5 ms·

Mixed views on new DNS top level domains

60 points by pcr910303 5y ago

chana_masala 5y ago
There is barely any viewpoint argued in the article. So vanity tlds may be bad, why??
- flemhans 5y ago
  Yes I was surprised that the article ended after what I thought could be the introduction to the topic
- j56no 5y ago
  JUR just another rant, surprisingly made to the homepage
j56no 5y ago
is there a list of the new ones?
- karmakaze 5y ago
  There's a wikipedia entry--can't speak for its accuracy[0]. There's likely more official/accurate lists elsewhere that shouldn't be too hard to find if needed. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_domains#ICANN-era_generic_top-level_domains https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_dom...
- CydeWeys 5y ago
  This is the list of all currently existing TLDs: https://data.iana.org/TLD/tlds-alpha-by-domain.txt https://data.iana.org/TLD/tlds-alpha-by-domain.txt Note that IDN TLDs are presented in punycode in that list (the XN-- ones), so you'd want to convert them to Unicode to see what they actually look like (e.g. many are Chinese characters).
robert_tweed 5y ago
I registered my own name under one of the new gTLDs because it was $10 for a year and I thought, "why not?". I didn't do anything with it, partly because I remained sceptical of the new gTLDs so didn't want to switch anything critical over to it, like my email address. That is probably just as well, because a year later, it had been reclassified as a "premium" name. The renewal fee was over $400,000. The fact that the owners of gTLDs can set pricing arbitrarily is the biggest problem in all this. A given domain name usually has no intrinsic value. What gives it value is the effort someone puts into marketing it. With the new gTLDs, the domain operators are free to offer useful names that aren't trademarks, but are unavailable as .com or similar. Then should anyone build a successful business on that name, they are free to seek arbitrarily high rents. There is no sense in which you can buy a domain name outright. Nor do the new gTLDs have any form of rent control. That is a fundamental problem with the system as it stands.
- iomcr 5y ago
  Was it {firstname}{lastname}.gtld or only one of those?
  - robert_tweed 5y ago
    It was just my last name. So in a way surprising it wasn't classified as premium to begin with. But the fact such a concept exists at all, and the goalposts can move at any time, is the troubling part.
- ziml77 5y ago
  I was looking at gTLDs when getting my own domain. I think I got lucky with the timing because all the desirable ones had already classified the name I wanted as being premium. Around the same price you're saying your renewal would have been. I ended up going with firstnamelastname.net. I don't thing it's a good idea for anyone to use a gTLD for anything serious. Even without the prices being uncapped, there's no guarantee that a gTLD will stick around. Would be crappy to lose a domain because the company who owns the gTLD went out of business or just didn't want to deal with handling domains anymore.
iomcr 5y ago
I do have a complaint about relatively new TLDs. Did you know .forum domains are $500 to $2000 per year? We live in a world where everybody is complaining about censorship and nazis, but one of the best new TLDs for an independent forum is prices out 99% of the market! Of course, there are plenty of TLDs in the $5-$20 range, which are great, but this will cause cheap TLDs to become crowded and .forum will be a ghost town. Forums generally don't make money. Any forum making money, probably isn't making enough to budget $500 extra in another domain. Any company that would say "wow, $2000/year is acceptable" would already have something like {forum,community}.acme.com.
- ziml77 5y ago
  Is it the best TLD for in independent forum? It could be completely irrational on my part but I'd be hesitant to click a search result that would bring me to a .forum domain.
- beprogrammed 5y ago
  Well, to be fair, censorship and fascism are worse things than extortionate domain name prices. Though both are bad.
  - iomcr 5y ago
    While true, a free and open web is generally desirable, and we'd like to keep the barriers of entry for federation to a minimum. If someone was ready to start mycool.forum, but doesn't have $500/yr to start a website, they must now wade through a garbage pile of "minimum $2,000 bid" squatted domains, weird TLDs that could declare your domain premium and charge $400,000/yr at any time, maybe even if the only thing "premium" about the name is that your website got popular, or buy a domain like themycoolforum50.com. This might be only one managable issue, but these things add up, and the more they add up, the more facebook becomes the only website people use.
    - beprogrammed 5y ago
      Agreed, that's why I never use or recommend any else use any of the domains run by private operators, just asking for troubles like the above. The attempted sale of org was scary. Which is all very unfortunate because some of those TLDs are quite nice, like .forum. What a mess we've gotten ourselves into. Should have been kept as a public service, but no putting the genie back in the bottle now. Only way out of this mess is a distributed system, but I can't imagine what that would like without a massive proliferation of competing services.
shiado 5y ago
TLDs are like neighborhoods or ZIP codes, you will be judged for being in a bad one even if you are a good person. That's why I suggest consulting this site before you register anything to make sure you don't accidentally get a TLD that is used mostly for abuse, which many of the newer ones are. https://www.spamhaus.org/statistics/tlds/ https://www.spamhaus.org/statistics/tlds/
7ewis 5y ago
I don't like the fact that the prices can wildly differ between different TLDs. I think it was nice that it was easy to recognise website.com was a website too, whereas website.wtf is less easy to identify, but then now there are more available to makes it easier to get a shorter, better name and can make the pricing more competitive, hopefully driving it lower for everyone.
axaxs 5y ago
My view, as someone who did a lot of work around it: Purely a money grab by everyone involved. In what I'd consider a more normal fashion, ICANN could have slowly picked and rolled out sensible new TLDs to operators interested. Instead, it was a free for all where you had to pay an insane fee to ICANN mafia to even apply, and get in bidding wars if multiple applications existed. If you won, you had to go find and pay your own registry, too. So, you had registries preemptively spamming local businesses convincing them to buy a tld and use that registry. Many thought they were gonna make a fortune. The only one who made a fortune was ICANN and to some extent, registries. That's probably why owners keep trying to jack up prices, they still want their windfall. Don't even get me started on how terrible ICANN is organized. The whole digital archery fiasco should be enough for nobody to ever put any faith in them. Anyone with a quarter of brain function would realize how terrible that idea is.
- el-salvador 5y ago
  The .sucks TLD is one that comes to mind.
PostThisTooFast 5y ago
The entire canned TLD system (and ICANN't) is a scam. TLDs should be abolished (except for the ones that are still enforced, like edu, mil, and gov), and you should be able to register anything.anythingelse. Trademark violations would be handled as they are today. The current mess is an embarrassment.
greatgib 5y ago
The worse thing with generic tld is that before tld were attributed on a kind of merit or usefulness (countries, com, org), but now it is only based on money considerations. At the beginning internet was based on a kind of democracy or gentlemen's agreements. Now, the one that has the most cash to spend, like Google or Apple or Amazon or some scammer, ça. Grave what you want. Like if it was their internet. The example of the ".dev" is good. Google can easily unilaterally decide to take over a domain that was used largely and internationally by individuals. And they are allowed to do that because they can afford it, but you, the individual, you are considered like horse shit in this system. And so you are not allowed to complain.

