21 ms·

.tel, .xxx and .mobi are all pointless and idiotic

110 points by profitbaron 16y ago

phlux 16y ago
I can see a valid use for .xxx -- but .mobi is the lamest of them all. .mobi should have been .mbl or just .m To make the mobile TLD longer than allthe others, that is just plain stupid.
- iamdave 16y ago
  Honestly, I think the current format used by most m.website.tld makes the most sense. It immediately tells you you're going to a mobile site in the case that your screen cuts off the full URL. Too, it's pretty consistent when a lot of sites use subdomains to indicate you're going to a different portion of the same domain, i.e. a blog (blog.site.tld) or an estore (shop.site.tld) or even a 404 page (404.site.tld). 'm' should tell you then that you're on the mobile page of the same site, especially when we're now seeing so many domains that a .com can be a completely different, totally nonaffiliated group from the .net
  - tommorris 16y ago
    The only prominent site I've seen that does it a bit strangely is Wikipedia: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/ http://en.m.wikipedia.org/ Which makes sense, but I can never remember whether it is en.m.wikipedia.org or m.en.wikipedia.org (And the fact that the iPad goes by default to the Mobile version despite the fact that it's not appropriate for the size of the device.)
- derleth 16y ago
  > I can see a valid use for .xxx All I can see is a major hook on which some damn do-gooder will attempt to hang yet another censorship scheme by trying to force all 'pornographic' websites to only have .xxx domains, and by 'pornographic' I mean 'everything the do-gooder disagrees with'. We fought the CDA to the Supreme Court and won with the mix of justices we had then. I hope that if something similar happens again, that case is used as precedent and not toilet paper.
  - phlux 16y ago
    Just to extend the logic for which you are arguing against .xxx - do you then agree that security through obscurity is valid? I agree that there is risk in regulating 'distasteful' domains to .xxx which then results in blanket blocking is a bad thing, but doesnt that just mean that the core issue we have here is not .xxx or anything other than the fundamental issues that we already have? .xxx just makes it easier for regulators/high-horse 'do-gooders' to target whole swathes of content... that does not entirely negate the usefulness of the TLD though. Why not have TLDs at all? Why not just have global content tags?
    - derleth 16y ago
      > do you then agree that security through obscurity is valid? Not if obscurity is your only defense. I think obscurity of some forms, like using unusual port numbers, can be part of a defense-in-depth strategy to foil purely scripted attacks and save your resources a bit. > .xxx just makes it easier for regulators/high-horse 'do-gooders' to target whole swathes of content... And here we have it. It's a temptation I doubt they will be able to resist. Giving it to them that easily is just removing one more element of a defense-in-depth against censorship attempts. > Why not have TLDs at all? Why not just have global content tags? This is more of a technical issue, but my first reaction to doing everything via tagging is that spammers are going to spam: If you give them the opportunity to add tags to addresses you end up with the same scenario that lead Google to ignore keywords on websites.
      - tommorris 16y ago
        Depends how you constrain the tags. I mean, I hear this "people lie" thing, but when was the last time a brick-and-mortar business website you saw lied about where they are? What benefit does one have in saying your business is actually located in New York City rather than Miami. I don't see why the same wouldn't apply for porn. If I'm running a pay-for porno site offering premium woman-on-horse action, I'm not interested in, I dunno, gay guys turning up. The people you want turning up are the target audience because those guys are going to pay you money. If the cost for lying in the tag is sufficient (i.e. Google won't rank you as high), then you've got a motivation for telling the truth.
- sigzero 16y ago
  What's the valid use? It isn't as if all the porn sites are going to give up their current domains and move into .xxx right? So what is the point? You can't force them to move. Who would be the judge on what needs to move into .xxx even if they could force it? No, it was stupid.
citricsquid 16y ago
.mobi is from way before we had smart phones, so the difference between mobile and desktop web did exist then.
- carussell 16y ago
  Are you suggesting it doesn't exist anymore?
  - younata 16y ago
    ... yes.
  - jawee 16y ago
    The gap is way shrinking. The mobile web originally meant browsers that barely supported HTML (does WAP ring a bell?), picture support was sketchy, and bandwidth was a major concern as connections were very slow. Now the majority of mobile use that use it more than once in a blue moon have the same rendering engines as most desktops on connections that rival (in my case surpass) what we have available through telcom ISPs. Screen sizes are really the only difference oftentimes. Indeed, even the plug-in landscape is similar as many smartphones over Flash plug-ins and so forth.
    - carussell 16y ago
      It's not about whether the technologies are supported. It's about the difference between what you get when you're identified as browsing on a mobile device versus anything else.
orangecat 16y ago
If I were an American, I’d now be saying something like “ICANN have jumped the shark” "has". Although the British pluralization actually does make more sense.
- derleth 16y ago
