7 ms·

There really was a bit of an enterprise gold rush for these gTLDs in the late 00s. They saw .google and .mcdonalds and thought "we should have our own one of t

by sbarre 2y ago

There really was a bit of an enterprise gold rush for these gTLDs in the late 00s. They saw .google and .mcdonalds and thought "we should have our own one of those".. And I guess after a while of paying the non-trivial gTLD fees to ICANN, companies eventually looked at the ROI and realized they actually didn't need their own one of those... Funny how different brands in the same industries figured it out many years before others did.

akira2501 2y ago
They all have the same oeuvre that typo squatted and oddly hyphenated domains have and immediately make me suspicious just looking at them. Which is bad enough for the commercial purposes most of these were probably purchased for, but I can only imagine that they would be exceptionally useless for sending emails or other communications. Another "ghost mining town" left behind from the wild west that was the first decades of the commercial internet.
hypeatei 2y ago
It's crazy to me that a decision to buy your own gTLD would even be approved outside the most rich and tech literate companies. The evaluation fee alone is $185,000 USD and you have to pay quarterly fees too if I'm not mistaken.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- cogthrow 2y ago
  > The evaluation fee alone is $185,000 USD and you have to pay quarterly fees too if I'm not mistaken. $185k is a rounding error in the marketing budget of many companies
  - griftrejection 2y ago
    If only there were a better way to deploy that capital. Oh well.
  - nickdothutton 2y ago
    This is the answer. Same thing happened in the early-to-mid 90s. The corporate web site money didn’t come from the IT budget, it came from marketing. The money for the Leased Line Internet connection too, for all but the most R&D focussed companies in the UK. Corporate email for employees and (shudder) actual Internet access for them, often only came later.
- bastawhiz 2y ago
  For a company like Dodge (well, I guess their parent company) that's like selling 6-7 cars a quarter. Massive corporations look at numbers like $185,000 and don't even blink.
  - CBarkleyU 2y ago
    Dodge is making 30k profit off of each car?
    - bastawhiz 2y ago
      The higher end cars like Charger are hugely profitable (some with six figures of margin). They sold nearly fifty thousand of them in 2023.
      - aidenn0 2y ago
        I just priced a fully loaded Hellcat[1] Charger (even with stupid stuff like "real carbon fiber inserts" on the interior) on Dodges site, and it was $109 705. Unless you are proposing it costs less than $9.7k to build and transport one, how are they making six figures of margin? 1: "SRT® Hellcat Redeye Jailbreak" actually. I think the marketing department is staffed with 12 year olds.
        DANmode 2y ago
        If they’re trying to stay at product level, it possibly should be.
        bastawhiz 2y ago
        The SRT Demon starts at $96k and often sell for $225 and up
        OptionOfT 2y ago
        MSRP was $96k. Dealers would charge extra because... they forcefully injected and monopolized their position as being the only entity that can actually sell you the car.
- ryan29 2y ago
  I think it can make sense for smaller companies as long as the costs aren't unbearable. There's value in being your own registry operator, especially when it comes to stuff like intellectual property claims, etc.. By being a registry instead of a registrant you get an extra layer of protection that helps to ensure your domain is untouchable. I think it makes a lot of sense to use for long term infrastructure if, again, the costs aren't prohibitive.
- seventyone 2y ago
