13 ms·

Not all TLDs are Created Equal

225 points by pabs3 3y ago

DanAtC 3y ago
Never forget a resident of Christmas Island was able to bring down the most infamous .cx domain with a single complaint.
RudyStone 3y ago
[flagged]
echelon 3y ago
There shouldn't be ccTLDs. Governments should exist as individual planes within a single top-level namespace. They're crowding the commons and taking useful suffixes. But I'm also of the opinion these TLD namespaces shouldn't be bought and controlled by the highest bidders, nor domains by at volume squatters.
- hsbauauvhabzb 3y ago
  I’m more scared of TLD owners either changing ownership of domaine and/or price gouging than either of those things - if your TLD decides to 10x the cost of your domain, or sell the domain to your competitor, what are you gonna do?
  - closewith 3y ago
    Or just host an annual action, which would be the fairest way to determine the value of the domain. Still, TLD registries know that if they make domains unattractive enough, some other identifier will come along.
    - hsbauauvhabzb 3y ago
      Annual auction favours whoever has more money, which is fairly anti competitive too. ‘Other identifiers’ only happen at scale. 1000x the cost of fortune 500’s, or a single tld.
    - PeterisP 3y ago
      Kind of the whole point is that we don't want domain registrars to be able to extract "the value of the domain", quite the opposite, we could want to auction for the lowest bids for running the technical infrastructure to some appropriate standard, so that as much as possible of "the value of the domain" stays with people actually running services, not goes to someone as unearned rent of a namespace monopoly.
      - closewith 3y ago
        Well, the names obviously have value. Why would that value naturally rest with whoever registered it first? That's just another unearned monopoly.
        PeterisP 3y ago
        Because a big part of that value comes only after - and only because - whoever registered the name invested into that brand, sometimes by continued business and reputation, sometimes by marketing. For example, the name ycombinator.com has some value on its own, but I think you won't contest that the vast majority of the current value of that name arose only because a popular community was ran on this domain name for decades, and if hackernews was instead run on scombinator.com or whatever, then the value of ycombinator.com would be just a fraction of what it currently is.
    - Macha 3y ago
      It would only be fair if we assumed all people had an exact equal amount of resources and therefore if person A outbids person B, it's because it means more to person A than person B, rather than say person A having 100x the resources of person B. We also don't force auction land off every year, because the costs (both financial and social) of that churn and insecurity are way worse than the gains from the resources being allocated for maximum economic value.
  - throwawayqqq11 3y ago
    Make an .onion mirror and educate the masses. There should be a way to abuse the tor network as a dns into the clear web.
    - hsbauauvhabzb 3y ago
      Ah yes, grandma you should learn how to use tor so you can visit my e-commerce site through an obscure url that’s meaningless to you just be sure not to get scammed.
      - maxcoder4 3y ago
        Tor browser is not harder to use then Firefox or Chrome. And people don't type urls, they click on links.
        CRConrad 3y ago
        I think I'm "people", and I type URLs.
      - throwawayqqq11 3y ago
        Tor has solved the centralized name service problem. Once it gets adopted up by browsers, your grandma only has to bookmark weird names.
    - h0p3 3y ago
      Unironically, I agree to the first claim, and I think i2p merits even higher consideration. Worthy attempts to resolve Zooko's triangle are going to require us to have trust in some stack, and it's hard to decentralize that appropriately. Namecoin may be one of the few examples of a b-word worth considering here. Ultimately, however, if the workers are to own the means of productions, there is no substitute for using and owning keys (and if that means people have to rely upon those they know and trust to assist them in this, then so be it). I don't predict that convention will arise in general, but I do prescribe it.
- silisili 3y ago
  Disagree. ccTLDs at least let you know you're dealing with the country in question - revenue.gov.uk is more trustworthy than revenue.gov.buzz or some other rando gTLD. People should generally just stop buying ccTLD domains for personal use. .ly, .ai, tv isn't as necessary or cool as they think it is.
  - benjojo12 3y ago
    Amusingly, the project/company that the person you're replying to is using .AI domain (see their HN bio), so clearly their opinions about how ccTLDs shouldn't exist can't be that strong
    - echelon 3y ago
      It shouldn't be a ccTLD. Look at these arbitrary .ai ccTLD rules [1], as originally posted by p4bl0: > The terms and conditions of .ai domain names include things such as "not asking for investors" (without an Anguilla license to be a bank, broker, public company, ICO, exchange, or gambling site) and "not violating copyrights", both of which are… complicated for a lot of AI-related startups that chose to use a .ai domain. That's arbitrary and horrible. Thoughts shouldn't be so encumbered. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39367730 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39367730
      - seszett 3y ago
        These don't seem arbitrary but totally in line with what a ccTLD means. Domains with the .ai TLD must obviously respect Anguilla law, just like the use .gov is restricted by the US government.
    - krab 3y ago
      They mean .ai should exist but it shouldn't be managed by a foreign country. ;-)
    - tsimionescu 3y ago
      I think they believe that .ai should exist as a TLD, but not as a ccTLD. They'd basically like the Anguilles to not be in control of this TLD. Using it despite that is not inconsistent. Not that I agree with them, by the way. ccTLDs have to exist, countries have an obvious write to host their own TLDs without having to rely on others.
- SahAssar 3y ago
  > Governments should exist as individual planes within a single top-level namespace. Isn't that exactly how it works? The top level namespace is ".", every goverment controls a namespace under that. Or do you mean that we should have .se.gov, .uk.gov and no government control over non-.gov domains?
  - JoshTriplett 3y ago
    > Or do you mean that we should have .se.gov, .uk.gov and no government control over non-.gov domains? Yes, that would be a substantial improvement.
    - quickthrower2 3y ago
      uk.gob us.gob etc. though. Why should we use the English word for government?
      - SahAssar 3y ago
        Because for most international standards we based it either on french or english. Recently (the last half century or so) it's been a lot more english, which is nice since it's the most widely spoken language.
      - midasuni 3y ago
        OP is a classic imperial citizen with no concept of the world outside his empire
        samatman 3y ago
        Is http the correct abbreviation for your language's translation of hypertext transport protocol?
- lifthrasiir 3y ago
  > Governments should exist as individual planes within a single top-level namespace. Do you want something like `foo.us.com` (instead of `foo.com.us`)? That doesn't sound like a meaningful difference, and can be worse than the status quo especially given that different governments would want a different set of second-level domains anyway.
  - nativeit 3y ago
    Not really relevant, but "us.com" is a weird type of sub-top-level domain now, I think some other "cc.com" domains have popped up as well.
- quectophoton 3y ago
  I have mixed feelings on this. On one hand, as an outsider it seems like every country needs to bow down their heads to the North American ICANN to ask for permission to have their own TLD listed in their root servers (even if those servers are already located in the country that's asking for permissions). But on the other hand, even if every country actually owned their root DNS servers and were completely independent from each other on this regard, everyone already expects the internet to work a certain way. So keeping things like they are now is the more pragmatic way to go. It would be doable in an alternate universe, e.g. every domain is local except those who have a specific TLD for international stuff. Similar to how country calling codes work; all numbers are national unless you use "+something" or "00something". So companies would have "home advantage" with their domain names because users from their own country wouldn't need the international TLD. (Yes, there's issues and things to think about if things were done that way, and I can certainly make this message longer, but everyone everywhere is already used to how things work now so there's not much point.) There's a similar "issue" with IP addresses (which are controlled by North American IANA (which is controlled by North American ICANN)), but in that case it's easier to solve because they are more invisible, not something the common person deals with daily.
- p4bl0 3y ago