  > Although the British pluralization actually does make more sense. Not really: One organization is one thing, logically speaking. But it was amusing of him to get that wrong while explicitly attempting to sound American.
  - chc 16y ago
    It gets really confusing, though. For example, "The Jets is doing really well this season," "The Monkees was awesome if somewhat cheesy." One organization is one thing, logically speaking, and teams and bands are just as much organizations as are corporations.
    - coderdude 16y ago
      The reason it sounds wrong the way you're saying it is because the team and band you listed have pluralized names.
      - chc 16y ago
        Yes, I'm well aware of that. The point is that "The Jets" names an organization just as much as "ICANN" does. Americans do not apply the "groups are singular" rule evenly. British usage is actually more logical and consistent IMO.
        coderdude 16y ago
        Americans go by what makes sense linguistically rather than the blanket usage of 'have' and 'are'. British usage is more consistent (usage-wise) but half the time it sounds wrong because "Google have employees" doesn't make sense by other rules of English.
cabalamat 16y ago
> I’ve heard that some of the Wikileaks and Pirate Bay crowd are working on a distributed alternative to DNS. I suspect that this will be the ultimate solution to this sort of nonsense.
- huhtenberg 16y ago
  It could also open the floodgates of phishing. Decentralized trust is one hell of a problem.
  - bergie 16y ago
    Then you just build the trust on SSL certificates instead of DNS
    - ashconnor 16y ago
      Destroying the de-centralized part in the process.
- aeden 16y ago
  It won't be a solution, simply an alternative.
kjksf 16y ago
I think that this misses forest for the trees. There should be no restrictions on the domain names at all. We only have the arbitrary segmentation into m.n form (where n is a limited set of (org, com etc.)) for technical reasons. Preferably, there should be no such restrictions at all. Or the n part should be an infinite set. But I don't see why people are partisan about restricting the available namespace.
- duskwuff 16y ago
  There is one theoretical advantage to having multiple TLDs: bad policies on the part of one registry don't affect all domains. Of course, since this only gives you effectively two choices right now (Verisign = com/net and Afilias = org/info), it's not a particularly good reason.
- DanI-S 16y ago
  Definitely. Current domain names have been around so long they seem natural, but they're pretty arbitrary given the way the web is used today. Honestly, how often do you type in a full domain anyway? I generally type the first couple of letters into Chrome's address bar.
- asdfaoeu 16y ago
  > But I don't see why people are partisan about restricting the available namespace. Duplication of data. Go to any major site and you'll see it has been registered as the same site in almost all of the other tlds or the rest of the domains are run by domain squatters.
- po 16y ago
  We already had a de-facto infinite set... it was the m part. We could either buy up common variations of, or ignore the n part. Now it is becoming obvious that ICANN views n as the new m for one of two reasons: money or stupidity. I'm still not sure it can't be both. If I'm a major corporation, do I now have to buy up my .n tld? Cannon did. Will IBM have to buy .ibm? Will apple have to buy .apple?
- tuhin 16y ago
  I believe that would be fine if everyone was as tech savvy as you and I. Unfortunately I still know of people who go to a site in the following way: 1) Type www.gooogle.com (not google, google.com or the browser search) 2)Type facebook.com in google search bar at google.com 3) go to facebook.com Now add to it facebook.mobi, fb.me, facebook.xxx (that is a nice idea thought :P) and how can we expect the average user to understand that all these point to the same DNS? DNS? What the hell is a DNS? I just want to see last night's party pics on Facebook
kragen 16y ago
> Politically, we should push for an actual democratic version of ICANN, and get a bunch of wise Unix neckbeard types to join and require all TLDs to get a supermajority vote of ICANN or a future counterpart to ICANN. Karl Auerbach was the wise Unix neckbeard type who was on ICANN's board for a while. You can read about his efforts to create ICANN transparency: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Auerbach http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Auerbach
duskwuff 16y ago
I'd go a step further and suggest that all of the new gTLDs are pointless and idiotic: - .aero: if IATA airport codes were all registered domains here, it might be useful, but they aren't, so it isn't. - .asia: asia is definitely a country </sarcasm> - .biz: sufficiently stupid that SpamAssassin has a rule for it - .cat: meow? seriously, I've only seen this used for vanity joke domains - .coop: there isn't a .llc, why is this any different? - .info: happy fun SEO land - .jobs: pity they won't take my registration for Blow, Inc. - .mobi: as noted - .museum: 1138 registered domains in 10 years is a sign of true irrelevance - .name: personal names are hardly unique identifiers - .pro: stupid hierarchy makes this one even more useless than you'd think - .tel: as noted - .travel: because .aero just wasn't enough - .xxx: as noted Perhaps I'm just not seeing the possibilities, but I suspect that there's no future for any of the gTLDs beyond com/net/org, and possibly a few of the up-and-coming IDN gTLDs. The future of domain names is really in better unique names, not a more complex hierarchy.
- light3 16y ago
  Hey come on there has to be uses, such as lol.cat(taken), malay.asia(taken), steve.jobs(not taken).