  Quarterly fees are ~$15k The domain for my work project was over $400k. Buying a gTLD would have been way cheaper, but wouldn't have managed to get us the cool domain we have. edit: on the other hand, we're hostage to a country who could ruin everything. I guess someone above my pay grade rolled the dice
- bombcar 2y ago
  People thought it was going to be like the AOL keywords of yore - but it was already so late in the game that nobody gives a shit, you either use google to search for bing or you just don't care. There's probably ten or twenty domains (not counting my own or my work's) that I can type from memory, the rest I just search for. The other killer is that "clownfarts.com" looks like a website but www.mcdonalds looks like a typo, even to non-tech people who don't understand any TLD besides the big three.
Ekaros 2y ago
I have a customer with one of these vanity gTLDs. And always go to wonder why... Oh it is cool with all the subdomains and services, but still... Is it really worth the money for profile of company it is... Which is not exactly high profile or known...
brifsttar 2y ago
gTLDs went live in 2014 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_top-level_domain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_top-level_domain
- sbarre 2y ago
  Yeah sorry my timeline was off there... I knew someone who worked on a gTLD platform and I mistakenly thought it was while I was at a certain job but it was the job after. Thanks for the correction!
silisili 2y ago
This isn't exactly accurate. Google and McDonalds didn't have some early exclusive launch. There were hundreds that launched at around the same time, when ICANN opened the process, and not in the 00s. I'm too lazy to research them all here, but I recognize a number of them here from their initial applications, which would have all happened at the same time as the two you mentioned.
- sbarre 2y ago
  Yeah sorry I had the timeline off... I also wasn't implying any exclusivity but I remember when these were first announced/marketed that those two domains were prevalent?
paulddraper 2y ago
A. It wasn't the 00s. B. Much better to have it and not need it, than need it and not have it. As it turns out, they didn't need it, and lost a bit of their marketing budget.
DidYaWipe 2y ago
This whole scam was so disappointing, although par for ICANN's course. When we heard that they were opening up TLDs, I thought that finally limited TLDs would be abolished. But nope. ICANN turned the whole thing into another disgraceful money grab... taken to a new level. Now that it has flopped, we can just hope that someday we'll be able to end a domain name with any valid string.
- cut3 2y ago
  Ive always wondered why a tld cant just be anything after the last period
  - DidYaWipe 2y ago
    As far as I know, there's no technical reason. I've seen people raise trademarks as an issue, but that's a red herring. There are already trademark-dispute resolution procedures in place.
  - userbinator 2y ago
    Mainly to control the resource usage of the root servers, I believe. DNS is hierarchical, and I don't think devolving into a semi-flat namespace is a good idea at all.
    - avidiax 2y ago
      This isn't anymore "flat" that then TLD nameservers like com., net., etc. It's just one level down. ICANN could certainly afford to run servers for a "flat" TLD system. The problem for ICANN is that it will sour relations with all the existing TLD registrars, and there are security problems with allowing any TLD. For example, I might be able to redirect traffic for a particular local network host name (e.g. "router", "fileserver", "raspberrypi", "linksys", etc.) to an external IP address of my choosing. Or I can make something that is normally a local file (e.g. "cmd.exe") and make it also a valid hostname.
      - brookst 2y ago
estebarb 2y ago
After seeing that list it doesn't surprise me anymore that companies like Avianca filled for bankruptcy. I'm sure they paid for than domain per year more than what they spend now in customer support.

