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TLD Graveyard
- mrweasel 6y agoSome of these would have been create as an internal domain (think Windows Domain Controller domains) but never as a domain for consumers to type in. No one was ever going to type in “tractors.newholland” when newholland.com exists. The high cost of the custom TLDs really keep them from being useful for internal systems though.
- BrandoElFollito 6y agoI do not understand your last sentence. Internal TLDs are "free" in the sense that they are not registed with IANA.
- tinus_hn 6y agoAlso not a smart idea because you’re in for a world of trouble if someone decides to register that tld you’re using.
- sefrost 6y agoIt took me longer than I'd like to admit before I realised why I couldn't access any ".dev" sites. Luckily I had to edit my hosts file for a new client and eventually realised the problem was because of a project many years ago.
- mrweasel 6y agoOh god yes. I worked for a telco that had a ton of service on a domain they no longer owned. In the end that other company was just blocked from our network because we hijacked their DNS internally. I wonder how much that could potentially break with DNSSEC.
- tialaramex 6y agoI'd be astonished if it doesn't already mean they have some massive unexpected security holes.
- mrweasel 6y agoSure, but there are advantages to have them available on the internet as well. What I’m thinking is having a seperate domain, which many companies already have, for corporate services. We have a .dk for our actual service, products and email, but we also use a .net domain for things like AD, Azure integration and a ton of auxilary services. Having .company rather than .company.net is just a “nice to have” and certainly not worth the $185,000 registration fee. Had it been cheaper I could see many chooce to have their own TLD just to have a more clear border between “infrastructure” and “product”. It gives the IT department more control of the domains they wish to allocate without stealing the from the product and marketing teams. I worked for a company where we already used a series of subdomains, for backend stuff, but down the road those same subdomains became more and more relevant to free up for the public parts of our website, and it was a pain to move around.
- mod50ack 6y agoThe point is that there is no point in paying that kind of money if you're only going to use it internally 99% of the time.
- ocdtrekkie 6y agoI believe that was how Google originally stated they planned to use .dev, prior to it being offered publicly for registration.
- heisenbit 6y agoThe point is the 1% case where a user trying is accessing the "internal" site while using an external DNS under the control of Mr. Blackhat pretending to offer internal services.
- teruakohatu 6y agoIf anyone is wondering about XN--PBT977C and XN--KPU716F, they are .珠宝 (Translated as .Jewelry) and .手表 (Translated as .Watch). I believe the latter means watch as in wristwatch, not watch as in watch a movie.
- secondcoming 6y agoThe punycode algorithm is bizarre!
- tasuki 6y agoIndeed. I recently implemented the decoding part[0] and really didn't feel like implementing the encoding... [0]: https://github.com/tasuki/elm-punycode https://github.com/tasuki/elm-punycode
- secondcoming 6y agoI have to do the encoder. Luckily the RFC includes the code, but when I look at it I can't help but think that there must have been an easier way to solve this problem...
- otabdeveloper4 6y agoYeah, I'm half sure it was an elaborate prank on somebody's part.
- bluejekyll 6y agoLike utf8... which mDNS supports: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6762#appendix-F https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6762#appendix-F I’d personally love to see a proposal to drop puny-code and adopt utf8.
- fiddlerwoaroof 6y agoUTF-8 is problematic because of lookalike codepoints. (And the current practice of decoding punycode has similar issues: how exactly international domain names should work seems to me like a really hard problem)
- retrofuturism 6y agoI don't get it. Did ICANN approve those TLDs and later remove them?
- detaro 6y agoPresumably their owners decided that it actually wasn't worth the cost and effort to continue maintaining them, so they got shutdown.
- Ekaros 6y agoI wonder if some of them were also move to protect trademark. Will they be reissued at some point in future?
- microtherion 6y agoOne of the defunct TLDs is .piaget; I suppose needing a TLD was just a developmental stage that they eventually outgrew.
- tomcam 6y agoThat was very very good
- Thorrez 6y agoI wonder why .yu (Yugoslavia) isn't there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.yu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.yu
- duskwuff 6y ago.yu shut down in 2010. This site looks like it started collecting data in 2011.