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
- jarin 16y ago
  I agree that pretty much all of those are dumb, but I still think there should be a .app TLD, if only because there are so many perfectly good .com names just sitting on parking pages (and I would totally use .app domains). Plus it just rolls off the tongue and there's no weird confusion on the spelling.
  - laktek 16y ago
    I too think .app would be a good fit as a gTLD, compared to dumb gTLDs exist today..
robryan 16y ago
No matter how many are added you will still have to assume that people who are after a site and actually type in a domain name will pick the .com, so no matter how many alternatives you own you won't get that traffic. The exception of course is when you can build it into your website name like .io and .ly. Also browsers are moving away from domain names so being first on Google (just as hard if someone prominent is already on the .com you want) will be more important.
- stoney 16y ago
  If I'm after a UK or Australian company I'm as likely to try .co.uk or .com.au first - but only because I've lived in both of those places so I'm familiar with the extensions.
  - robryan 16y ago
    That's true, at least with .com.au you have to have a registered business so you will usually get the company you are after.
delineal 16y ago
None of it is idiotic. It is just different than before. This creates greater competition in the registrar market which will keep domain prices down. It also dilutes the value of any particular domain name, which is a Good Thing (tm). I would be very happy to see the whole domaining business model disappear. The proliferation of new domains is one of the issues I'm grappling with in my work on delineal.com.
- rlpb 16y ago
  It doesn't do this at all. It just shifts the crowded .com space into the root space, causes more confusion for everyone, and eliminates the possibility of any future expansion. Once a name is allocated, it's gone forever - you can't just demand it back or change the rules.
  - delineal 16y ago
    It doesn't move anything onto the root space, AFAIK. Do you have a link supporting that assertion? My understanding is that this just creates more TLDs under which domains can be registered. There is no more confusion created. (Almost) all existing TLDs have domains in them that should not be there based on the original "purpose" of the TLDs. The .com domain only ever made sense in the context of a single language and a single country. It's only crowded because it is one of the first ones that anyone could register in. If all the TLDs that exist today existed at the beginning, the landscape would be very different. The notion that "once a name is allocated, it's gone forever" is no different than today. More TLDs provide more opportunities for similarly named companies or organizations to have some form of their name. It "prevents" large companies from dominating all forms of a name.
InclinedPlane 16y ago
Most new TLDs have been pointless and idiotic. Blame ICANN.
chronomex 16y ago
I have a .tel. It's almost useless--you get to publish DNS records through the registrar's mickey-mouse PHP thing, and you can only really push TXT and NAPTR and MX records. The only reason I bought it is because I am a member of an informal organization whose name is "Shadytel", so an @shady.tel address looked real spiffy at the time.
- derleth 16y ago
  > Shadytel is now offering reduced comfort noise as a tariffed service. (from the Twitter feed: https://twitter.com/#!/shadytel/status/47150260157562880 https://twitter.com/#!/shadytel/status/47150260157562880 ) I'm aware I can pay for that with my Diner's Club, but will you accept Krugerrands if I can get them on the noon autogyro?
bromley 16y ago
"little Johnny can't visit any website where the domain component of the URL ends in the string “.xxx”, in which case all little Johnny has to do is go to a web-based nslookup tool, type in the domain he wants to look at, and then replace the domain with that IP address." Sounds like a good opportunity for nslookup tools to justify requiring a credit-card payment for certain types of lookup.
tuhin 16y ago
The joke was fine till .me, .co and .tv but .cat, .tel and .xxx? That sure is bound to be of use to nobody but the ones selling the domain. The point where he questions if he is desktop or mobile, is actually very critical. The web is one. Especially with new ways of designing and developing a site including things like media queries make the entire point of a .mobi appear like a joke to me.
- Macha 16y ago
  .tv is for Tevula. And .me is another country's abbreviation (Montenegro I believe). Just because they're being abused doesn't mean they're a joke.
  - tuhin 16y ago
    I actually know that! I own two .me domains and was about to buy .tv domain. Also the .tv domain was launched with high hopes of TV Networks buying enough and paying enough to support the country's economy. Of course that did not happen. Looks like they were made with the purpose of being abused.
- ez77 16y ago
  Searching for 'site:cat' in Google yields over 81M results, 11M more than 'site:me'. As a sample of real use, check out the site of the Catalan Government: http://www.gencat.cat/ http://www.gencat.cat/.
- zppx 16y ago
  .cat is for Catalunya, and only open for sites in Catalan. .co is for Colombia Google uses both: http://www.google.cat/ http://www.google.cat/ (in Catalan) http://www.google.com.co/ http://www.google.com.co/ (in Spanish)
cookiecaper 16y ago