by sbarre 2y ago

akira2501 2y ago

They all have the same oeuvre that typo squatted and oddly hyphenated domains have and immediately make me suspicious just looking at them. Which is bad enough for the commercial purposes most of these were probably purchased for, but I can only imagine that they would be exceptionally useless for sending emails or other communications. Another "ghost mining town" left behind from the wild west that was the first decades of the commercial internet.

hypeatei 2y ago

It's crazy to me that a decision to buy your own gTLD would even be approved outside the most rich and tech literate companies. The evaluation fee alone is $185,000 USD and you have to pay quarterly fees too if I'm not mistaken.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
cogthrow 2y ago
> The evaluation fee alone is $185,000 USD and you have to pay quarterly fees too if I'm not mistaken. $185k is a rounding error in the marketing budget of many companies
- griftrejection 2y ago
  If only there were a better way to deploy that capital. Oh well.
- nickdothutton 2y ago
  This is the answer. Same thing happened in the early-to-mid 90s. The corporate web site money didn’t come from the IT budget, it came from marketing. The money for the Leased Line Internet connection too, for all but the most R&D focussed companies in the UK. Corporate email for employees and (shudder) actual Internet access for them, often only came later.
bastawhiz 2y ago
For a company like Dodge (well, I guess their parent company) that's like selling 6-7 cars a quarter. Massive corporations look at numbers like $185,000 and don't even blink.
- CBarkleyU 2y ago
  Dodge is making 30k profit off of each car?
  - bastawhiz 2y ago
    The higher end cars like Charger are hugely profitable (some with six figures of margin). They sold nearly fifty thousand of them in 2023.
    - aidenn0 2y ago
      I just priced a fully loaded Hellcat[1] Charger (even with stupid stuff like "real carbon fiber inserts" on the interior) on Dodges site, and it was $109 705. Unless you are proposing it costs less than $9.7k to build and transport one, how are they making six figures of margin? 1: "SRT® Hellcat Redeye Jailbreak" actually. I think the marketing department is staffed with 12 year olds.
      - DANmode 2y ago
        If they’re trying to stay at product level, it possibly should be.
      - bastawhiz 2y ago
        The SRT Demon starts at $96k and often sell for $225 and up
        OptionOfT 2y ago
        MSRP was $96k. Dealers would charge extra because... they forcefully injected and monopolized their position as being the only entity that can actually sell you the car.
ryan29 2y ago
I think it can make sense for smaller companies as long as the costs aren't unbearable. There's value in being your own registry operator, especially when it comes to stuff like intellectual property claims, etc.. By being a registry instead of a registrant you get an extra layer of protection that helps to ensure your domain is untouchable. I think it makes a lot of sense to use for long term infrastructure if, again, the costs aren't prohibitive.
seventyone 2y ago
Quarterly fees are ~$15k The domain for my work project was over $400k. Buying a gTLD would have been way cheaper, but wouldn't have managed to get us the cool domain we have. edit: on the other hand, we're hostage to a country who could ruin everything. I guess someone above my pay grade rolled the dice
bombcar 2y ago
People thought it was going to be like the AOL keywords of yore - but it was already so late in the game that nobody gives a shit, you either use google to search for bing or you just don't care. There's probably ten or twenty domains (not counting my own or my work's) that I can type from memory, the rest I just search for. The other killer is that "clownfarts.com" looks like a website but www.mcdonalds looks like a typo, even to non-tech people who don't understand any TLD besides the big three.

Ekaros 2y ago

I have a customer with one of these vanity gTLDs. And always go to wonder why... Oh it is cool with all the subdomains and services, but still... Is it really worth the money for profile of company it is... Which is not exactly high profile or known...

brifsttar 2y ago

gTLDs went live in 2014 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_top-level_domain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_top-level_domain

sbarre 2y ago
Yeah sorry my timeline was off there... I knew someone who worked on a gTLD platform and I mistakenly thought it was while I was at a certain job but it was the job after. Thanks for the correction!

silisili 2y ago

This isn't exactly accurate. Google and McDonalds didn't have some early exclusive launch. There were hundreds that launched at around the same time, when ICANN opened the process, and not in the 00s. I'm too lazy to research them all here, but I recognize a number of them here from their initial applications, which would have all happened at the same time as the two you mentioned.

sbarre 2y ago
Yeah sorry I had the timeline off... I also wasn't implying any exclusivity but I remember when these were first announced/marketed that those two domains were prevalent?

paulddraper 2y ago

A. It wasn't the 00s. B. Much better to have it and not need it, than need it and not have it. As it turns out, they didn't need it, and lost a bit of their marketing budget.

DidYaWipe 2y ago

This whole scam was so disappointing, although par for ICANN's course. When we heard that they were opening up TLDs, I thought that finally limited TLDs would be abolished. But nope. ICANN turned the whole thing into another disgraceful money grab... taken to a new level. Now that it has flopped, we can just hope that someday we'll be able to end a domain name with any valid string.

cut3 2y ago
Ive always wondered why a tld cant just be anything after the last period
- DidYaWipe 2y ago
  As far as I know, there's no technical reason. I've seen people raise trademarks as an issue, but that's a red herring. There are already trademark-dispute resolution procedures in place.
- userbinator 2y ago
  Mainly to control the resource usage of the root servers, I believe. DNS is hierarchical, and I don't think devolving into a semi-flat namespace is a good idea at all.
  - avidiax 2y ago
    This isn't anymore "flat" that then TLD nameservers like com., net., etc. It's just one level down. ICANN could certainly afford to run servers for a "flat" TLD system. The problem for ICANN is that it will sour relations with all the existing TLD registrars, and there are security problems with allowing any TLD. For example, I might be able to redirect traffic for a particular local network host name (e.g. "router", "fileserver", "raspberrypi", "linksys", etc.) to an external IP address of my choosing. Or I can make something that is normally a local file (e.g. "cmd.exe") and make it also a valid hostname.
    - brookst 2y ago

estebarb 2y ago

After seeing that list it doesn't surprise me anymore that companies like Avianca filled for bankruptcy. I'm sure they paid for than domain per year more than what they spend now in customer support.