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Meh, I doubt it'll have any major effect. The vast majority of TLDs that are introduced fail very quickly (.name, .biz, .pro, a range of ccTLDs whose country's
by tristanperry 15y ago
Meh, I doubt it'll have any major effect.
The vast majority of TLDs that are introduced fail very quickly (.name, .biz, .pro, a range of ccTLDs whose country's citizens opt for the 'big 3' - .com, .net and .org - regardless, etc)
All that'll happen here - IMO - is that a few of the bigger names will waste $185k on their unique TLDs, realise that their users get confused by them (never underestimate the ability of big companies to misunderstand it's users..) and either switch back or stick ridgidly to using them with no positive effect.
So yep, I'm not too concerned about this. ICANN aren't a great organisation, and they seem to mainly bring out new TLDs to get more money.
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- fbnt 15y agoSo yep, I'm not too concerned about this. ICANN aren't a great organisation, and they seem to mainly bring out new TLDs to get more money. ICANN is a non-profit whom CEO gets ~1M/year. Executives earn a bonus of more than 50% of their base salaries if specific goals are reached, such as adding a new gTLD. Source: http://www.thedomains.com/2010/02/11/nonprofit-icann-releases-salaries-beckstrom-over-2-2-million-guaranteed-cfo-270k-lawyer-230k-plus-plus/ http://www.thedomains.com/2010/02/11/nonprofit-icann-release... I really hope this top-level domain thing isn't going anywhere.
- pavlov 15y agoFor comparison, the CEO of the American Red Cross has an annual salary of $500k. I don't think this is a relevant metric at all for judging a non-profit's goals or performance. There is a certain point where the organization has become so big or important that any person whom the stakeholders can trust to run it will command a high salary.
- windsurfer 15y agoSo as a stakeholder in a non-profit, I'd want the non-profit to be as efficient with money as possible... yet I'd want a a CEO that burns through way more money than he needs? Please explain.
- tedunangst 15y agoEfficient is not strictly synonymous with cheap.
- tptacek 15y agoIt's not strictly synonymous with "expensive" either. If it correlates, it probably correlates in the direction of "cheap", if only marginally. And any way you slice it, "expensive" is synonymous with "expensive". Let's come up for air here and ask the simple question: do we believe we have better domain policy because we pay some guy at ICANN a 7-figure annual comp package? I don't believe that. Do you?
- pavlov 15y agoWell, define "better domain policy"...? Due to its ARPANET origins, the Internet namespace was technically property of the United States. Obviously that situation had to change, or the other nearly 200 nations on the planet would have difficulty accepting the Internet as the true global network. The ICANN is necessarily a compromise between the interests of powerful nations. It's not reasonable to assume that it could be run completely differently from all the other global intergovernmental organizations. Most politicians don't consider Internet policy to be all that special compared to trade, foreign aid, patents and everything else that needs to be similarly balanced and negotiated. Hence, the head of the ICANN is someone who's acceptable to governments foremost.
- tedunangst 15y agoI'm not really inclined to figure out what the appropriate compensation for ICANN's CEO is. My comment was not about ICANN in particular.
- saucetenuto 15y agoI'm not the grandparent poster, but I think he's saying that executives skilled enough to run the Red Cross are motivated primarily by their salaries, and so those salaries have to be competitive with what the same highly-skilled exec could make in the private sector.
- tptacek 15y agoGail McGovern, the CEO of the American Red Cross, makes $995,000. Charity Navigator gives the Red Cross 3 of 4 stars. By contrast, Ophelia Dahl of the 4-star rated Partners in Health makes $86,000. PIH is a smaller organization than the Red Cross, but there are people who could argue that PIH is also more impactful. It's also the case that part of the reason the Red Cross is so much larger is that it's a key mission of the Red Cross to be larger. It's not unlikely that charities with highly-compensated CEOs share that trait. You pay a CEO a lot of money because their market value is high. What makes a manager-type CEO's market value high? Sales and financing skill. It's absolutely reasonable to point out and question the salary of a nonprofit's CEO.
- derleth 15y ago> By contrast, Ophelia Dahl of the 4-star rated Partners in Health makes $86,000. That's still tens of thousands of dollars. Can you point to a CEO of a non-profit making less than $10k? Less than $1k?
- Hoff 15y agohttp://kittyrescueandadoption.org/how_to_help.html http://kittyrescueandadoption.org/how_to_help.html "The shelter depends entirely on the generosity of others to sustain our efforts. There are no paid personnel and all monies/donations are used to care for our cats. KRA is a non-profit 501 (C3) corporation and donations are tax-deductible."
- r00fus 15y ago$86k in many places (say NYC or SFBay) is (just below) a living wage. Must all do-gooders be penniless?
- c2 15y agoSFBay average is about 76K: http://www.bayareacensus.ca.gov/bayarea.htm http://www.bayareacensus.ca.gov/bayarea.htm Equating 86K a year to penniless is a statement very very far removed from reality.
- 15y ago
- gnosis 15y agoIf profit is their motive, why didn't they do this 20 years ago? That's 20 years of lost profit.