He's missing the point on .xxx. No person with any vague understanding of the internet thinks that they can block pornography entirely from a person interested in getting to it. It's not that hard to get around filters because porn is everywhere online, but it can still be useful to filter it, even though a determined individual can obviously bypass your block. Here's why: 1. First and foremost, filtration software isn't just about adversarial blocking. It can stop your grandma from getting tricked into going lemonparty.org. This is a big one. 2. Children looking for porn without permission are often under non-ideal constraints, like a time limit before someone else comes home. If you can get fairly good coverage, the kid will have that much less time, and many kids aren't going to invest in figuring out how to bypass it; they'd just as soon go to their room and fap there, or go to a friend's house where there is unmonitored access. 3. Filtration can be used to demonstrate a good-faith effort to keep your network and environment safe (at a library or net cafe, for instance). Same principles as number two here: if it's difficult enough and the user is under time constraints, they'll just wait until later. There are other good reasons, but that should suffice. .xxx isn't about keeping a sophisticated, determined opponent out, and that's rarely successful no matter what measures you take. The internet is always going to have porn and there shouldn't be any enforcement forcing adult content onto xxx. However, if xxx sees wide adoption, and the xxx sites move off of com (redirect), that's a big weight off the shoulders of blacklist and filtration vendors. To be able to block a whole huge namespace like that, where xxx is now hosting 30% or some other significant number of the new adult content that would have been on com if not for the xxx TLD, that's a big efficiency gain, even if you still have to filter com.
- dustingetz 16y ago
  > if xxx sees wide adoption Off the top of my head, I (and I think also the author) don't see any particular reason to think that .xxx will see wide adoption.
  - cookiecaper 16y ago
    The author indicates that there's already a large queue of pre-orders. I think xxx will achieve adoption by pornographers that want social acceptance. Basically, any pornographer that operates in the real world as an "adult media company", "glamor photography", etc. A xxx domain will demonstrate a willingness to allow your content to be easily filtered, which is important for porn companies because as much as adults love pornography, generally, they want some control over its introduction and availability to their children. xxx-exclusive hosted content will be seen as a good faith effort to keep parents in control. I think that eventually any porn company that wants social tolerance will be on xxx because it will be better for their image. Topsites and other aggregators will probably stay on com as they don't really care and it doesn't effect their commissions and/or ad money.
mkramlich 16y ago
I also think TLD's have jumped the shark. Let's abolish .com/.org/etc and force everybody to live in a more unified domain name space, so we're left with (at best), addresses like: www.google, graph.facebook, api.cnn, etc. The suffixes have been abused so much they are no longer reliable (see bit.ly that wildly popular Libyan website -- wait, what?), and even if there are people camping on foo.com's, we also have the problem where say foo.com and foo.net and foo.ly are all unrelated to one another and run by different people. Yes, legacy code, I understand, pain, etc. More of an idealistic rant. The increasing inelegance and hypocrisy and over-complexity of TLD's are getting to me just like the OA's author.
- d0mine 16y ago
  The same effect [as abolishing all TLDs] could be achieved in a backward compatible way by allowing arbitrary TLDs i.e., google, facebook, cnn would be TLDs in www.google, graph.facebook, api.cnn addresses.
  - vacri 16y ago
    Doesn't this reduce our available address space? What about all the sites that currently have three different entities at their .com, .net and .org addresses? What happens to ubuntu.com and ubuntu.org, two different groups? Where we are now, getting rid of TLDs would cause immense unnecessary conflict.
    - d0mine 16y ago
      "allowing" means that .ubuntu may exist in addition to ubuntu.tld .ubuntu is a TLD itself (or it could be thought of as having an empty tld)
- rlpb 16y ago
  This makes it impossible to trust certain namespaces. If I go to a .gov or .gov.uk, for example, I know it's the official site. Where the hierarchical system is used (eg. .ac.uk and presumably .edu) it is still very useful. Getting rid of the suffixes eliminates this and brings us down to the free-for-all level of the .com for all sites.
freejack 16y ago
There are lots of stupid startups. Why would the ones behind these top-level domains be any different? ICANN's role isn't to pick the winners, its to manage the overall framework. Perhaps .sex will succeed where .xx fails. Or not. But you can't blame ICANN for failed .tld business models anymore than you can blame YC for funding failed startup business models. Its just part of the landscape. Now stop ranting about it and go do something productive. ;-)
- tommorris 16y ago
  I'm not blaming ICANN for failed business models. I'm blaming ICANN for turning what ought to be a matter of public interest (i.e. the governance of the Internet) and turning it into a situation where you can turn up with a half-baked idea and a big pile of cash and be able to start churning out new domain names.
Jach 16y ago
When there's an effective way to take the domains of squatters away from them, I'll be fine with just .com, .net, .org. Or screw the dots and just have "google". (I think that may be where it's going, considering Chrome tries to hide the http and www isn't needed in many cases.)