  That's clearly a very bad idea. Maybe .gov was supposed to be that initially? The USA have it for themselves alone. Thankfully other countries have their ccTLD and can reserve a subdomain for their government official websites, like .gouv.fr in France, because they can't have .fr.gov (which would look strange anyway, since "gov" is a shorthand for the english word). And this is not the only instance. Initially, the .edu was for all education institutions, but at some point it was unilaterally decided that only higher education institutions in the USA should be authorized to use such domains, which is a shame. For institutions still using it outside the US because they registered it before this decision, a single mishaps like missing the renewal deadline and they won't ever be able to get their domain back. And .edu can only be renewed in the last two weeks before expiration (thankfully now it is possible to pay for three years at once rather than a single one but that's recent). So, the history of US-centric management of the internet strongly suggest that it's a good idea that countries have and can control their own TLD. Even if a few people feel like their vanity domain name should use what happens to be a ccTLD.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - kube-system 3y ago
    > Maybe .gov was supposed to be that initially? The USA have it for themselves alone. .gov dates to 1984, back when the internet was the ARPA-Internet. At the time the whole thing was a US military network that some research institutions were permitted to connect to. .edu was never intended to be used for every school in the world, just the institutions collaborating on US government research. https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc920 https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc920 If you think about the history of the internet from today's international perspective, it sounds strange, because it never was that from the beginning. It always was a US military computer network that grew way beyond the initial intent. It wasn't until 2016 that the US government decided to hand over control to the international community.
    - p4bl0 3y ago
      > .edu was never intended to be used for every school in the world There was a time when .edu domains were attributed upon simple requests as long as you were an education related institution, from wherever in the world. It only later became paid, and then restricted to US institutions in 2001 (that is 16 years after the creation of the .edu TLD, contrary to what you say). I know this because I inherited the management of such a domain for a French university directly from the person who created it back then and who told me the whole history of how they got hold of this domain name. I insist on saying "institutions" and not "schools" because it's what I can see. Examples still in use in France includes polytechnique.edu [1] but also snes.edu, which is the website of the main workers union for middle and high school teachers in France (SNES-FSU). Also, note that nothing in its text seems to limit the scope of the RFC 920, the one you linked, to the US. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89cole_polytechnique https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89cole_polytechnique
- midasuni 3y ago
  How’s the connectivity in Anguilla?
- zokier 3y ago
  There shouldn't be any gTLDs. Registrations for legacy TLDs should have closed when ccTLDs were introduced. There is no other generally accepted division of world except countries with their sovereignity. All entities with presence on internet are generally subject to some country. The handful of other entities (UN etc) can be handled as special cases.
p4bl0 3y ago
About this, it didn't get traction but yesterday I submitted this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39356410 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39356410 The terms and conditions of .ai domain names include things such as "not asking for investors" (without an Anguilla license to be a bank, broker, public company, ICO, exchange, or gambling site) and "not violating copyrights", both of which are… complicated for a lot of AI-related startups that chose to use a .ai domain.
- rvnx 3y ago
  This is the much more interesting news / fact, people relying on a weak .ai TLD for their billion dollar idea.
  - nottorp 3y ago
    Most billion dollar ideas are worth about 2 cents aren't they?
    - Sohcahtoa82 3y ago
      The idea is worth 2 cents. The successful execution could be worth $2b.
- chippiewill 3y ago
  They clearly tie "not asking for investors" to "don't be a scam", so I don't think any legitimate AI startup has a concern on that front. Most startups aren't exactly pitching for investment on their home page anyway.
agos 3y ago
I remember .ly domains, at the time widely used as url shorteners, having troubles in times of political unrest.
- stigi 3y ago
  In a few days my domain `foodba.by` is expiring after I stopped transferring funds to Belarus after the role the country took during the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Glad that side project never took of :-)
  - drexlspivey 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - urbandw311er 3y ago
      Not surprised you’re being downvoted — it comes across as pretty immature to sneer at individuals taking a stance against something they don’t believe in. Shame on you.
      - drexlspivey 3y ago
        How does not paying a registrar (a private company) hurt the government in any way?
        sofixa 3y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boycott https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boycott For a successful example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Apartheid_Movement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Apartheid_Movement
        hnbad 3y ago
        It's really more like going vegan. Individual actions are not a boycott. Boycotts require organization across a broad enough group of individuals that they can achieve a critical mass. Calling this a boycott reminds me of the young leftists who pop up on social media announcing a "general strike" with zero preparation. That doesn't mean it's wrong or silly. If you don't feel comfortable giving money to an entity no matter how large, it's your prerogative to stop doing so. But you shouldn't mistake that isolated action by one individual for political activism.
nemetroid 3y ago
My local ccTLD answers to the democratic government on which I vote. ICANN is a foreign entity and answers to the US government.
- throwaway11460 3y ago
  My TLD answering to the democratic government on which I have 1 of 10 million votes - and most of it not going the way I'd like - is my worst fear.
  - WindyMiller 3y ago
    Still, if that's your worst fear, at least you must have a pretty good government.
    - throwaway11460 3y ago
      No, it's just the only thing left where they can touch me.
  - Macha 3y ago
    Better it answers to a board of directors where you have 0 votes?
    - throwaway11460 3y ago
      Yes, that board of directors is motivated to keep their revenue stream. A state doesn't care, it can just steal more (not saying all taxes are stealing, but it is in my home country).
  - Gormo 3y ago
    ...especially if 9.9 million of those votes are being cast by people on the basis of questions completely unrelated to TLD governance, and who may not even be aware that such a thing exists. I've never understood the model of having a single democratic process be the arbiter of every issue. It just allows gamesmanship where factions can play up issue X to win votes, then use the political power they obtain to push their agenda on completely unrelated issue Y. I suspect this is a major motivation for a lot of the exaggerated political polarization around symbolic "culture war" issues.
seszett 3y ago
As always, these articles seem to be written from a US or "international" point of view that doesn't seem to understand that country TLDs are actually, at least initially, intended for the people of that country. They are great, absolutely useful, and much lower risk than gTLDs operated by questionable commercial entities. But obviously they depend on the country they represent. I would argue that the main problem is that they should never have been available to entities that don't have ties to the country. That would have solved most of these problems that seem to boil down to "when you pick a random country TLD because it looks cute but you don't know much about the country, sometimes you're surprised by that country's policies".
- bux93 3y ago
  Also, it's not like gTLDs don't have weird policies. A ton of them are a money grab trying to extort money from trademark owners, and they might disappear or raise prices overnight. Com/net/org repeatedly tried shenanigans in the past. Replacing "do your due diligence" with a heuristic "cc = bad!" is not advisable.
  - nytesky 3y ago
    Why did com net org domains try in past, price gouging?
    - diggan 3y ago
      Two events that come to mind: - The attempt to remove price caps on .org and .info by ICANN, seen as testing the waters for doing the same with .com if the cap removal was successful, which it wasn't - PIR (operator of .org) was almost sold to some shell company which was gonna transform it into a for-profit from it's current non-profit, this was blocked by ICANN if I remember correctly Maybe there are more that I don't know about/don't remember
      - donmcronald 3y ago