60 points by pcr910303 5y ago

chana_masala 5y ago

There is barely any viewpoint argued in the article. So vanity tlds may be bad, why??

flemhans 5y ago
Yes I was surprised that the article ended after what I thought could be the introduction to the topic
j56no 5y ago
JUR just another rant, surprisingly made to the homepage

j56no 5y ago

is there a list of the new ones?

karmakaze 5y ago
There's a wikipedia entry--can't speak for its accuracy[0]. There's likely more official/accurate lists elsewhere that shouldn't be too hard to find if needed. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_domains#ICANN-era_generic_top-level_domains https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_dom...
CydeWeys 5y ago
This is the list of all currently existing TLDs: https://data.iana.org/TLD/tlds-alpha-by-domain.txt https://data.iana.org/TLD/tlds-alpha-by-domain.txt Note that IDN TLDs are presented in punycode in that list (the XN-- ones), so you'd want to convert them to Unicode to see what they actually look like (e.g. many are Chinese characters).

robert_tweed 5y ago

I registered my own name under one of the new gTLDs because it was $10 for a year and I thought, "why not?". I didn't do anything with it, partly because I remained sceptical of the new gTLDs so didn't want to switch anything critical over to it, like my email address. That is probably just as well, because a year later, it had been reclassified as a "premium" name. The renewal fee was over $400,000. The fact that the owners of gTLDs can set pricing arbitrarily is the biggest problem in all this. A given domain name usually has no intrinsic value. What gives it value is the effort someone puts into marketing it. With the new gTLDs, the domain operators are free to offer useful names that aren't trademarks, but are unavailable as .com or similar. Then should anyone build a successful business on that name, they are free to seek arbitrarily high rents. There is no sense in which you can buy a domain name outright. Nor do the new gTLDs have any form of rent control. That is a fundamental problem with the system as it stands.

iomcr 5y ago
Was it {firstname}{lastname}.gtld or only one of those?
- robert_tweed 5y ago
  It was just my last name. So in a way surprising it wasn't classified as premium to begin with. But the fact such a concept exists at all, and the goalposts can move at any time, is the troubling part.
ziml77 5y ago
I was looking at gTLDs when getting my own domain. I think I got lucky with the timing because all the desirable ones had already classified the name I wanted as being premium. Around the same price you're saying your renewal would have been. I ended up going with firstnamelastname.net. I don't thing it's a good idea for anyone to use a gTLD for anything serious. Even without the prices being uncapped, there's no guarantee that a gTLD will stick around. Would be crappy to lose a domain because the company who owns the gTLD went out of business or just didn't want to deal with handling domains anymore.