110 points by profitbaron 16y ago

phlux 16y ago

I can see a valid use for .xxx -- but .mobi is the lamest of them all. .mobi should have been .mbl or just .m To make the mobile TLD longer than allthe others, that is just plain stupid.

iamdave 16y ago
Honestly, I think the current format used by most m.website.tld makes the most sense. It immediately tells you you're going to a mobile site in the case that your screen cuts off the full URL. Too, it's pretty consistent when a lot of sites use subdomains to indicate you're going to a different portion of the same domain, i.e. a blog (blog.site.tld) or an estore (shop.site.tld) or even a 404 page (404.site.tld). 'm' should tell you then that you're on the mobile page of the same site, especially when we're now seeing so many domains that a .com can be a completely different, totally nonaffiliated group from the .net
- tommorris 16y ago
  The only prominent site I've seen that does it a bit strangely is Wikipedia: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/ http://en.m.wikipedia.org/ Which makes sense, but I can never remember whether it is en.m.wikipedia.org or m.en.wikipedia.org (And the fact that the iPad goes by default to the Mobile version despite the fact that it's not appropriate for the size of the device.)
derleth 16y ago
> I can see a valid use for .xxx All I can see is a major hook on which some damn do-gooder will attempt to hang yet another censorship scheme by trying to force all 'pornographic' websites to only have .xxx domains, and by 'pornographic' I mean 'everything the do-gooder disagrees with'. We fought the CDA to the Supreme Court and won with the mix of justices we had then. I hope that if something similar happens again, that case is used as precedent and not toilet paper.
- phlux 16y ago
  Just to extend the logic for which you are arguing against .xxx - do you then agree that security through obscurity is valid? I agree that there is risk in regulating 'distasteful' domains to .xxx which then results in blanket blocking is a bad thing, but doesnt that just mean that the core issue we have here is not .xxx or anything other than the fundamental issues that we already have? .xxx just makes it easier for regulators/high-horse 'do-gooders' to target whole swathes of content... that does not entirely negate the usefulness of the TLD though. Why not have TLDs at all? Why not just have global content tags?
  - derleth 16y ago
    > do you then agree that security through obscurity is valid? Not if obscurity is your only defense. I think obscurity of some forms, like using unusual port numbers, can be part of a defense-in-depth strategy to foil purely scripted attacks and save your resources a bit. > .xxx just makes it easier for regulators/high-horse 'do-gooders' to target whole swathes of content... And here we have it. It's a temptation I doubt they will be able to resist. Giving it to them that easily is just removing one more element of a defense-in-depth against censorship attempts. > Why not have TLDs at all? Why not just have global content tags? This is more of a technical issue, but my first reaction to doing everything via tagging is that spammers are going to spam: If you give them the opportunity to add tags to addresses you end up with the same scenario that lead Google to ignore keywords on websites.
    - tommorris 16y ago
      Depends how you constrain the tags. I mean, I hear this "people lie" thing, but when was the last time a brick-and-mortar business website you saw lied about where they are? What benefit does one have in saying your business is actually located in New York City rather than Miami. I don't see why the same wouldn't apply for porn. If I'm running a pay-for porno site offering premium woman-on-horse action, I'm not interested in, I dunno, gay guys turning up. The people you want turning up are the target audience because those guys are going to pay you money. If the cost for lying in the tag is sufficient (i.e. Google won't rank you as high), then you've got a motivation for telling the truth.
sigzero 16y ago
What's the valid use? It isn't as if all the porn sites are going to give up their current domains and move into .xxx right? So what is the point? You can't force them to move. Who would be the judge on what needs to move into .xxx even if they could force it? No, it was stupid.

citricsquid 16y ago

.mobi is from way before we had smart phones, so the difference between mobile and desktop web did exist then.

carussell 16y ago
Are you suggesting it doesn't exist anymore?
- younata 16y ago
  ... yes.
- jawee 16y ago
  The gap is way shrinking. The mobile web originally meant browsers that barely supported HTML (does WAP ring a bell?), picture support was sketchy, and bandwidth was a major concern as connections were very slow. Now the majority of mobile use that use it more than once in a blue moon have the same rendering engines as most desktops on connections that rival (in my case surpass) what we have available through telcom ISPs. Screen sizes are really the only difference oftentimes. Indeed, even the plug-in landscape is similar as many smartphones over Flash plug-ins and so forth.
  - carussell 16y ago
    It's not about whether the technologies are supported. It's about the difference between what you get when you're identified as browsing on a mobile device versus anything else.

orangecat 16y ago

If I were an American, I’d now be saying something like “ICANN have jumped the shark” "has". Although the British pluralization actually does make more sense.