        > The attempt to remove price caps on .org and .info by ICANN I thought those were removed for .org. Did this [1] get reversed? 1. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/07/icann-eliminates-org-domain-price-caps-despite-lopsided-opposition/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/07/icann-eliminates...
NoboruWataya 3y ago
> To register (and maintain) a domain name ending in .eu, you have to be a resident of the EU. Tiny nit (and I only bring it up because it is relevant to me), but you can also own a .eu domain if you are a citizen of the EU (or EEA), wherever you are resident. This rule may have been brought in as a result of Brexit, as the Europa website says: > Previously restricted to residents of EU/EEA countries, any EU citizen can now register a .eu domain name wherever they are in the world. https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/faqs/eu-domain-name-questions-and-answers https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/faqs/eu-domain-name... The point still stand, of course. It was (and remains) a headache for a lot of people. I still haven't told my registrar I no longer live in the EU because although I am (as an EU citizen) legally entitled to my .eu domain, I don't trust them to understand that.
- joelccr 3y ago
  Some EU countries also have the same policy for their ccTLDs, although I believe the EU rules are that they aren't allowed to restrict to just their own country's citizens/residents like others worldwide do, they can only restrict non-EU registration. Caused me some grief post-Brexit when my firstname.tld domain happened to be some French islands and AFNIC started indicating they'd enforce it. Fortunately I have the .uk now.
  - tialaramex 3y ago
    It wouldn't make any sense to require a specific EU country. The EU's Freedom of Movement rules mean that on the whole all of any EU member state's citizens are welcome to go wherever they please within the EU, so you can't require "citizenship" or "residence" of a specific country. The way this comes about is interesting. First up the EC (the predecessor entity to the EU) is a trade bloc, so it wants to ensure you can move say money and goods around, not much use being a trading bloc if it's there's a lot of taxes and paperwork to move your partly finished Doodads from Germany to France, then when they're finished ship them to Italy for sale. But wait, if we can only move money and goods we create a race to the bottom, the workers would be trapped, so move production to wherever the most desperate workers are and pay them as little as possible. That doesn't sound like we've made anything better. So they say workers can move too, if you want to live somewhere with better pay, or a nicer climate, that's cool. And then the EU's court says well, what exactly is a worker? Is Bob a worker if he just moved to your country hoping to find a job? Does he get to bring his elderly grandmother? She's not going to get a job, how is she a worker? So they decide no, not just workers, all people. All EU people are welcome to move anywhere inside the EU.
donatj 3y ago
I remember in the late 90s there were at least a couple companies promoting alternative TLDs outside the standard set. I have no idea how that was implemented. Just special DNS servers with extra TLDs? Or something more involved on the OS levels? Seems like there could be an appetite for such a thing these days. TLDs outside ICANNs control.
- seszett 3y ago
  It was an alternative DNS but I forgot which it was. You had to switch to these DNS servers, which the added "benefit" that DNS queries returning NXDOMAIN were hijacked to show you ads. I don't think this has any usefulness anymore, since gTLDs exist.
  - donatj 3y ago
    gTLDs cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. You can run your own DNS servers for waaay less. I think the usefulness could come from community controlled TLDs. Might not be a mainstream thing but free libre TLDs for open source projects and what not?
    - Towaway69 3y ago
      Something similar to what Let's Encrypt did to the SSL Certificate market. Before they came along, SSL root certificate were way over priced and overnight, the market simply disappeared. The same should happen to gTLDs.
    - Ayesh 3y ago
      IIRC, the cost is ~$200k one time and ~$25/yr. Shitcoins get magnitudes higher crowd funding. Not impossible to do at all.
    - alfons_foobar 3y ago
      On a technical level, this is very simple - just change the list of DNS root servers on all "participating" machines to point to your own new nameservers. But then you have the problem: Who manages your community controlled domains? Who keeps track of who owns which domain?
unlog 3y ago
My ccTLD gives me much more confidence than some random company that rents TLDs governed by who knows. It's provided by my ISP which is owned by the state, which serves the population.
- arielcostas 3y ago
  > which is owned by the state, which serves the population Until it doesn't. Corruption and coups are a thing.
  - besofrrn 3y ago
    [dead]
  - Aerbil313 3y ago
    Then what? I know DNS has a terrible centralized design, but what is the alternative?
- usrbinbash 3y ago
  Good for you, but... a) that's not the case in many places, as demonstrated by what happened in Afghanistan, where control over the ccTLD now lies with a group of religious extremists b) you have no guarantee that the happy state of affairs with your ccTLD will continue. Governments change, and so do politics.
  - hnbad 3y ago
    Sure but all of this is true for gTLDs, with a different set of caveats. Corporations don't exist in a vacuum, they're subject to the laws of the jurisdictions they're incorporated in. Corporations aren't permanent and unchanging, they can pivot in unexpected ways or enact arbitrary decisions that may affect you. Most people just get to pretend gTLDs are safe from politics because most gTLDs are ultimately under US jurisidiction and even outside the US we often treat that as the default. The mistake of the people using dot-af domains was to treat af as if this is also true for them - which even prior to the US retreat wasn't a safe bet. What's also missing from the discourse around `queer.af` is that they were merely one domain of many affected because the Taliban withdrew from Gandi (among others?), not just the people running that Mastodon instance. It's just the most obvious example because of the nature of social media.
nicky0 3y ago
I'm still salty about the .eu thing. I was an EU citizen for 42 years of my life and I used a .eu domain as my primary email address for many years. Not only did the EU decide I could not longer have it, they've made it available for anyone to register. Hundreds of my website registrations were tied to that email address. Thankfully I had sufficient advance notice to tediously re-register the majority of sites to a non-.eu domain email. But there are still a few I didn't catch. Thanks for that, EU. (Edit: thanks also to the Brexit voters, yes .... but I still contend that the EU could have made an accomodation for existing registrants to hold onto their domains, instead of take them away and re-list them for anyone to get. Edit 2: Of course, any Brit well-resourced enough to set up some kind of shell company in EU to hold on to their domain will have been able to keep it. So the claim that "UK people should not be able to own .eu domain. It's confusing and misleading" does not hold water ... it's perfectly possible to do so even today by various trickery. So this decision only affects regular people. Not big business or the very wealthy.)
- dijit 3y ago
  I guess it’s a weird thought experiment, but what if scotland left the UK, should they still have rights to use .uk tld’s? Maybe yes for historical reasons but it is a twee bit odd to have what is essentially a foreign entity representing themselves with your name. Do you UK? Or have you always resided outside the EU?
  - nicky0 3y ago
    I would argue for a "grandfathering in" provision. Both in the Brexit case and your hypothetical Scexit. So, if Scotland became independent, the remaining UK might close the .uk ccTLD for new Scottish registrations but existing domain holders should have the right to retain their registrations indefinitely. I think it's ethically wrong to forcible take away someone's domain name without exceptionally good reason (such as abusive use of domain or whatever). (Yes, I am a UK citizen. By "the .eu thing" I was referring to the situation as described in the article.)
    - kolp 3y ago
xg15 3y ago
The abstraction layer the internet is implementing on top of geography is proving increasingly leaky these days. I think the irony in this incident is that it might actually strengthen the original purpose of ccTLDs, as namespaces for domains within a particular country. Because it shows that, no matter what your domain vendor or even the country's registrar tells you the domain is ultimately controlled by the country's government and is therefore subject to the whims and fate of that country.
- Karrot_Kream 3y ago
  The concept of the domain on today's internet is a bit anachronistic on the internet these days. People just want to get "places" on the internet, not to addresses.
  - autoexec 3y ago
    What is the alternative? IP addresses? AOL Keywords? Abstracting away the whole thing and forcing people to only connect to your webserver via a mobile app? Domains are still the best thing anyone has managed to come up with. We just need better administration of them since ICANN sold out.