- Clewza313 6y agoIn case anybody else is wondering what the two ccTLDs on the list are: - .an was the Netherlands Antilles, now replaced by its constituents .cw, .sx and .bq - .tp was East Timor, now renamed Timor Leste (.tl) There are plenty more not listed here though, including .su (Soviet Union) and .yu (Yugoslavia).
- eqvinox 6y ago.su isn't listed because it's still active.
- skissane 6y agoI don't think .su will ever die. Come 2091, people will celebrate the 100th anniversary of the fall of the Soviet Union, and .su will still be alive and kicking.
- ex3ndr 6y agoNo one is going to celebrate this.
- skissane 6y agoCommemorate might be the better word. But I'm sure somebody somewhere is going to be celebrating. America's hawkish (neo)conservatives continue to celebrate the fall of the Soviet Union. "Presidents Reagan and Bush Sr beat the USSR!" (Maybe that is an oversimplification of the truth, but it sounds good to their ears.) In 2091, there is likely to exist some intellectual successor/descendant to that school of thought, eager to mark that centenary. What do the Russian Orthodox think? They went from an authoritarian regime which officially opposed the Russian Orthodox Church to a (still rather authoritarian, but arguably somewhat less so) regime which wants to be publicly seen currying favour with it. I'm sure some of them view that as an improvement. If that's what some of them think, why wouldn't they celebrate in 2091? What about the countries which gained their independence through the downfall of the Soviet Union? I think many people in many of those countries will be celebrating the centenary of their independence.
- walrus01 6y agoif anyone want to know about what sort of companies and persons are involved in the new generic TLD game, take a look at these links. One of the biggest, Donuts LLC, is part of the same group of people who tried to buy .org http://domainincite.com/26198-breaking-failed-org-buyer-ethos-capital-buys-donuts http://domainincite.com/26198-breaking-failed-org-buyer-etho... https://domainnamewire.com/2020/11/19/donuts-is-acquiring-afilias/ https://domainnamewire.com/2020/11/19/donuts-is-acquiring-af... https://domainnamewire.com/2021/01/22/breaking-ethos-capital-acquires-donuts/ https://domainnamewire.com/2021/01/22/breaking-ethos-capital... List of gTLDs run by Donuts: https://icannwiki.org/Donuts https://icannwiki.org/Donuts Or you can just google "donuts abry acquisition dot org" Or you can google "Ethos capital .org": https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=ethos+capital+.org https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=ethos+cap... Or you can google "Fadi chehade ethos capital": https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=fadi+chehade+ethos+capital https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=fadi+cheh... In my personal opinion it's nothing but a bunch of rent-seekers, in the classical economics textbook sense of the word.
- m463 6y agoI think "ethos" in the name is funny in respect to, well, lack of respect
- microtherion 6y agoThe name reminds me of an often quoted line in The Big Lebowski: https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/1acb0717-c59e-44ed-a094-ca69b53ab4d1 https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/1acb0717-c59e-44ed-a094-ca69b53...
- pfortuny 6y agoThe classical meaning is “character/customs” of a comunity, so it may well be that they were speaking of themselves...
- phgn 6y agoDo you not think some of these domain extensions are providing value to people (like incorporating a "cool" domain name into branding like crisp.chat, frame.work or magic.link)? You don't have to use their TLDs.
- young_unixer 6y agoI didn't know that companies and institutions could create TLDs with their name, fully dedicated to them. At this point, why not just accept any string of characters up to a certain lenght as a TLD? We've already lost the advantages of having fewer TLDs, no one can remember what is and isn't a TLD, so we have to assume that anything could be a TLD. I don't realy agree with the proliferation of so many TLDs, but the damage is already done and the logical step forward is to let anytjing be a TLD.
- tpetry 6y agoThe problem with your concept is determing who is responsible for „.hackernews“
- cdmckay 6y agoThey don’t do that because they can charge companies $185,000 to become a custom TLD and $6,250 a quarter after that. https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/24460/how-can-i-buy-my-own-personalized-top-level-domain-tld#24474 https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/24460/how-can...
- NetOpWibby 6y agoI’ve been looking for a similar reference to this all week, thanks.