- wmeredith 15y ago~1M a year!? That poor CEO...
- bradpineau 15y agoAgreed -- if anything, it will just make .com domains even more valuable. The average Internet user won't understand these new TLDs.
- Meai 15y agoReally? I mean how valuable is a .com domain to an average user? As far as I can tell, most people don't type in URLs at all, they type the site name into Google or have a bookmark. They mostly don't even look at the url, they look at what the page says. If you want to send the link to someone, you copy the whole thing anyway. If you do a little word of mouth, you probably won't include any TLD at all, so Google is again your target destination. I don't have any knowledge on how Google weighs TLD, but I highly suspect that they don't care. It's about content, they might even favor specific TLDs like "mybusiness.usa" over "mybusiness.com" Domains couldn't be more irrelevant right now, and adding more TLDs is only exacerbating the situation.
- vladd 15y ago> I mean how valuable is a .com domain to an average user? > If you do a little word of mouth, you probably won't include any TLD at all From my experience, mentioning .com verbally after the domain name is what makes regular people realize that they can put that name in Google and reach the website.
- stanleydrew 15y agoGoogle most definitely does care about the TLD. It's well known that .edu pages are given more weight than others.
- Devilboy 15y agoThe average user types 'facebook' and through the magic of browser search gets to Facebook.com already. This just cuts out one step.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- extension 15y agoHow do you decide that a TLD has "failed"? Do the domains still resolve? They are obviously not going to attain a critical mass of public awareness overnight. If startups are willing to go with goofy abuses of ccTLDs like .ly and .us then they would likely accept or even prefer gTLDs, when there is a rich variety of them available. The domain scarcity problem will only get worse with time. Unviable options will eventually become viable by sheer necessity.
- DrJokepu 15y agoLet me illustrate how they failed with the example of the .aero TLD. When I want to visit the website of British Airways, one of the largest airlines in the world, I typically Google for "ba". The first search result is britisharways.com, not britishairways.aero. Now you can repeat the same experiment with all the other major or minor airlines, and the top search result always will be a .com (or a ccTLD) domain. This how you can tell .aero has failed; it's main target users are simply not using it.
- extension 15y agoIf you already have your .com then you don't need new TLDs. But .aero may come in handy the next time someone wants to start a new airline (which is admittedly pretty rare, so .aero in particular was probably a dumb idea). I think the succesful gTLDs will be the ones that appear commonly in trademarks like photo, pizza, sports, mart, lube, etc. It may become much more common for the domain to be the primary trademark, even for businesses that aren't particularly internet related. Fredspizza.com would be a confusing name for a restaurant but Freds.pizza less so.
- baudehlo 15y ago> But .aero may come in handy the next time someone wants to start a new airline The problem is that ICANN has already set it up so that if you have the trademark on "flying.com" that nobody can get "flying.aero" (well they can, but you can take it off them easily). So why would you even bother with the .aero domain unless you own the .com too? This is simply a money grab by ICANN.
- noibl 15y agoI think you're missing the significance of this change. It's not clearly stated in the announcement (in fact, nothing is) but in section 1.3 of the Applicant Guidebook[1] it shows that for the first time it will be possible to have IDN gTLDs, that is, gTLDs in any standardised script. Latin1 is gone. This is big. Sometimes the anglocentrism (and USA-centrism) on this site worries me. [1] http://www.icann.org/en/topics/new-gtlds/rfp-clean-30may11-en.pdf http://www.icann.org/en/topics/new-gtlds/rfp-clean-30may11-e...
- vladd 15y agoI think you've missed a couple of IDN gTLDs, some launched more than a year ago, i.e. http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/111710_470000_Domains_Registered_Under_New_Non_ASCII_Russian_TLD_Following_General_Registration http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/111710_470000_Domain... .
- qq66 15y agoThe anglocentrism on this site is nearly entirely because the overwhelming majority of developments in the computer industry, from the Mark I to the iPad, have been created by Anglophones.
- noibl 15y agoLet's keep this tangent short but, so what? It doesn't mean we need to be blinkered about what the gradual relegation of English as tech lingua franca might mean for non-anglophones. Do we really need to be in a minority to be interested in remote perspectives?
- kijeda 15y agoWhether a raft of new generic top-level domains succeeds or fails depends on whether there is a mind shift in the average user from ".com" to ".anything". IMHO, the new entrants like .biz haven't succeeded because there hasn't been that shift yet. Now, if Google starts using .google for its products, and other key services you use every day stop using .com as their primary URLs, I think that mind shift could happen and you could get a very different result.
- hugohoffmanstal 15y agojust names - one day it will be without www or top level domains just the pure company name or service. Like tinyUrl and other rerouts this will become possible and the background of the domain structure will only be a registration and admin thing.
- baudehlo 15y agoThat works just fine today. Type the name into your address bar and it will either go right there, or google it for you. Technology has made this move by ICANN obsolete. However the big problem is if you're a large company you HAVE to protect your trademark, so you'll have to register these other domains anyway - meaning it's just a pure money grab from ICANN.