    - Palomides 3y ago
      most people with a laptop/desktop will type "facebook" into the address bar of their browser, which will do a search in whatever search engine was provided as the default, then click on the first link they have little to no conception of what a TLD is actually, most people use an app on their phone for everything and avoid the web browser I don't say this to insult the average person, this is simply what I see non-engineers do
      - besofrrn 3y ago
        [dead]
    - kalkr 3y ago
pedrovhb 3y ago
Imagine if one day we come up with a technology that allows resolving _arbitrary strings_ and doesn't cost multiple times the cost of the hosting structure itself.
- diggan 3y ago
  We have that technology already, it's called DNS. Everything else is people/organization problems, that won't be solved by adding more technology to the fire.
lynx23 3y ago
Abusing ccTLDs for things which are not relevant to the particular country just because they TLD sounds or reads cool is where the problem began. .cc, .rs, just to name some. I know it has become out of fashion these days, but countries have sovereignty. If the registrar thinks they want to decline a particular subdomain, thats their call. And all international activists can go to hell.
- donkulous 3y ago
  ".to" was the first big one I remember from the late 90s. You could get a forwarded address to your geocities or angelfire URL from something like "welcome.to/myawesomesite" or "jump.to/mycoolpage"
quickthrower2 3y ago
I get the impression that .com is safer than .bananas or whatever. Is this true? I would settle for a not so good .com for the safety.
- Ayesh 3y ago
  .com is run by Verizon, and .bananas will be by another for-profit company (most likely Donuts). If the .com prices were to be increased, there will be a huge backlash. As for .bananas, not so much. .bananas might get blocked at TLD level, .com unlikely so.
  - redwall_hp 3y ago
    Verisign administers .com and .net domains. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verisign https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verisign
    - pitaj 3y ago
      I imagine it was an auto-correct typo.
    - quickthrower2 3y ago
      Never knew about Reston, interesting little city.
- Macha 3y ago
  There is an agreement for .com and .org (and formerly .net, but not anymore) that registry price increases are capped at 10% a year, and they aren't allowed designate in demand domains as more expensive premium domains. There was an attempt by the .org operators to renegotiate that, but it was stopped by public pressure.
- userbinator 3y ago
  I tend to subconsciously skip over "weird" TLD sites in search results as they are usually SEO spam.
Kognito 3y ago
The article goes on about how this is “bigotry” by the Afghan authorities for suspending queer.af yet doesn’t bother to consider whether any other domains were affected. Saw at least one other report yesterday and I suspect it’s not the only one: https://x.com/wesbos/status/1757418308050079762 https://x.com/wesbos/status/1757418308050079762
olivierduval 3y ago
Actually, ccTLD might be a VERY GOOD thing: if I buy something from a ".com" website, it can be from anywhere in the world... and I would have no recourse in case of scam. On the other side: if I buy something from my own country, I know that the law will protect me because the TLD tell me that the vendor has at least a company in my country, subject to my country laws
- organsnyder 3y ago
  Relying on a site's TLD to verify a company's location is rarely (never?) a good idea.
- razakel 3y ago
  What exactly is stopping me from registering a company at a PO box, creating myfakeshop.yourcountry, taking your money, and disappearing?
crossroadsguy 3y ago
ccTLDs are controlled by an authority that IANA decides and IANA is controlled by the Govt of USA. So we know eventually who controls the domains. So maybe we come to 'all TLDs are actually created equal', eventually. (my point is - in the end USA controls all the domains, maybe via ICANN/IANA.)
vdaea 3y ago
>After Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the Ukranian Vice Prime Minister asked ICANN to suspend ccTLDs associated with Russia. What's the point of ccTLDs if the US, a potential enemy, can still pull the rug out from under your feet?
- Macha 3y ago
  Here's what happens if it goes ahead. Russia (and allied countries) ISPs update their config to point to root servers that do resolve .ru and .su, and they can then fallback to the usual servers for the rest of the world. And hey, maybe now they have that infra, they decide that in Russia, whitehouse.gov points somewhere else now
- trimethylpurine 3y ago
  They expect that the US won't do that because it would violate Americans' expectations about good and evil.
  - lpribis 3y ago
    Sure, the US has never done _anything_ that violates expectations about good and evil.
    - trimethylpurine 3y ago
      Of course they have. But in Western countries governments still need to sell their position to the public or it will typically cost them an election. So, typically, it's safe to expect on simple issues like letting Libya keep their ccTLD that they won't bother. The article gave another example about Ukraine where, as expected, they didn't bother.
- kube-system 3y ago
  Anybody can ask anyone to suspend a ccTLD. Doesn't mean they're going to do it.
deadbabe 3y ago
Will we ever live in a time where TLD conventions are abandoned entirely and websites just use a hashtag or something?
- acheron 3y ago
  Yes, that time was 1996-2002 or so, and they were called "AOL keywords".
- Aerbil313 3y ago
  This is a solved problem. AFAIK there are not one, but multiple solutions for performant global routing without centralization. DHTs are an example.
- palata 3y ago
  There is no need; the current system works. Just don't register your domain in Afghanistan if you don't want to depend on... Afghanistan.
nottorp 3y ago
> While ICANN kinda-sorta has something to do with ccTLDs (in the sense that it makes them exist on the Internet), it has no authority to control how a ccTLD is managed. Right, like ICANN's .com and other traditional domains are managed fairly and can be trusted :) Isn't it .com domains that are generally easily taken hostage by cybersquatters because of dubious rules and lowest cost possible administration?
Donaldzibe 3y ago
[flagged]
2Gkashmiri 3y ago
Presstv.com is a domain siezed by US government that belongs to a foreign news agency (based out of iran) This means that the .com TLD is at the whims of US govt, just like .AF is at the whims of afghan govt. If you are at the mercy of US govt for .com you should be at the mercy of afghan govt as well for their cctld. What's the problem here?
pimlottc 3y ago
> Unfortunately, ccTLD registries have a disconcerting habit of changing their minds on whether they serve their geographic locality, such as when auDA decided to declare an open season in the .au namespace some years ago. I think this is referring to these licensing rules changes effective April 2021: https://www.auda.org.au/au-domain-names/policies-and-compliance/au-licensing-rules https://www.auda.org.au/au-domain-names/policies-and-complia...
ChrisArchitect 3y ago
Related recent piece of this discussion: Queer.af Mastodon instance has been shut down by the Taliban https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39348923 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39348923
- ChrisArchitect 3y ago
  And one about the flipside/money side of things that was omitted from the OP: .ai website registrations are a windfall for tiny Anguilla https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39194477 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39194477
tomoyoirl 3y ago
Disappointed to see no mention yet of Tuvalu, the tiny low-lying island nation (imperiled by global warming etc) where something like 10% of the government income is funded by sales of .tv domains, which is just such an interesting case.
gggmaster 3y ago
As if there are guarantees that gTLDs won't be sold to shady entities.
glub103011 3y ago
[dead]
ceeam 3y ago
> I don’t think any gTLD operator will be invading a neighbouring country any time soon. I would guess people in Yemen (most recently) would find this statement somewhat funny.
- CRConrad 3y ago
  Also, isn't .ru still a thing? (As is .us, for that matter.)
bitwize 3y ago
I think we should petition ICANN for a .asfuck TLD, so the queer.af people have somewhere to go to that's less politically fraught.
teddyh 3y ago
Summary: Many countries are bad. Therefore, avoid them all.
tempestn 3y ago
One other thing I'd note is to avoid using the new gTLDs like .email or .mail for an email address. I tried it and discovered just how many bad form validators and spam filters there are out there.
- paulnpace 3y ago
  What year did you experiment with that? I know of one person currently using .email TLD and hasn't reported issues. I started using .guru not long after it launched and definitely experienced the issues you describe, including my residential ISP not being able to resolve.
  - tempestn 3y ago
    I switched away from it in 2021. Certainly most websites handled it fine, and most of my email went through. But in both cases, there were notable exceptions compared to using a .com domain.