- tialaramex 6y ago> we have to assume that anything could be a TLD Yes. This has been the correct way to handle it for at least a couple of decades and perhaps arguably more. RFC 2606 reserves a handful of TLDs (such as .example and .invalid) and it would be sane to treat these specially (e.g. this-is.invalid just isn't a valid DNS name) but otherwise the most you could say for sure about any TLD is that you don't know whether it exists. There's a lot of bad legacy code out there which will do things like reject email addresses with a TLD longer than three characters, don't do that even if you think .horse was a bad idea. > At this point, why not just accept any string of characters up to a certain lenght as a TLD? With the exceptions in RFC 2606 and the practical constraint that some TLDs are "poisoned" by decades of misuse (e.g. .corp) this is the situation today. However the next question is - who shall operate the registry for each of these TLDs? So that's what the ICANN process is for. It's not a problem for .some-ludicrous-vanity-domain-for-a-corporation as on the one hand, nobody else wanted those names (often even the corporation itself never uses them, it's just burning money) - but it gets trickier for .horse where understandably the people who own a horse's name in .horse don't want to hear about how the company operating it went bankrupt and now they need to pay somebody else or their site stops working.
- petecooper 6y agoSite was very slow for me, so I made a snapshot: http://web.archive.org/web/20210226094451/https://dzdb.caida.org/tlds/graveyard http://web.archive.org/web/20210226094451/https://dzdb.caida...
- skissane 6y agoIt is missing what is (to the best of my knowledge) the first ever deleted TLD – .nato – deleted in July 1996 – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.nato https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.nato
- ainar-g 6y agoSome of those at the end seem to be IDN test TLDs[1], which, if Wikipedia is to be believed, were created in October of 2007. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDN_Test_TLDs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDN_Test_TLDs
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Raed667 6y agoI remember some people predicting that every big brand would have its own TLD instead of .com So you'd go to `iphone.apple`, `zero.cocacola` or `order.macdonald` etc.. I guess that didn't workout yet.
- dkjaudyeqooe 6y agoApple has a TLD, as does Google and many others. Give it some time.
- rzzzt 6y agoCanon has one, since 2015-ish: https://global.canon/en/news/2016/20160516.html https://global.canon/en/news/2016/20160516.html
- dna_polymerase 6y agoI remember stumbling upon an actual .brand domain only once and of all the brands it was the Swiss private bank pictet [0]. [0]: https://www.group.pictet https://www.group.pictet
- Macha 6y agoblog.google makes it on this site somewhat often
- rualca 6y agoIIRC Amazon has a few of them. https://icannwiki.org/Amazon https://icannwiki.org/Amazon
- alangibson 6y agoI still want to know why there is no .bbq TLD.
- vxNsr 6y agoDon’t let your dreams be dreams. https://www.icann.org/news/announcement-2-2008-10-23-en https://www.icann.org/news/announcement-2-2008-10-23-en
- alangibson 6y agoIf it didn't cost 6 figures just to apply, I swear I would.
- jakeschaeffer 6y agoCould make an offer on the Handshake version for probably a lot less https://www.namebase.io/domains/bbq https://www.namebase.io/domains/bbq
- phgn 6y agoIn case you are wondering what whacky top-level-domains there are right now (there are over 1000), I'm working on a faster search & categorisation of them at https://domain.garden https://domain.garden. While some extensions are just absurd, I think there is a good branding potential with choosing some of these TLDs (like for crisp.chat, frame.work or magic.link).
- monkeybutton 6y agoNeat website, the simplicity is nice.
- phgn 6y agoThank you! That's the main thing I wanted to solve, having a simple site to see available domains and where to best buy them. Glad that's resonating.
- vxNsr 6y agoTake a look at https://tld-list.com/ https://tld-list.com/ might what you’re looking for.
- phgn 6y agoYep that website is useful as well, with more details about each registry. Mine is more focused on finding available extensions for a given name.
- waheoo 6y agoTLDs,a solution to a problem nobody has. It's just a programmers solution to a programmers problem. The only reason .com even matters is because it got ingrained in people's minds early on. You could drop all TLDs tomorrow and nobody would care.
- iFreilicht 6y agoWhat was the problem, then? I thought the idea of TLDs initially was to separate domains between countries so they could manage them themselves and create less collisions between local registrars?