derleth 16y ago
> Although the British pluralization actually does make more sense. Not really: One organization is one thing, logically speaking. But it was amusing of him to get that wrong while explicitly attempting to sound American.
- chc 16y ago
  It gets really confusing, though. For example, "The Jets is doing really well this season," "The Monkees was awesome if somewhat cheesy." One organization is one thing, logically speaking, and teams and bands are just as much organizations as are corporations.
  - coderdude 16y ago
    The reason it sounds wrong the way you're saying it is because the team and band you listed have pluralized names.
    - chc 16y ago
      Yes, I'm well aware of that. The point is that "The Jets" names an organization just as much as "ICANN" does. Americans do not apply the "groups are singular" rule evenly. British usage is actually more logical and consistent IMO.
      - coderdude 16y ago
        Americans go by what makes sense linguistically rather than the blanket usage of 'have' and 'are'. British usage is more consistent (usage-wise) but half the time it sounds wrong because "Google have employees" doesn't make sense by other rules of English.

cabalamat 16y ago

> I’ve heard that some of the Wikileaks and Pirate Bay crowd are working on a distributed alternative to DNS. I suspect that this will be the ultimate solution to this sort of nonsense.

huhtenberg 16y ago
It could also open the floodgates of phishing. Decentralized trust is one hell of a problem.
- bergie 16y ago
  Then you just build the trust on SSL certificates instead of DNS
  - ashconnor 16y ago
    Destroying the de-centralized part in the process.
aeden 16y ago
It won't be a solution, simply an alternative.

kjksf 16y ago

I think that this misses forest for the trees. There should be no restrictions on the domain names at all. We only have the arbitrary segmentation into m.n form (where n is a limited set of (org, com etc.)) for technical reasons. Preferably, there should be no such restrictions at all. Or the n part should be an infinite set. But I don't see why people are partisan about restricting the available namespace.

duskwuff 16y ago
There is one theoretical advantage to having multiple TLDs: bad policies on the part of one registry don't affect all domains. Of course, since this only gives you effectively two choices right now (Verisign = com/net and Afilias = org/info), it's not a particularly good reason.
DanI-S 16y ago
Definitely. Current domain names have been around so long they seem natural, but they're pretty arbitrary given the way the web is used today. Honestly, how often do you type in a full domain anyway? I generally type the first couple of letters into Chrome's address bar.
asdfaoeu 16y ago
> But I don't see why people are partisan about restricting the available namespace. Duplication of data. Go to any major site and you'll see it has been registered as the same site in almost all of the other tlds or the rest of the domains are run by domain squatters.
po 16y ago
We already had a de-facto infinite set... it was the m part. We could either buy up common variations of, or ignore the n part. Now it is becoming obvious that ICANN views n as the new m for one of two reasons: money or stupidity. I'm still not sure it can't be both. If I'm a major corporation, do I now have to buy up my .n tld? Cannon did. Will IBM have to buy .ibm? Will apple have to buy .apple?
tuhin 16y ago
I believe that would be fine if everyone was as tech savvy as you and I. Unfortunately I still know of people who go to a site in the following way: 1) Type www.gooogle.com (not google, google.com or the browser search) 2)Type facebook.com in google search bar at google.com 3) go to facebook.com Now add to it facebook.mobi, fb.me, facebook.xxx (that is a nice idea thought :P) and how can we expect the average user to understand that all these point to the same DNS? DNS? What the hell is a DNS? I just want to see last night's party pics on Facebook

kragen 16y ago

> Politically, we should push for an actual democratic version of ICANN, and get a bunch of wise Unix neckbeard types to join and require all TLDs to get a supermajority vote of ICANN or a future counterpart to ICANN. Karl Auerbach was the wise Unix neckbeard type who was on ICANN's board for a while. You can read about his efforts to create ICANN transparency: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Auerbach http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Auerbach

duskwuff 16y ago

I'd go a step further and suggest that all of the new gTLDs are pointless and idiotic: - .aero: if IATA airport codes were all registered domains here, it might be useful, but they aren't, so it isn't. - .asia: asia is definitely a country </sarcasm> - .biz: sufficiently stupid that SpamAssassin has a rule for it - .cat: meow? seriously, I've only seen this used for vanity joke domains - .coop: there isn't a .llc, why is this any different? - .info: happy fun SEO land - .jobs: pity they won't take my registration for Blow, Inc. - .mobi: as noted - .museum: 1138 registered domains in 10 years is a sign of true irrelevance - .name: personal names are hardly unique identifiers - .pro: stupid hierarchy makes this one even more useless than you'd think - .tel: as noted - .travel: because .aero just wasn't enough - .xxx: as noted Perhaps I'm just not seeing the possibilities, but I suspect that there's no future for any of the gTLDs beyond com/net/org, and possibly a few of the up-and-coming IDN gTLDs. The future of domain names is really in better unique names, not a more complex hierarchy.