225 points by pabs3 3y ago

Never forget a resident of Christmas Island was able to bring down the most infamous .cx domain with a single complaint.

RudyStone 3y ago

[flagged]

echelon 3y ago

There shouldn't be ccTLDs. Governments should exist as individual planes within a single top-level namespace. They're crowding the commons and taking useful suffixes. But I'm also of the opinion these TLD namespaces shouldn't be bought and controlled by the highest bidders, nor domains by at volume squatters.

hsbauauvhabzb 3y ago
I’m more scared of TLD owners either changing ownership of domaine and/or price gouging than either of those things - if your TLD decides to 10x the cost of your domain, or sell the domain to your competitor, what are you gonna do?
- closewith 3y ago
  Or just host an annual action, which would be the fairest way to determine the value of the domain. Still, TLD registries know that if they make domains unattractive enough, some other identifier will come along.
  - hsbauauvhabzb 3y ago
    Annual auction favours whoever has more money, which is fairly anti competitive too. ‘Other identifiers’ only happen at scale. 1000x the cost of fortune 500’s, or a single tld.
  - PeterisP 3y ago
    Kind of the whole point is that we don't want domain registrars to be able to extract "the value of the domain", quite the opposite, we could want to auction for the lowest bids for running the technical infrastructure to some appropriate standard, so that as much as possible of "the value of the domain" stays with people actually running services, not goes to someone as unearned rent of a namespace monopoly.
    - closewith 3y ago
      Well, the names obviously have value. Why would that value naturally rest with whoever registered it first? That's just another unearned monopoly.
      - PeterisP 3y ago
        Because a big part of that value comes only after - and only because - whoever registered the name invested into that brand, sometimes by continued business and reputation, sometimes by marketing. For example, the name ycombinator.com has some value on its own, but I think you won't contest that the vast majority of the current value of that name arose only because a popular community was ran on this domain name for decades, and if hackernews was instead run on scombinator.com or whatever, then the value of ycombinator.com would be just a fraction of what it currently is.
  - Macha 3y ago
    It would only be fair if we assumed all people had an exact equal amount of resources and therefore if person A outbids person B, it's because it means more to person A than person B, rather than say person A having 100x the resources of person B. We also don't force auction land off every year, because the costs (both financial and social) of that churn and insecurity are way worse than the gains from the resources being allocated for maximum economic value.
- throwawayqqq11 3y ago
  Make an .onion mirror and educate the masses. There should be a way to abuse the tor network as a dns into the clear web.
  - hsbauauvhabzb 3y ago
    Ah yes, grandma you should learn how to use tor so you can visit my e-commerce site through an obscure url that’s meaningless to you just be sure not to get scammed.
    - maxcoder4 3y ago
      Tor browser is not harder to use then Firefox or Chrome. And people don't type urls, they click on links.
      - CRConrad 3y ago
        I think I'm "people", and I type URLs.
    - throwawayqqq11 3y ago
      Tor has solved the centralized name service problem. Once it gets adopted up by browsers, your grandma only has to bookmark weird names.
  - h0p3 3y ago
    Unironically, I agree to the first claim, and I think i2p merits even higher consideration. Worthy attempts to resolve Zooko's triangle are going to require us to have trust in some stack, and it's hard to decentralize that appropriately. Namecoin may be one of the few examples of a b-word worth considering here. Ultimately, however, if the workers are to own the means of productions, there is no substitute for using and owning keys (and if that means people have to rely upon those they know and trust to assist them in this, then so be it). I don't predict that convention will arise in general, but I do prescribe it.
silisili 3y ago
Disagree. ccTLDs at least let you know you're dealing with the country in question - revenue.gov.uk is more trustworthy than revenue.gov.buzz or some other rando gTLD. People should generally just stop buying ccTLD domains for personal use. .ly, .ai, tv isn't as necessary or cool as they think it is.
- benjojo12 3y ago
  Amusingly, the project/company that the person you're replying to is using .AI domain (see their HN bio), so clearly their opinions about how ccTLDs shouldn't exist can't be that strong
  - echelon 3y ago
    It shouldn't be a ccTLD. Look at these arbitrary .ai ccTLD rules [1], as originally posted by p4bl0: > The terms and conditions of .ai domain names include things such as "not asking for investors" (without an Anguilla license to be a bank, broker, public company, ICO, exchange, or gambling site) and "not violating copyrights", both of which are… complicated for a lot of AI-related startups that chose to use a .ai domain. That's arbitrary and horrible. Thoughts shouldn't be so encumbered. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39367730 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39367730
    - seszett 3y ago
      These don't seem arbitrary but totally in line with what a ccTLD means. Domains with the .ai TLD must obviously respect Anguilla law, just like the use .gov is restricted by the US government.
  - krab 3y ago
    They mean .ai should exist but it shouldn't be managed by a foreign country. ;-)
  - tsimionescu 3y ago
    I think they believe that .ai should exist as a TLD, but not as a ccTLD. They'd basically like the Anguilles to not be in control of this TLD. Using it despite that is not inconsistent. Not that I agree with them, by the way. ccTLDs have to exist, countries have an obvious write to host their own TLDs without having to rely on others.
SahAssar 3y ago
> Governments should exist as individual planes within a single top-level namespace. Isn't that exactly how it works? The top level namespace is ".", every goverment controls a namespace under that. Or do you mean that we should have .se.gov, .uk.gov and no government control over non-.gov domains?
- JoshTriplett 3y ago
  > Or do you mean that we should have .se.gov, .uk.gov and no government control over non-.gov domains? Yes, that would be a substantial improvement.
  - quickthrower2 3y ago
    uk.gob us.gob etc. though. Why should we use the English word for government?
    - SahAssar 3y ago
      Because for most international standards we based it either on french or english. Recently (the last half century or so) it's been a lot more english, which is nice since it's the most widely spoken language.
    - midasuni 3y ago
      OP is a classic imperial citizen with no concept of the world outside his empire
      - samatman 3y ago
        Is http the correct abbreviation for your language's translation of hypertext transport protocol?
lifthrasiir 3y ago
> Governments should exist as individual planes within a single top-level namespace. Do you want something like `foo.us.com` (instead of `foo.com.us`)? That doesn't sound like a meaningful difference, and can be worse than the status quo especially given that different governments would want a different set of second-level domains anyway.
- nativeit 3y ago
  Not really relevant, but "us.com" is a weird type of sub-top-level domain now, I think some other "cc.com" domains have popped up as well.
quectophoton 3y ago
I have mixed feelings on this. On one hand, as an outsider it seems like every country needs to bow down their heads to the North American ICANN to ask for permission to have their own TLD listed in their root servers (even if those servers are already located in the country that's asking for permissions). But on the other hand, even if every country actually owned their root DNS servers and were completely independent from each other on this regard, everyone already expects the internet to work a certain way. So keeping things like they are now is the more pragmatic way to go. It would be doable in an alternate universe, e.g. every domain is local except those who have a specific TLD for international stuff. Similar to how country calling codes work; all numbers are national unless you use "+something" or "00something". So companies would have "home advantage" with their domain names because users from their own country wouldn't need the international TLD. (Yes, there's issues and things to think about if things were done that way, and I can certainly make this message longer, but everyone everywhere is already used to how things work now so there's not much point.) There's a similar "issue" with IP addresses (which are controlled by North American IANA (which is controlled by North American ICANN)), but in that case it's easier to solve because they are more invisible, not something the common person deals with daily.
p4bl0 3y ago
That's clearly a very bad idea. Maybe .gov was supposed to be that initially? The USA have it for themselves alone. Thankfully other countries have their ccTLD and can reserve a subdomain for their government official websites, like .gouv.fr in France, because they can't have .fr.gov (which would look strange anyway, since "gov" is a shorthand for the english word). And this is not the only instance. Initially, the .edu was for all education institutions, but at some point it was unilaterally decided that only higher education institutions in the USA should be authorized to use such domains, which is a shame. For institutions still using it outside the US because they registered it before this decision, a single mishaps like missing the renewal deadline and they won't ever be able to get their domain back. And .edu can only be renewed in the last two weeks before expiration (thankfully now it is possible to pay for three years at once rather than a single one but that's recent). So, the history of US-centric management of the internet strongly suggest that it's a good idea that countries have and can control their own TLD. Even if a few people feel like their vanity domain name should use what happens to be a ccTLD.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- kube-system 3y ago
  > Maybe .gov was supposed to be that initially? The USA have it for themselves alone. .gov dates to 1984, back when the internet was the ARPA-Internet. At the time the whole thing was a US military network that some research institutions were permitted to connect to. .edu was never intended to be used for every school in the world, just the institutions collaborating on US government research. https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc920 https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc920 If you think about the history of the internet from today's international perspective, it sounds strange, because it never was that from the beginning. It always was a US military computer network that grew way beyond the initial intent. It wasn't until 2016 that the US government decided to hand over control to the international community.
  - p4bl0 3y ago
    > .edu was never intended to be used for every school in the world There was a time when .edu domains were attributed upon simple requests as long as you were an education related institution, from wherever in the world. It only later became paid, and then restricted to US institutions in 2001 (that is 16 years after the creation of the .edu TLD, contrary to what you say). I know this because I inherited the management of such a domain for a French university directly from the person who created it back then and who told me the whole history of how they got hold of this domain name. I insist on saying "institutions" and not "schools" because it's what I can see. Examples still in use in France includes polytechnique.edu [1] but also snes.edu, which is the website of the main workers union for middle and high school teachers in France (SNES-FSU). Also, note that nothing in its text seems to limit the scope of the RFC 920, the one you linked, to the US. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89cole_polytechnique https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89cole_polytechnique
midasuni 3y ago
How’s the connectivity in Anguilla?
zokier 3y ago
There shouldn't be any gTLDs. Registrations for legacy TLDs should have closed when ccTLDs were introduced. There is no other generally accepted division of world except countries with their sovereignity. All entities with presence on internet are generally subject to some country. The handful of other entities (UN etc) can be handled as special cases.

