root namespace. Particularly since ICANN has repeatedly shown that they would be terrible custodians of an "everyone" namespace.