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Show HN: TLD Squatting
- jruohonen 3y agoInteresting! Does someone know how much money is involved in squatting a good TLD?
- bhaney 3y agoICANN charges a $185,000 evaluation fee to register a new gTLD, and they are under no obligation to approve it. They also expect you to actually run some infrastructure for your new gTLD, which has ongoing cost, and they will not approve your application if you don't have a plan for that infrastructure. There's also an ongoing fee of $6,250 per quarter per gTLD.
- jruohonen 3y agoThanks. Then it is about squatting by heavy hitters.
- DanAtC 3y agoThat initial fee is quite the racket. Quarterly's not as bad, but looking at some recent TLDs that have gone inactive you can tell those companies are desperate to save the cash: Paramount let .cbs and .showtime expire in October, and Gap let .bananarepublic and .oldnavy expire this month.
- Arnt 3y agoSome of them are desperate, perhaps. I'd guess more of them see that after ten years, Twitter still doesn't make a link when they post something like 'great content on whatever.cbs'. They have $6250 but run out of patience.
- quickthrower2 3y agoThe cost of a legal defence to just have someone read some paperwork and say yay or ney.
- captn3m0 3y agoIn case of multiple applicants, there is an auction that can happen as well. In reality, various applicants settled among themselves so there weren't many. 1/3rd of the amount raised from the fee (60k USD or so) was earmarked for a legal fees. Some of the money is being spent on a ICANN Grant Program: https://www.icann.org/grant-program-en https://www.icann.org/grant-program-en
- jwilk 3y agos/charges/charged/. The last time you could apply for a gTLD was in 2012. > The next application submission period for new gTLDs is expected to open in Q2 2026. > […] > While the application fee has not been determined, it will be set on a cost-recovery basis. The fee will ensure that the next round of the New gTLD Program is fully funded and does not require funds from ICANN's operating budget. As a point of reference, the application fee for the 2012 round of the New gTLD Program was US$185,000. https://newgtlds.icann.org/en/announcements-and-media/announcement-06nov23-en https://newgtlds.icann.org/en/announcements-and-media/announ...
- thomasfromcdnjs 3y agoI've always found the salaries of ICANN workers a bit exorbitant; because why do they actually own the intellectual property[0] and what do they actually do. https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/fy20-annual-report-expense-reimbursement-payments-directors-01oct20-en.pdf https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/fy20-annual-repo... Around ~1mill to the CEO in 2020 [0] - I say IP because I don't know the history or the network effects of how it all ends up under their control at the end of the day.
- jayceedenton 3y agoInteresting that Google owns 'here', given the competing map business Here. Also that Amazon owns 'tunes'. Many of these look like efforts to grab TLDs that would compete. The domain business seems completely broken to me. Anything remotely useful has a squatter. I dream of a day when the entire system is obsolete.
- realusername 3y agoI'm really hoping for something like namecoin (or equivalent) to take off so that finally domain owners could really be owners of their domain.
- quickthrower2 3y agoNo better than this. More $ means more squatting in both cases.
- realusername 3y agoI don't think there's any system which can truly prevent squating. I'm open to more options though if that's possible.
- quickthrower2 3y agoYes genuine competition is good and all it needs is browser consensus really.
- bickeringyokel 3y agoI have been able to pick up a handleful of useful domains like firstnamelastname.net without much effort and my total spend every year on domains is probably less than 50$. Maybe a dotcom is hard to come by but other TLD are not so bad. Your milage will totally vary, but I would say things are not totally broken, you can find decent domains at good prices if you're a l bit flexible or patient.
- boxed 3y agoAs a Scandinavian I find the squatting of .viking by a Bermuda company to be annoying.
- baobun 3y agoYou guys really can't complain after practically taking over .nu though. Similar story to .io.
- boxed 3y agoYou mean buying domains, causing money to go to an impoverished country? How dare we! :P
- Symbiote 3y agoIt's nothing at all like IO, which is a British colony/territory. Niue (NU) is a former British colony "in free association with New Zealand", and whatever the situation there it's nothing to do with Scandinavia.
- boxed 3y ago"Nu" means "now" in Swedish. So a lot of Swedes bought .nu domains because it works in Swedish. Just like I bought "och.glass" which means "and.icecream" in Swedish, even though "glass" has a different meaning in English.
