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Terrible article, in my opinion. The thesis is not supported in the slightest. This was just an unfocused rant about the new TLDs and a quick upvote grab by put

Terrible article, in my opinion. The thesis is not supported in the slightest. This was just an unfocused rant about the new TLDs and a quick upvote grab by putting a trendy jab at free markets in the title. What are free markets making worse here? He agrees that participants should be allowed to buy and sell TLDs at whatever they are willing to pay. How is that not free market? He suggest we fight this buy not paying for it. How is that not free market? His only complaint seems to be that the price is ridiculous, and ICANN should be "better than that". The price of something is what someone will pay for it. If you don't have a problem with people choosing what they will pay for, then you don't have a problem with free markets. Complaining about confusion for users, cell phone towers dotting the landscape (?), and that some other people would spend their money on something else (free market), do not help your claim that free markets make it worse either.

freejack 15y ago
I agree. It would seem that a corollary to the author's argument is that IP addresses should be just fine at the basis for navigation.
gaius 15y ago
The new TLDs are a scam by the domain name registrars. If you are a company that owns trademarks, you have to defend them or lose them. That means buying the domain name - in every TLD - and now a whole TLD for a 6-figure sum! And what does it cost the registrar, a few bytes of storage? It's a license to print money, is the charitable way to look at it, I would say it's a protection racket.
- freejack 15y ago
  I think you (wrongly) mean to point the finger at the registries. Registrars don't create the string, they just offer it for sale. The registry creates and manages the string (.xxx, .biz, etc.)
- watchandwait 15y ago
  If a TLD registry deliberately creates a TLD in order to shake-down existing trademark holders, they are probably violating U.S. RICO (racketeering) statutes. I won't hold my breath, but I'd love to see some enterprising attorney general subpoena some registries internal emails...
- Jach 15y ago
  I don't really have much pity for someone who goes to google.xxx expecting google.com for porn and becoming infested with malware. The risk of BigCo not owning their domains in all possible TLDs is from phishing targets on their potential customers, email attacks. Apart from that, it seems really unlikely that target.xxx would outrank target.com in a search, so target.xxx would never be visited aside from idiots thinking it's Target With Porn or clicking an email link. So if the TLDs are a scam, the BigCos that play along are willing suckers.
  - eftpotrm 15y ago
    These aren't restricted to the old 7 bit ASCII character sets though, are they? We've already had cases where people were registering famous domains with one character changed so some high unicode value that was graphically but not conceptually equal to the original character. Net result, new domain whose address looks and reads identically (to a human at least) to the domain it's trying to impersonate. Hopefully there are safeguards in place but that happening at a TLD level would hardly be pleasant.
    - Jach 15y ago
      That still doesn't address the issue that no one will visit these domains except for phishing victims with incredibly poor spam filters. Even within ascii someone might register target.c0m or target.corn and be able to fool people in a void. Presumably search engines like Google use unicode and can distinguish the different o's.
    - capnrefsmmat 15y ago
      Most modern browsers display Unicode domains only for TLDs that have a character set policy that prevents homograph attacks. Newer IDN TLDs (like .рф) also have restrictions -- .рф only accepts Cyrillic domains, for example.