- JdeBP 6y agoRFC 882 explains it in detail, and contrary to what M. waheoo says it is a problem that many people have. One can find analogues to it in many fields, such as why there isn't a single telephone directory book that covers the entire world.
- CydeWeys 6y ago> You could drop all TLDs tomorrow and nobody would care. Huh? That would cause all domain names to stop working. People would certainly care! Can you expand on what you mean by "drop all TLDs" and how all of the existing Web content and links therein would continue to work if this were done?
- benatkin 6y ago.bnl - Buy n Large from WALL·E https://pixar.fandom.com/wiki/Buy_n_Large https://pixar.fandom.com/wiki/Buy_n_Large
- Havoc 6y agoIs there a way to determine how risk a TLD is in this regard? Keen to use a .land for something but would suck if it disappeared.
- phgn 6y agoAlmost all of the deactivated top-level-domains are brand names or for countries that no longer exist. I think for global TLDs that investors payed money for there is a low risk of them disappearing. .land specifically seems to be owned by Donuts Inc, so that will stay [0] [0] https://icannwiki.org/.land https://icannwiki.org/.land
- Havoc 6y agoThank you!
- CydeWeys 6y agoLaunched generic TLDs that actually have customers owning their domains will never disappear. The worst that will happen is that the registry services will be seamlessly transferred to another operator (as a registrant you likely wouldn't even notice because your interactions are with a registrar, not the registry). See ICANN's EBERO process which ensures that even in the case that a registry operator abruptly fails with data loss, the TLD and all domains on it can still be quickly transitioned to another operator: https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/ebero-2013-04-02-en https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/ebero-2013-04-02-en Tl;dr they've thought about how bad for the Internet it would be if TLDs with many users on them could just fail and disappear, so they've taken steps to prevent that from ever happening. There's a reason almost everything on this list is a brand TLD. Your biggest risk as a consumer isn't that your TLD will disappear, it's that the price will be jacked up on it (though this has been happening on .com and .org too).
- Havoc 6y ago> Launched generic TLDs that actually have customers owning their domains will never disappear. Thank you. That provides significant comfort. Want to use it for email so possibility of them pulling the plug would be not awesome Glad that does directly apply as a possibility Price increase - well I guess if it’s not absolutely insane increases I’ve got at least a year to transition
- ksec 6y ago.Web is still in dispute 5 years after the auction finished. When will .exe, .jpg or .png ever also be in TLD?
- CydeWeys 6y agoNever. ICANN won't be delegating such common Web filenames as that because there's little upside but massive potential downside. That'd be really confusing too.
- 0x0 6y agoWell there is already a TLD with a well known executable file extension: .com
- CydeWeys 6y ago.com was delegated 36 years ago, well before the existence of the World Wide Web. It's a little bit of a different situation.
- breakingcups 6y agoYou'd also be hard-pressed to find a widely used operating system that still allows .com files to be executed.
- 0x0 6y agoWindows 10 still runs .com files. At least the 32bit builds. I wouldn't be surprised if the 64bit builds would accept at least com-renamed PE .exe files too, despite the lack of NTVDM
- NetOpWibby 6y agoThe latter are domains on Handshake. - https://www.namebase.io/domains/jpg https://www.namebase.io/domains/jpg - https://www.namebase.io/domains/png https://www.namebase.io/domains/png
- OliverJones 6y agoA lot of those unused TLDs seem to be brands. The companies behind the brands may have bought some of them to keep squatters at bay. At any rate, it's a way for brand-owning companies, or squatters hoping to shake down those companies, to help support ICANN financially. TLDs are expensive to register.
- CydeWeys 6y agoIt's not about keeping squatters away. TLDs do not use a first-come first-served allocation system. ICANN will not delegate an obvious brand name to any entity other than that trademark's owner, and there are mechanisms built in to contest allocations (just look at .amazon as an example). What's mostly going on here is simply that companies bought something without a plan for using it and then dropped it after a period of time as the expenses continued adding up and they continued doing nothing with the TLD.