p4bl0 3y ago

About this, it didn't get traction but yesterday I submitted this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39356410 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39356410 The terms and conditions of .ai domain names include things such as "not asking for investors" (without an Anguilla license to be a bank, broker, public company, ICO, exchange, or gambling site) and "not violating copyrights", both of which are… complicated for a lot of AI-related startups that chose to use a .ai domain.

rvnx 3y ago
This is the much more interesting news / fact, people relying on a weak .ai TLD for their billion dollar idea.
- nottorp 3y ago
  Most billion dollar ideas are worth about 2 cents aren't they?
  - Sohcahtoa82 3y ago
    The idea is worth 2 cents. The successful execution could be worth $2b.
chippiewill 3y ago
They clearly tie "not asking for investors" to "don't be a scam", so I don't think any legitimate AI startup has a concern on that front. Most startups aren't exactly pitching for investment on their home page anyway.

agos 3y ago

I remember .ly domains, at the time widely used as url shorteners, having troubles in times of political unrest.

stigi 3y ago
In a few days my domain `foodba.by` is expiring after I stopped transferring funds to Belarus after the role the country took during the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Glad that side project never took of :-)
- drexlspivey 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - urbandw311er 3y ago
    Not surprised you’re being downvoted — it comes across as pretty immature to sneer at individuals taking a stance against something they don’t believe in. Shame on you.
    - drexlspivey 3y ago
      How does not paying a registrar (a private company) hurt the government in any way?
      - sofixa 3y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boycott https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boycott For a successful example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Apartheid_Movement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Apartheid_Movement
        hnbad 3y ago
        It's really more like going vegan. Individual actions are not a boycott. Boycotts require organization across a broad enough group of individuals that they can achieve a critical mass. Calling this a boycott reminds me of the young leftists who pop up on social media announcing a "general strike" with zero preparation. That doesn't mean it's wrong or silly. If you don't feel comfortable giving money to an entity no matter how large, it's your prerogative to stop doing so. But you shouldn't mistake that isolated action by one individual for political activism.

nemetroid 3y ago

My local ccTLD answers to the democratic government on which I vote. ICANN is a foreign entity and answers to the US government.

throwaway11460 3y ago
My TLD answering to the democratic government on which I have 1 of 10 million votes - and most of it not going the way I'd like - is my worst fear.
- WindyMiller 3y ago
  Still, if that's your worst fear, at least you must have a pretty good government.
  - throwaway11460 3y ago
    No, it's just the only thing left where they can touch me.
- Macha 3y ago
  Better it answers to a board of directors where you have 0 votes?
  - throwaway11460 3y ago
    Yes, that board of directors is motivated to keep their revenue stream. A state doesn't care, it can just steal more (not saying all taxes are stealing, but it is in my home country).
- Gormo 3y ago
  ...especially if 9.9 million of those votes are being cast by people on the basis of questions completely unrelated to TLD governance, and who may not even be aware that such a thing exists. I've never understood the model of having a single democratic process be the arbiter of every issue. It just allows gamesmanship where factions can play up issue X to win votes, then use the political power they obtain to push their agenda on completely unrelated issue Y. I suspect this is a major motivation for a lot of the exaggerated political polarization around symbolic "culture war" issues.

seszett 3y ago

As always, these articles seem to be written from a US or "international" point of view that doesn't seem to understand that country TLDs are actually, at least initially, intended for the people of that country. They are great, absolutely useful, and much lower risk than gTLDs operated by questionable commercial entities. But obviously they depend on the country they represent. I would argue that the main problem is that they should never have been available to entities that don't have ties to the country. That would have solved most of these problems that seem to boil down to "when you pick a random country TLD because it looks cute but you don't know much about the country, sometimes you're surprised by that country's policies".

bux93 3y ago
Also, it's not like gTLDs don't have weird policies. A ton of them are a money grab trying to extort money from trademark owners, and they might disappear or raise prices overnight. Com/net/org repeatedly tried shenanigans in the past. Replacing "do your due diligence" with a heuristic "cc = bad!" is not advisable.
- nytesky 3y ago
  Why did com net org domains try in past, price gouging?
  - diggan 3y ago
    Two events that come to mind: - The attempt to remove price caps on .org and .info by ICANN, seen as testing the waters for doing the same with .com if the cap removal was successful, which it wasn't - PIR (operator of .org) was almost sold to some shell company which was gonna transform it into a for-profit from it's current non-profit, this was blocked by ICANN if I remember correctly Maybe there are more that I don't know about/don't remember
    - donmcronald 3y ago
      > The attempt to remove price caps on .org and .info by ICANN I thought those were removed for .org. Did this [1] get reversed? 1. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/07/icann-eliminates-org-domain-price-caps-despite-lopsided-opposition/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/07/icann-eliminates...