      - metageek 15y ago
        What's that stand for, Russian Federation?
- tankenmate 15y ago
  New gTLDs are required to support both the UDRP and trademark clearing houses. These two options provide trademark holders with protections that are unavailable in any other sphere of the market. With clearing houses trademark holders don't need to buy domains, they can block their trademark from being registered, albeit with a one off fee. The trademark lobbyists have managed to garner a priori chilling of speech and yet this doesn't seem to be enough to satisfy.
  - kelnos 15y ago
    With clearing houses trademark holders don't need to buy domains, they can block their trademark from being registered, albeit with a one off fee. So pay us, or... pay us? Those are the two options?
    - tankenmate 15y ago
      There is no such thing as a free lunch; if you want a government backed monopoly on something you can surely bet it will have to cost you X. Whether X is a figure that is too much for you is a free market decision you will have to make. Is a few thousand a year too much for a limited government backed monopoly on a name? I would say no. I would also like to point out that I haven't discounted the social benefit of trademarks, but the registrant pays model is probably the best practical model.
      - kelnos 15y ago
        I would definitely agree that there is a social benefit to trademarks (much more significant than that of patents or copyrights). I don't think I object to the cost in the general sense, from the registrant's perspective. But from the other side, the registries have the potential to make a decent chunk of change off this, which really feels like they're making money not for providing a useful service, but by exploiting features of trademark law. It just feels a little dirty to me.
- stonemetal 15y ago
  If you are a company that owns trademarks, you have to defend them or lose them. That means buying the domain name How does that follow? Coca-Cola doesn't have to own Coke.org to protect its trademark. It would have to sue anyone who used it in the context of soft drinks. If a cocaine rehab clinic got the domain then Coca-Cola wouldn't have any trademark issues.
  - metageek 15y ago
    Yeah, but buying the domain is cheaper than suing.
- Sayter 15y ago
  The sky is not falling. Companies will not lose their trademark if they fail to register the domain in all possible TLD's and/or register and maintain a TLD. Considering the latter requires becoming a registrar, you are essentially asserting that owning a trademark effectively requires every company to enter the domain business. That assertion is absurd.
- WalterBright 15y ago
  You can put any name on a sign, too, but if that sign contains a trademarked name, you can have action taken against you. I don't think TLDs are special in allowing trademark infringement.
AJ007 15y ago
ICANN is a bureaucracy granted power by the United States government. Its embarrassing that this kind of linkbait crap makes it to hacker news. As for the underlying issue, I'm all for new extensions. What bothers me is the dirty games being played when they are sold. Registrars create special rules that benefit themselves such as selling generic word domains off for a premium.
- freejack 15y ago
  again, its the registries that do this - registrars are mainly a sales channel, we don't set the rules.
  - rbanffy 15y ago
    That's not exactly true. Registrars are well represented in any decision ICANN makes.
killerswan 15y ago
Yeah, the free market would work effectively if no producer and no consumer had the power to set the price... An alternative model, though, is mailing addresses: bureaucratic, cheap, and a primary part of civilization for 2500 years. It would have been interesting if the USPS had jumped on this idea about 20 years ago, but now it is too late.