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- mike_d 3y agoThis isn't squatting. ICANN specifically allowed applications as a "restricted registry" for a trademarked brand where the applicant could show that such a limitation on registrations increased the overall safety for consumers. The applicant had to demonstrate that they have broad recognition of the trademarked string (i.e. cocacola or mcdonalds). They also obviously can't profit from this type of delegation by selling registrations and no company is going to sell their brand TLD. Having every new TLD open to registration would have been a constant battle against things like real-login-page.bankofamerica and such. https://www.name.com/blog/the-different-types-of-new-gtlds-which-one-is-right-for-you https://www.name.com/blog/the-different-types-of-new-gtlds-w...
- p4bl0 3y agoSo, either ICANN could have just maintained a list a forbidden TLDs (especially for those where even the owner doesn't use it) rather than forcing these corporations to pay for them; or, the money could have been used as a kind of tax on the wealthiest to fund DNS infrastructure and lower the prices of domain names for the rest of us. That clearly didn't happen.
- captn3m0 3y agoYeah, just the interest on this windfall would be enough to lower the ICANN fees forever if treated as an endowment.
- captn3m0 3y agoThe list on the link is primarily unrestricted TLDs (which are supposed to be open to registration for everyone) but are not (yet). Examples are `.ads` by Google, or `.author` by Amazon. There are a few brand TLDs in the list as well which I consider to be legitimate squatting - `.cal`, `.baseball` are considered brand TLDs by ICANN, but Google should not have a monopoly on an entire TLD because they built Google Calendar. `.bofa` for example is a legitimate brand TLD, and is not on the list. If you think a brand TLD on this list is incorrect, corrections/additions are welcome - https://github.com/captn3m0/tld-squatting/blob/main/_data/fakebrands.yml https://github.com/captn3m0/tld-squatting/blob/main/_data/fa...
- emaro 3y agoI'm surprised .abc is owned by Disney while Alphabet had to settle for .xzy. That being said, I believe gTLDs should be open for the public, at least the short (3 to 5 letters) ones.
- andylynch 3y agoIsn’t the American Broadcasting Company one of Disney’s biggest properties?
- emaro 3y agoYes, that seems to be true. I'm not from the US and wasn't aware of the fact. Makes much more sense now.
- Gabrys1 3y agoTLDs being a suffix, XYZ make more sense to me than ABC. abc.xyz is a nice play on this.
- jwilk 3y agoFor the avoidance of doubt, the .xyz TLD is not owned by Google.
- emaro 3y agoOh... it's only abc.xyz then. My bad, thank you.
- broth 3y agoExorbitant vanity gTLDs more like it.
- some1else 3y agoOne Google-owned TLD I wish others could use is .new: - https://docs.new https://docs.new - https://sheets.new https://sheets.new - https://slides.new https://slides.new
- MattJ100 3y ago.new can be registered, but you have to use it for its stated purpose (creating a new whatever). I think they verify this after 100 days.
- hoseja 3y agoDoes this profusion of frivolous TLDs have infrastructure cost?
- 0x073 3y agoThere was never a need for new domain names. They look cool but didn't solve any problems except money for icann. Most of the time you search for a page and then use the auto complete or bookmark. If you own such a domain it's useless for mail .(blocked because of spam, e.g. xyz)
- quickthrower2 3y agoI prefer a butchered .com e.g. tadpolehq.com or trytadpole.com
- matsemann 3y agoNit pick: This isn't a "Show HN", and see it quite often lately, so I think it's worth pointing out. A showhn is: > Show HN is for something you've made that other people can play with. HN users can try it out, give you feedback, and ask questions in the thread. > Off topic: blog posts, sign-up pages, newsletters, lists, and other reading material. Those can't be tried out, so can't be Show HNs. Make a regular submission instead. https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html
- captn3m0 3y agoThanks, I wrote a lot of code for this (scraped several sources before settling on nTLD) so this was a “Show HN” post in my head by default. But you’re right.
- nake89 3y agoI made a userscript to make the table sortable. Just click the table header to sort. https://gist.github.com/nake89/da99121ef5557e99ea6ca3804e219d4f https://gist.github.com/nake89/da99121ef5557e99ea6ca3804e219... Disclaimer: ChatGPT helped me because I'm lazy.