light3 16y ago
Hey come on there has to be uses, such as lol.cat(taken), malay.asia(taken), steve.jobs(not taken).
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
jarin 16y ago
I agree that pretty much all of those are dumb, but I still think there should be a .app TLD, if only because there are so many perfectly good .com names just sitting on parking pages (and I would totally use .app domains). Plus it just rolls off the tongue and there's no weird confusion on the spelling.
- laktek 16y ago
  I too think .app would be a good fit as a gTLD, compared to dumb gTLDs exist today..

robryan 16y ago

No matter how many are added you will still have to assume that people who are after a site and actually type in a domain name will pick the .com, so no matter how many alternatives you own you won't get that traffic. The exception of course is when you can build it into your website name like .io and .ly. Also browsers are moving away from domain names so being first on Google (just as hard if someone prominent is already on the .com you want) will be more important.

stoney 16y ago
If I'm after a UK or Australian company I'm as likely to try .co.uk or .com.au first - but only because I've lived in both of those places so I'm familiar with the extensions.
- robryan 16y ago
  That's true, at least with .com.au you have to have a registered business so you will usually get the company you are after.

delineal 16y ago

None of it is idiotic. It is just different than before. This creates greater competition in the registrar market which will keep domain prices down. It also dilutes the value of any particular domain name, which is a Good Thing (tm). I would be very happy to see the whole domaining business model disappear. The proliferation of new domains is one of the issues I'm grappling with in my work on delineal.com.

rlpb 16y ago
It doesn't do this at all. It just shifts the crowded .com space into the root space, causes more confusion for everyone, and eliminates the possibility of any future expansion. Once a name is allocated, it's gone forever - you can't just demand it back or change the rules.
- delineal 16y ago
  It doesn't move anything onto the root space, AFAIK. Do you have a link supporting that assertion? My understanding is that this just creates more TLDs under which domains can be registered. There is no more confusion created. (Almost) all existing TLDs have domains in them that should not be there based on the original "purpose" of the TLDs. The .com domain only ever made sense in the context of a single language and a single country. It's only crowded because it is one of the first ones that anyone could register in. If all the TLDs that exist today existed at the beginning, the landscape would be very different. The notion that "once a name is allocated, it's gone forever" is no different than today. More TLDs provide more opportunities for similarly named companies or organizations to have some form of their name. It "prevents" large companies from dominating all forms of a name.

InclinedPlane 16y ago

Most new TLDs have been pointless and idiotic. Blame ICANN.

chronomex 16y ago

I have a .tel. It's almost useless--you get to publish DNS records through the registrar's mickey-mouse PHP thing, and you can only really push TXT and NAPTR and MX records. The only reason I bought it is because I am a member of an informal organization whose name is "Shadytel", so an @shady.tel address looked real spiffy at the time.

derleth 16y ago
> Shadytel is now offering reduced comfort noise as a tariffed service. (from the Twitter feed: https://twitter.com/#!/shadytel/status/47150260157562880 https://twitter.com/#!/shadytel/status/47150260157562880 ) I'm aware I can pay for that with my Diner's Club, but will you accept Krugerrands if I can get them on the noon autogyro?

bromley 16y ago

"little Johnny can't visit any website where the domain component of the URL ends in the string “.xxx”, in which case all little Johnny has to do is go to a web-based nslookup tool, type in the domain he wants to look at, and then replace the domain with that IP address." Sounds like a good opportunity for nslookup tools to justify requiring a credit-card payment for certain types of lookup.

tuhin 16y ago

The joke was fine till .me, .co and .tv but .cat, .tel and .xxx? That sure is bound to be of use to nobody but the ones selling the domain. The point where he questions if he is desktop or mobile, is actually very critical. The web is one. Especially with new ways of designing and developing a site including things like media queries make the entire point of a .mobi appear like a joke to me.

Macha 16y ago
.tv is for Tevula. And .me is another country's abbreviation (Montenegro I believe). Just because they're being abused doesn't mean they're a joke.
- tuhin 16y ago
  I actually know that! I own two .me domains and was about to buy .tv domain. Also the .tv domain was launched with high hopes of TV Networks buying enough and paying enough to support the country's economy. Of course that did not happen. Looks like they were made with the purpose of being abused.
ez77 16y ago
Searching for 'site:cat' in Google yields over 81M results, 11M more than 'site:me'. As a sample of real use, check out the site of the Catalan Government: http://www.gencat.cat/ http://www.gencat.cat/.
zppx 16y ago
.cat is for Catalunya, and only open for sites in Catalan. .co is for Colombia Google uses both: http://www.google.cat/ http://www.google.cat/ (in Catalan) http://www.google.com.co/ http://www.google.com.co/ (in Spanish)