NoboruWataya 3y ago

> To register (and maintain) a domain name ending in .eu, you have to be a resident of the EU. Tiny nit (and I only bring it up because it is relevant to me), but you can also own a .eu domain if you are a citizen of the EU (or EEA), wherever you are resident. This rule may have been brought in as a result of Brexit, as the Europa website says: > Previously restricted to residents of EU/EEA countries, any EU citizen can now register a .eu domain name wherever they are in the world. https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/faqs/eu-domain-name-questions-and-answers https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/faqs/eu-domain-name... The point still stand, of course. It was (and remains) a headache for a lot of people. I still haven't told my registrar I no longer live in the EU because although I am (as an EU citizen) legally entitled to my .eu domain, I don't trust them to understand that.

joelccr 3y ago
Some EU countries also have the same policy for their ccTLDs, although I believe the EU rules are that they aren't allowed to restrict to just their own country's citizens/residents like others worldwide do, they can only restrict non-EU registration. Caused me some grief post-Brexit when my firstname.tld domain happened to be some French islands and AFNIC started indicating they'd enforce it. Fortunately I have the .uk now.
- tialaramex 3y ago
  It wouldn't make any sense to require a specific EU country. The EU's Freedom of Movement rules mean that on the whole all of any EU member state's citizens are welcome to go wherever they please within the EU, so you can't require "citizenship" or "residence" of a specific country. The way this comes about is interesting. First up the EC (the predecessor entity to the EU) is a trade bloc, so it wants to ensure you can move say money and goods around, not much use being a trading bloc if it's there's a lot of taxes and paperwork to move your partly finished Doodads from Germany to France, then when they're finished ship them to Italy for sale. But wait, if we can only move money and goods we create a race to the bottom, the workers would be trapped, so move production to wherever the most desperate workers are and pay them as little as possible. That doesn't sound like we've made anything better. So they say workers can move too, if you want to live somewhere with better pay, or a nicer climate, that's cool. And then the EU's court says well, what exactly is a worker? Is Bob a worker if he just moved to your country hoping to find a job? Does he get to bring his elderly grandmother? She's not going to get a job, how is she a worker? So they decide no, not just workers, all people. All EU people are welcome to move anywhere inside the EU.

donatj 3y ago

I remember in the late 90s there were at least a couple companies promoting alternative TLDs outside the standard set. I have no idea how that was implemented. Just special DNS servers with extra TLDs? Or something more involved on the OS levels? Seems like there could be an appetite for such a thing these days. TLDs outside ICANNs control.

seszett 3y ago
It was an alternative DNS but I forgot which it was. You had to switch to these DNS servers, which the added "benefit" that DNS queries returning NXDOMAIN were hijacked to show you ads. I don't think this has any usefulness anymore, since gTLDs exist.
- donatj 3y ago
  gTLDs cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. You can run your own DNS servers for waaay less. I think the usefulness could come from community controlled TLDs. Might not be a mainstream thing but free libre TLDs for open source projects and what not?
  - Towaway69 3y ago
    Something similar to what Let's Encrypt did to the SSL Certificate market. Before they came along, SSL root certificate were way over priced and overnight, the market simply disappeared. The same should happen to gTLDs.
  - Ayesh 3y ago
    IIRC, the cost is ~$200k one time and ~$25/yr. Shitcoins get magnitudes higher crowd funding. Not impossible to do at all.
  - alfons_foobar 3y ago
    On a technical level, this is very simple - just change the list of DNS root servers on all "participating" machines to point to your own new nameservers. But then you have the problem: Who manages your community controlled domains? Who keeps track of who owns which domain?

unlog 3y ago

My ccTLD gives me much more confidence than some random company that rents TLDs governed by who knows. It's provided by my ISP which is owned by the state, which serves the population.

arielcostas 3y ago
> which is owned by the state, which serves the population Until it doesn't. Corruption and coups are a thing.
- besofrrn 3y ago
  [dead]
- Aerbil313 3y ago
  Then what? I know DNS has a terrible centralized design, but what is the alternative?
usrbinbash 3y ago
Good for you, but... a) that's not the case in many places, as demonstrated by what happened in Afghanistan, where control over the ccTLD now lies with a group of religious extremists b) you have no guarantee that the happy state of affairs with your ccTLD will continue. Governments change, and so do politics.
- hnbad 3y ago
  Sure but all of this is true for gTLDs, with a different set of caveats. Corporations don't exist in a vacuum, they're subject to the laws of the jurisdictions they're incorporated in. Corporations aren't permanent and unchanging, they can pivot in unexpected ways or enact arbitrary decisions that may affect you. Most people just get to pretend gTLDs are safe from politics because most gTLDs are ultimately under US jurisidiction and even outside the US we often treat that as the default. The mistake of the people using dot-af domains was to treat af as if this is also true for them - which even prior to the US retreat wasn't a safe bet. What's also missing from the discourse around `queer.af` is that they were merely one domain of many affected because the Taliban withdrew from Gandi (among others?), not just the people running that Mastodon instance. It's just the most obvious example because of the nature of social media.

nicky0 3y ago

I'm still salty about the .eu thing. I was an EU citizen for 42 years of my life and I used a .eu domain as my primary email address for many years. Not only did the EU decide I could not longer have it, they've made it available for anyone to register. Hundreds of my website registrations were tied to that email address. Thankfully I had sufficient advance notice to tediously re-register the majority of sites to a non-.eu domain email. But there are still a few I didn't catch. Thanks for that, EU. (Edit: thanks also to the Brexit voters, yes .... but I still contend that the EU could have made an accomodation for existing registrants to hold onto their domains, instead of take them away and re-list them for anyone to get. Edit 2: Of course, any Brit well-resourced enough to set up some kind of shell company in EU to hold on to their domain will have been able to keep it. So the claim that "UK people should not be able to own .eu domain. It's confusing and misleading" does not hold water ... it's perfectly possible to do so even today by various trickery. So this decision only affects regular people. Not big business or the very wealthy.)

dijit 3y ago
I guess it’s a weird thought experiment, but what if scotland left the UK, should they still have rights to use .uk tld’s? Maybe yes for historical reasons but it is a twee bit odd to have what is essentially a foreign entity representing themselves with your name. Do you UK? Or have you always resided outside the EU?
- nicky0 3y ago
  I would argue for a "grandfathering in" provision. Both in the Brexit case and your hypothetical Scexit. So, if Scotland became independent, the remaining UK might close the .uk ccTLD for new Scottish registrations but existing domain holders should have the right to retain their registrations indefinitely. I think it's ethically wrong to forcible take away someone's domain name without exceptionally good reason (such as abusive use of domain or whatever). (Yes, I am a UK citizen. By "the .eu thing" I was referring to the situation as described in the article.)
  - kolp 3y ago

xg15 3y ago

The abstraction layer the internet is implementing on top of geography is proving increasingly leaky these days. I think the irony in this incident is that it might actually strengthen the original purpose of ccTLDs, as namespaces for domains within a particular country. Because it shows that, no matter what your domain vendor or even the country's registrar tells you the domain is ultimately controlled by the country's government and is therefore subject to the whims and fate of that country.