freejack 15y ago

I agree. It would seem that a corollary to the author's argument is that IP addresses should be just fine at the basis for navigation.

gaius 15y ago

The new TLDs are a scam by the domain name registrars. If you are a company that owns trademarks, you have to defend them or lose them. That means buying the domain name - in every TLD - and now a whole TLD for a 6-figure sum! And what does it cost the registrar, a few bytes of storage? It's a license to print money, is the charitable way to look at it, I would say it's a protection racket.

freejack 15y ago
I think you (wrongly) mean to point the finger at the registries. Registrars don't create the string, they just offer it for sale. The registry creates and manages the string (.xxx, .biz, etc.)
watchandwait 15y ago
If a TLD registry deliberately creates a TLD in order to shake-down existing trademark holders, they are probably violating U.S. RICO (racketeering) statutes. I won't hold my breath, but I'd love to see some enterprising attorney general subpoena some registries internal emails...
Jach 15y ago
I don't really have much pity for someone who goes to google.xxx expecting google.com for porn and becoming infested with malware. The risk of BigCo not owning their domains in all possible TLDs is from phishing targets on their potential customers, email attacks. Apart from that, it seems really unlikely that target.xxx would outrank target.com in a search, so target.xxx would never be visited aside from idiots thinking it's Target With Porn or clicking an email link. So if the TLDs are a scam, the BigCos that play along are willing suckers.
- eftpotrm 15y ago
  These aren't restricted to the old 7 bit ASCII character sets though, are they? We've already had cases where people were registering famous domains with one character changed so some high unicode value that was graphically but not conceptually equal to the original character. Net result, new domain whose address looks and reads identically (to a human at least) to the domain it's trying to impersonate. Hopefully there are safeguards in place but that happening at a TLD level would hardly be pleasant.
  - Jach 15y ago
    That still doesn't address the issue that no one will visit these domains except for phishing victims with incredibly poor spam filters. Even within ascii someone might register target.c0m or target.corn and be able to fool people in a void. Presumably search engines like Google use unicode and can distinguish the different o's.
  - capnrefsmmat 15y ago
    Most modern browsers display Unicode domains only for TLDs that have a character set policy that prevents homograph attacks. Newer IDN TLDs (like .рф) also have restrictions -- .рф only accepts Cyrillic domains, for example.
    - metageek 15y ago
      What's that stand for, Russian Federation?
tankenmate 15y ago
New gTLDs are required to support both the UDRP and trademark clearing houses. These two options provide trademark holders with protections that are unavailable in any other sphere of the market. With clearing houses trademark holders don't need to buy domains, they can block their trademark from being registered, albeit with a one off fee. The trademark lobbyists have managed to garner a priori chilling of speech and yet this doesn't seem to be enough to satisfy.
- kelnos 15y ago
  With clearing houses trademark holders don't need to buy domains, they can block their trademark from being registered, albeit with a one off fee. So pay us, or... pay us? Those are the two options?
  - tankenmate 15y ago
    There is no such thing as a free lunch; if you want a government backed monopoly on something you can surely bet it will have to cost you X. Whether X is a figure that is too much for you is a free market decision you will have to make. Is a few thousand a year too much for a limited government backed monopoly on a name? I would say no. I would also like to point out that I haven't discounted the social benefit of trademarks, but the registrant pays model is probably the best practical model.
    - kelnos 15y ago
      I would definitely agree that there is a social benefit to trademarks (much more significant than that of patents or copyrights). I don't think I object to the cost in the general sense, from the registrant's perspective. But from the other side, the registries have the potential to make a decent chunk of change off this, which really feels like they're making money not for providing a useful service, but by exploiting features of trademark law. It just feels a little dirty to me.
stonemetal 15y ago
If you are a company that owns trademarks, you have to defend them or lose them. That means buying the domain name How does that follow? Coca-Cola doesn't have to own Coke.org to protect its trademark. It would have to sue anyone who used it in the context of soft drinks. If a cocaine rehab clinic got the domain then Coca-Cola wouldn't have any trademark issues.
- metageek 15y ago
  Yeah, but buying the domain is cheaper than suing.
Sayter 15y ago
The sky is not falling. Companies will not lose their trademark if they fail to register the domain in all possible TLD's and/or register and maintain a TLD. Considering the latter requires becoming a registrar, you are essentially asserting that owning a trademark effectively requires every company to enter the domain business. That assertion is absurd.
WalterBright 15y ago
You can put any name on a sign, too, but if that sign contains a trademarked name, you can have action taken against you. I don't think TLDs are special in allowing trademark infringement.

AJ007 15y ago

ICANN is a bureaucracy granted power by the United States government. Its embarrassing that this kind of linkbait crap makes it to hacker news. As for the underlying issue, I'm all for new extensions. What bothers me is the dirty games being played when they are sold. Registrars create special rules that benefit themselves such as selling generic word domains off for a premium.

freejack 15y ago
again, its the registries that do this - registrars are mainly a sales channel, we don't set the rules.
- rbanffy 15y ago
  That's not exactly true. Registrars are well represented in any decision ICANN makes.

killerswan 15y ago

Yeah, the free market would work effectively if no producer and no consumer had the power to set the price... An alternative model, though, is mailing addresses: bureaucratic, cheap, and a primary part of civilization for 2500 years. It would have been interesting if the USPS had jumped on this idea about 20 years ago, but now it is too late.