cookiecaper 16y ago

He's missing the point on .xxx. No person with any vague understanding of the internet thinks that they can block pornography entirely from a person interested in getting to it. It's not that hard to get around filters because porn is everywhere online, but it can still be useful to filter it, even though a determined individual can obviously bypass your block. Here's why: 1. First and foremost, filtration software isn't just about adversarial blocking. It can stop your grandma from getting tricked into going lemonparty.org. This is a big one. 2. Children looking for porn without permission are often under non-ideal constraints, like a time limit before someone else comes home. If you can get fairly good coverage, the kid will have that much less time, and many kids aren't going to invest in figuring out how to bypass it; they'd just as soon go to their room and fap there, or go to a friend's house where there is unmonitored access. 3. Filtration can be used to demonstrate a good-faith effort to keep your network and environment safe (at a library or net cafe, for instance). Same principles as number two here: if it's difficult enough and the user is under time constraints, they'll just wait until later. There are other good reasons, but that should suffice. .xxx isn't about keeping a sophisticated, determined opponent out, and that's rarely successful no matter what measures you take. The internet is always going to have porn and there shouldn't be any enforcement forcing adult content onto xxx. However, if xxx sees wide adoption, and the xxx sites move off of com (redirect), that's a big weight off the shoulders of blacklist and filtration vendors. To be able to block a whole huge namespace like that, where xxx is now hosting 30% or some other significant number of the new adult content that would have been on com if not for the xxx TLD, that's a big efficiency gain, even if you still have to filter com.

dustingetz 16y ago
> if xxx sees wide adoption Off the top of my head, I (and I think also the author) don't see any particular reason to think that .xxx will see wide adoption.
- cookiecaper 16y ago
  The author indicates that there's already a large queue of pre-orders. I think xxx will achieve adoption by pornographers that want social acceptance. Basically, any pornographer that operates in the real world as an "adult media company", "glamor photography", etc. A xxx domain will demonstrate a willingness to allow your content to be easily filtered, which is important for porn companies because as much as adults love pornography, generally, they want some control over its introduction and availability to their children. xxx-exclusive hosted content will be seen as a good faith effort to keep parents in control. I think that eventually any porn company that wants social tolerance will be on xxx because it will be better for their image. Topsites and other aggregators will probably stay on com as they don't really care and it doesn't effect their commissions and/or ad money.

mkramlich 16y ago

I also think TLD's have jumped the shark. Let's abolish .com/.org/etc and force everybody to live in a more unified domain name space, so we're left with (at best), addresses like: www.google, graph.facebook, api.cnn, etc. The suffixes have been abused so much they are no longer reliable (see bit.ly that wildly popular Libyan website -- wait, what?), and even if there are people camping on foo.com's, we also have the problem where say foo.com and foo.net and foo.ly are all unrelated to one another and run by different people. Yes, legacy code, I understand, pain, etc. More of an idealistic rant. The increasing inelegance and hypocrisy and over-complexity of TLD's are getting to me just like the OA's author.

d0mine 16y ago
The same effect [as abolishing all TLDs] could be achieved in a backward compatible way by allowing arbitrary TLDs i.e., google, facebook, cnn would be TLDs in www.google, graph.facebook, api.cnn addresses.
- vacri 16y ago
  Doesn't this reduce our available address space? What about all the sites that currently have three different entities at their .com, .net and .org addresses? What happens to ubuntu.com and ubuntu.org, two different groups? Where we are now, getting rid of TLDs would cause immense unnecessary conflict.
  - d0mine 16y ago
    "allowing" means that .ubuntu may exist in addition to ubuntu.tld .ubuntu is a TLD itself (or it could be thought of as having an empty tld)
rlpb 16y ago
This makes it impossible to trust certain namespaces. If I go to a .gov or .gov.uk, for example, I know it's the official site. Where the hierarchical system is used (eg. .ac.uk and presumably .edu) it is still very useful. Getting rid of the suffixes eliminates this and brings us down to the free-for-all level of the .com for all sites.

freejack 16y ago

There are lots of stupid startups. Why would the ones behind these top-level domains be any different? ICANN's role isn't to pick the winners, its to manage the overall framework. Perhaps .sex will succeed where .xx fails. Or not. But you can't blame ICANN for failed .tld business models anymore than you can blame YC for funding failed startup business models. Its just part of the landscape. Now stop ranting about it and go do something productive. ;-)

tommorris 16y ago
I'm not blaming ICANN for failed business models. I'm blaming ICANN for turning what ought to be a matter of public interest (i.e. the governance of the Internet) and turning it into a situation where you can turn up with a half-baked idea and a big pile of cash and be able to start churning out new domain names.

Jach 16y ago

When there's an effective way to take the domains of squatters away from them, I'll be fine with just .com, .net, .org. Or screw the dots and just have "google". (I think that may be where it's going, considering Chrome tries to hide the http and www isn't needed in many cases.)