Karrot_Kream 3y ago
The concept of the domain on today's internet is a bit anachronistic on the internet these days. People just want to get "places" on the internet, not to addresses.
- autoexec 3y ago
  What is the alternative? IP addresses? AOL Keywords? Abstracting away the whole thing and forcing people to only connect to your webserver via a mobile app? Domains are still the best thing anyone has managed to come up with. We just need better administration of them since ICANN sold out.
  - Palomides 3y ago
    most people with a laptop/desktop will type "facebook" into the address bar of their browser, which will do a search in whatever search engine was provided as the default, then click on the first link they have little to no conception of what a TLD is actually, most people use an app on their phone for everything and avoid the web browser I don't say this to insult the average person, this is simply what I see non-engineers do
    - besofrrn 3y ago
      [dead]
  - kalkr 3y ago

pedrovhb 3y ago

Imagine if one day we come up with a technology that allows resolving _arbitrary strings_ and doesn't cost multiple times the cost of the hosting structure itself.

diggan 3y ago
We have that technology already, it's called DNS. Everything else is people/organization problems, that won't be solved by adding more technology to the fire.

lynx23 3y ago

Abusing ccTLDs for things which are not relevant to the particular country just because they TLD sounds or reads cool is where the problem began. .cc, .rs, just to name some. I know it has become out of fashion these days, but countries have sovereignty. If the registrar thinks they want to decline a particular subdomain, thats their call. And all international activists can go to hell.

donkulous 3y ago
".to" was the first big one I remember from the late 90s. You could get a forwarded address to your geocities or angelfire URL from something like "welcome.to/myawesomesite" or "jump.to/mycoolpage"

quickthrower2 3y ago

I get the impression that .com is safer than .bananas or whatever. Is this true? I would settle for a not so good .com for the safety.

Ayesh 3y ago
.com is run by Verizon, and .bananas will be by another for-profit company (most likely Donuts). If the .com prices were to be increased, there will be a huge backlash. As for .bananas, not so much. .bananas might get blocked at TLD level, .com unlikely so.
- redwall_hp 3y ago
  Verisign administers .com and .net domains. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verisign https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verisign
  - pitaj 3y ago
    I imagine it was an auto-correct typo.
  - quickthrower2 3y ago
    Never knew about Reston, interesting little city.
Macha 3y ago
There is an agreement for .com and .org (and formerly .net, but not anymore) that registry price increases are capped at 10% a year, and they aren't allowed designate in demand domains as more expensive premium domains. There was an attempt by the .org operators to renegotiate that, but it was stopped by public pressure.
userbinator 3y ago
I tend to subconsciously skip over "weird" TLD sites in search results as they are usually SEO spam.

Kognito 3y ago

The article goes on about how this is “bigotry” by the Afghan authorities for suspending queer.af yet doesn’t bother to consider whether any other domains were affected. Saw at least one other report yesterday and I suspect it’s not the only one: https://x.com/wesbos/status/1757418308050079762 https://x.com/wesbos/status/1757418308050079762

olivierduval 3y ago

Actually, ccTLD might be a VERY GOOD thing: if I buy something from a ".com" website, it can be from anywhere in the world... and I would have no recourse in case of scam. On the other side: if I buy something from my own country, I know that the law will protect me because the TLD tell me that the vendor has at least a company in my country, subject to my country laws

organsnyder 3y ago
Relying on a site's TLD to verify a company's location is rarely (never?) a good idea.
razakel 3y ago
What exactly is stopping me from registering a company at a PO box, creating myfakeshop.yourcountry, taking your money, and disappearing?

crossroadsguy 3y ago

ccTLDs are controlled by an authority that IANA decides and IANA is controlled by the Govt of USA. So we know eventually who controls the domains. So maybe we come to 'all TLDs are actually created equal', eventually. (my point is - in the end USA controls all the domains, maybe via ICANN/IANA.)

vdaea 3y ago

>After Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the Ukranian Vice Prime Minister asked ICANN to suspend ccTLDs associated with Russia. What's the point of ccTLDs if the US, a potential enemy, can still pull the rug out from under your feet?

Macha 3y ago
Here's what happens if it goes ahead. Russia (and allied countries) ISPs update their config to point to root servers that do resolve .ru and .su, and they can then fallback to the usual servers for the rest of the world. And hey, maybe now they have that infra, they decide that in Russia, whitehouse.gov points somewhere else now
trimethylpurine 3y ago
They expect that the US won't do that because it would violate Americans' expectations about good and evil.
- lpribis 3y ago
  Sure, the US has never done _anything_ that violates expectations about good and evil.
  - trimethylpurine 3y ago
    Of course they have. But in Western countries governments still need to sell their position to the public or it will typically cost them an election. So, typically, it's safe to expect on simple issues like letting Libya keep their ccTLD that they won't bother. The article gave another example about Ukraine where, as expected, they didn't bother.
kube-system 3y ago
Anybody can ask anyone to suspend a ccTLD. Doesn't mean they're going to do it.

deadbabe 3y ago

Will we ever live in a time where TLD conventions are abandoned entirely and websites just use a hashtag or something?

acheron 3y ago
Yes, that time was 1996-2002 or so, and they were called "AOL keywords".
Aerbil313 3y ago
This is a solved problem. AFAIK there are not one, but multiple solutions for performant global routing without centralization. DHTs are an example.
palata 3y ago
There is no need; the current system works. Just don't register your domain in Afghanistan if you don't want to depend on... Afghanistan.

nottorp 3y ago

> While ICANN kinda-sorta has something to do with ccTLDs (in the sense that it makes them exist on the Internet), it has no authority to control how a ccTLD is managed. Right, like ICANN's .com and other traditional domains are managed fairly and can be trusted :) Isn't it .com domains that are generally easily taken hostage by cybersquatters because of dubious rules and lowest cost possible administration?

Donaldzibe 3y ago

[flagged]

2Gkashmiri 3y ago

Presstv.com is a domain siezed by US government that belongs to a foreign news agency (based out of iran) This means that the .com TLD is at the whims of US govt, just like .AF is at the whims of afghan govt. If you are at the mercy of US govt for .com you should be at the mercy of afghan govt as well for their cctld. What's the problem here?

pimlottc 3y ago

> Unfortunately, ccTLD registries have a disconcerting habit of changing their minds on whether they serve their geographic locality, such as when auDA decided to declare an open season in the .au namespace some years ago. I think this is referring to these licensing rules changes effective April 2021: https://www.auda.org.au/au-domain-names/policies-and-compliance/au-licensing-rules https://www.auda.org.au/au-domain-names/policies-and-complia...

ChrisArchitect 3y ago

Related recent piece of this discussion: Queer.af Mastodon instance has been shut down by the Taliban https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39348923 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39348923

ChrisArchitect 3y ago
And one about the flipside/money side of things that was omitted from the OP: .ai website registrations are a windfall for tiny Anguilla https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39194477 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39194477

tomoyoirl 3y ago

Disappointed to see no mention yet of Tuvalu, the tiny low-lying island nation (imperiled by global warming etc) where something like 10% of the government income is funded by sales of .tv domains, which is just such an interesting case.

gggmaster 3y ago

As if there are guarantees that gTLDs won't be sold to shady entities.

glub103011 3y ago

[dead]

ceeam 3y ago

> I don’t think any gTLD operator will be invading a neighbouring country any time soon. I would guess people in Yemen (most recently) would find this statement somewhat funny.

CRConrad 3y ago
Also, isn't .ru still a thing? (As is .us, for that matter.)

bitwize 3y ago

I think we should petition ICANN for a .asfuck TLD, so the queer.af people have somewhere to go to that's less politically fraught.

teddyh 3y ago

Summary: Many countries are bad. Therefore, avoid them all.

tempestn 3y ago

One other thing I'd note is to avoid using the new gTLDs like .email or .mail for an email address. I tried it and discovered just how many bad form validators and spam filters there are out there.

paulnpace 3y ago
What year did you experiment with that? I know of one person currently using .email TLD and hasn't reported issues. I started using .guru not long after it launched and definitely experienced the issues you describe, including my residential ISP not being able to resolve.
- tempestn 3y ago
  I switched away from it in 2021. Certainly most websites handled it fine, and most of my email went through. But in both cases, there were notable exceptions compared to using a .com domain.