iomcr 5y ago

I do have a complaint about relatively new TLDs. Did you know .forum domains are $500 to $2000 per year? We live in a world where everybody is complaining about censorship and nazis, but one of the best new TLDs for an independent forum is prices out 99% of the market! Of course, there are plenty of TLDs in the $5-$20 range, which are great, but this will cause cheap TLDs to become crowded and .forum will be a ghost town. Forums generally don't make money. Any forum making money, probably isn't making enough to budget $500 extra in another domain. Any company that would say "wow, $2000/year is acceptable" would already have something like {forum,community}.acme.com.

ziml77 5y ago
Is it the best TLD for in independent forum? It could be completely irrational on my part but I'd be hesitant to click a search result that would bring me to a .forum domain.
beprogrammed 5y ago
Well, to be fair, censorship and fascism are worse things than extortionate domain name prices. Though both are bad.
- iomcr 5y ago
  While true, a free and open web is generally desirable, and we'd like to keep the barriers of entry for federation to a minimum. If someone was ready to start mycool.forum, but doesn't have $500/yr to start a website, they must now wade through a garbage pile of "minimum $2,000 bid" squatted domains, weird TLDs that could declare your domain premium and charge $400,000/yr at any time, maybe even if the only thing "premium" about the name is that your website got popular, or buy a domain like themycoolforum50.com. This might be only one managable issue, but these things add up, and the more they add up, the more facebook becomes the only website people use.
  - beprogrammed 5y ago
    Agreed, that's why I never use or recommend any else use any of the domains run by private operators, just asking for troubles like the above. The attempted sale of org was scary. Which is all very unfortunate because some of those TLDs are quite nice, like .forum. What a mess we've gotten ourselves into. Should have been kept as a public service, but no putting the genie back in the bottle now. Only way out of this mess is a distributed system, but I can't imagine what that would like without a massive proliferation of competing services.

shiado 5y ago

TLDs are like neighborhoods or ZIP codes, you will be judged for being in a bad one even if you are a good person. That's why I suggest consulting this site before you register anything to make sure you don't accidentally get a TLD that is used mostly for abuse, which many of the newer ones are. https://www.spamhaus.org/statistics/tlds/ https://www.spamhaus.org/statistics/tlds/

7ewis 5y ago

I don't like the fact that the prices can wildly differ between different TLDs. I think it was nice that it was easy to recognise website.com was a website too, whereas website.wtf is less easy to identify, but then now there are more available to makes it easier to get a shorter, better name and can make the pricing more competitive, hopefully driving it lower for everyone.

axaxs 5y ago

My view, as someone who did a lot of work around it: Purely a money grab by everyone involved. In what I'd consider a more normal fashion, ICANN could have slowly picked and rolled out sensible new TLDs to operators interested. Instead, it was a free for all where you had to pay an insane fee to ICANN mafia to even apply, and get in bidding wars if multiple applications existed. If you won, you had to go find and pay your own registry, too. So, you had registries preemptively spamming local businesses convincing them to buy a tld and use that registry. Many thought they were gonna make a fortune. The only one who made a fortune was ICANN and to some extent, registries. That's probably why owners keep trying to jack up prices, they still want their windfall. Don't even get me started on how terrible ICANN is organized. The whole digital archery fiasco should be enough for nobody to ever put any faith in them. Anyone with a quarter of brain function would realize how terrible that idea is.

el-salvador 5y ago
The .sucks TLD is one that comes to mind.

PostThisTooFast 5y ago

The entire canned TLD system (and ICANN't) is a scam. TLDs should be abolished (except for the ones that are still enforced, like edu, mil, and gov), and you should be able to register anything.anythingelse. Trademark violations would be handled as they are today. The current mess is an embarrassment.

greatgib 5y ago

The worse thing with generic tld is that before tld were attributed on a kind of merit or usefulness (countries, com, org), but now it is only based on money considerations. At the beginning internet was based on a kind of democracy or gentlemen's agreements. Now, the one that has the most cash to spend, like Google or Apple or Amazon or some scammer, ça. Grave what you want. Like if it was their internet. The example of the ".dev" is good. Google can easily unilaterally decide to take over a domain that was used largely and internationally by individuals. And they are allowed to do that because they can afford it, but you, the individual, you are considered like horse shit in this system. And so you are not allowed to complain.