- dragonwriter 6y ago> ICANN will not delegate an obvious brand name to any entity other than that trademark's owner Any given potential name can be the subject of multiple (registered, not to mention unregistered) trademarks in different combination of field of business and territorial jurisdiction, so even if you have high trust that ICANN won't issue something that is a trademark somewhere in the world to anyone other than the trademark owner (which you probably shouldn't be, given that it's pretty much impossible), you have very little reason to be sure that (1) your brand isn't also someone else's trademark in some jurisdiction and field of business, and (2) that person won't get a TLD for it. Especially in the early round of newTLDs when it wasn't clear the degree to which the prediction that having your own TLD would be expectation as much as having a second-level domain in the most appropriate TLD had been previously would turn out to be true, preemptively acquiring the TLD even without a clear plan to use it made a lot of sense if the cost of doing so is a small fraction of the value of the brand.
- axaxs 6y agoThis is really interesting, thanks! I was doing registry work at the time the new gtld program was launching, and remember thinking how silly it all was but specifically some of the tlds being sought. Sure enough, I recognize a few of them listed.
- clxxx 6y agoI find it odd that TLD’s can be bought and sold in such a manner. I understand those like .edu, .gov, .com, and country denoted TLD’s because they seem to denote a purpose behind the ownership and I was under the assumption that ICANN simply maintained them as a non-profit. It looks to be more like a money fueled rat race to swoop up as many names as possible for the purpose of land lording over them. Perhaps it’s a limited and cynical take, but is there more to the picture? I’ve heard of decentralized protocols like Handshake attempt to decentralize the entire sector of TLD’s but they just seem be riddled with early profit seekers buying up all the names, so it seems unlikely the large browsers will incorporate them. Can anyone speak on the TLD space and it’s future? What was the incentive of ICANN starting the gTLD’s and what are the assumptions behind browsers accepting TLD’s?
- tasuki 6y ago> I’ve heard of decentralized protocols like Handshake attempt to decentralize the entire sector of TLD’s but they just seem be riddled with early profit seekers buying up all the names, so it seems unlikely the large browsers will incorporate them. Yes, and any system will be riddled with early profit seekers. With Handshake, there's a lot less profit to seek: 1. The current TLDs are pre-reserved on Handshake for the current owners. 2. The number of Handshake TLDs is ~infinite. If it were to catch on, I'd expect a race-to-the-bottom for second level domain prices.
- hakfoo 6y agoA TLD that enforced a "one organization, one name" rule might reduce the land-rush mentality. I recall talking with someone who worked with a trade school, this was probably about 15 years ago, and they were very proud of their .edu domain. It was seen as a bdge that they were a federally-sanctioned college as opposed to just a Learning Annex with delusions of grandeur. At the time, they could only get the one domain schoolname.edu and couldn't just buy "enrollatschoolname.edu" or "schoolnamegoldenhamsters.edu" for a marketing push. Not sure if that's changed.
- koolba 6y agoAnd each of these sent at least $250K to ICANN to open up the TLD right? What a scamola.
- pas 6y agoNobody forced the registrars to do so, no? Plus it was clear what they are getting.
- NetOpWibby 6y agoNamebase[0] is a marketplace built upon Handshake[1], a decentralized ICANN (simplistic comparison). I checked these dead TLDs against Namebase and a fair number of them are blocked from auction. However, a surprising number of them have already been claimed. I created auctions for the remainders. Granted, unless your devices are using a Handshake resolver (or NextDNS[3]), you won't be able to actually use these domains but browser adoption seems (tentatively) likely. Puma Browser[4] (mobile app) supports Handshake so who knows...these dead TLDs may see life again. -- [0]: https://namebase.io https://namebase.io [1]: https://handshake.org https://handshake.org [2]: https://nextdns.io https://nextdns.io [3]: https://www.pumabrowser.com https://www.pumabrowser.com
- dehrmann 6y agoICANN really overplayed its hand with TLDs. It turns out there's obvious massive value in legacy ones like .com, but they acted a bit too slowly with country hack domains like .io, and then massively overdid it with some of the recent expansions.
- CydeWeys 6y agoICANN didn't create any of these new ones; registry operators who applied for them did. It's a crucial distinction. I guess you could argue that ICANN should've limited it somehow, but ICANN picking and choosing the haves and have nots like that would be worse than the current situation, where pretty much anyone who wanted to could get whatever string they wanted (subject to some reasonable restrictions).
- lanrat 6y agoHi everyone, This is actually my project that I started years ago to track changes in root zones files. Let me know if you have any questions.