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Here comes the greatest Internet landgrab in history
- segmond 14y agothere will never be anything like the .com grab as fair as domain names are concerned.
- dfc 14y agoA more appropriate but less link baiterrific title would be: Here comes the greatest Internet terraform in history I do not understand why the article leads with Schilling making a fortune when it should begin by describing the piles of money that ICANN is printing...
- jessedhillon 14y agoHere comes the circus would be more correct, in my opinion
- hcho 14y agoI am finding it hard to believe that this will be such a landgrab. The demand to already existing non .com TLDs doesn't indicate that there will be a huge demand for new ones.
- loceng 14y agoI can see people registering main keywords, or playful phrases that work.. eg: about.me etc.. However then those will just turn into cybersquatting and auctioning off in most cases. I can see it causing confusion in some situations as well.
- seanp2k2 14y agoYup. I hate this idea. If anything, we need /fewer/ gTLDs. No one uses .mobi, .travel, .museum, etc. If you're serious, you still get a .com. "movies.youtube" sounds like nothing I'd care to visit.
- marquis 14y agoAren't tlds just a landgrab from the start, making money for the registrars? The original RFC882 never stated domain.com - their example was blue.colors, red.colors etc. What happened that we became stuck with these country level TLDs, and why can't I register myname.lastname? http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc882 http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc882
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- seanp2k2 14y agoThe answer is both obvious and depressing: greed. USA basically controls the Internet right now. We need to build the next internet that cannot be co-opted, censored, disabled, or monitored.
- harbud 14y agoThe winner will be ICANN who laughs all the way to the bank with hundreds of new gTLD registration fees (equalling tens of millions of US$). The losers will most probably be companies like uniregistry.com (or, more specifically, their investors) who will register tens of new gTLDs and later find out that they are not worth as much.
- GoodIntentions 14y agoI wish I could put this comment to the top of the page. How many TLD/ccTLDs are there already? The primary interest being served here would seem to be ICANN's. As a user, I may well register some of these new domains, but I'm kind of looking at it sidewise atm. What value does it bring? Just more dilution of the already huge namespace for the most part.
- possibilistic 14y agoAfter the initial land grab is over, will these ever reach a price where we can afford them as individuals? I'd like to own a few.
- mjwalshe 14y agoNo running a registry is not a cheap or easy endeveor (I used to be one of the owners of .coop)
- ohashi 14y agoI would love to hear the story about .coop. Have you written about it anywhere or would you be willing to chat privately about it? my details are in my profile.
- mjwalshe 14y agoI was one the profesional servies side trying to keep poptel running - though I did sit next to the tech lead. http://www.andrewbibby.com/socialenterprise/poptel2.html http://www.andrewbibby.com/socialenterprise/poptel2.html has some details. And I did have to chair a share holder meeting and put the founder in his place when we where discussing a reorg. You coudl try contacting Malcolm Corbett hes on face book at http://www.facebook.com/malcolm.corbett.9 http://www.facebook.com/malcolm.corbett.9
- ohashi 14y agoThanks for that!
- daulex 14y agoDepends on the company. I don't imagine you'll be able to buy ipad.apple, but I don't see why google wouldn't start selling *.foo.
- zerostar07 14y agoDidn't the last land grab (.info/.movie etc) end soon? Why would this one be different?
- sgdesign 14y agoI don't see domains like .movies or .brand-name working at all. On the other hand, new two-letters domain could be useful. Like .ng ("runnin.ng"), .ay ("pl.ay"), etc. But I don't know if those are included in the new tlds?
- kilian 14y agotwo letter tld's are reserved for countries, so only 3+ are allowed indeed.
- joezydeco 14y agoHow many domain-name filter regexs are hardcoded to .com/.net/.org/.mil and will never work on these new domains? Yeah, I know the countries are out there as well, but that's still a known whitelist, right?
- seanp2k2 14y ago...probably a lot that are written by those who do not care enough to read RFCs. I was recently asked on an interview to write regex that grabs "valid" e-mail addresses. I asked if I could review the RFC so I could write useful regex. I was denied, and I ended up totally uninterested in this trendy company with amateurish standards.
- w1nk 14y agoSlightly off topic, but even with access to the RFC you weren't likely to get that one right. Validating any email address correctly with a regex is nearly impossible (a canonical example of the horror: http://ex-parrot.com/~pdw/Mail-RFC822-Address.html http://ex-parrot.com/~pdw/Mail-RFC822-Address.html and even that one has a limitation or 2). I think the only correct answer to that question is to suggest an alternative to a regular expression. It could be that was the answer they were looking for.
- jmillikin 14y agoThat seems like a really easy regex to write. .+@.+\..+ (note: I haven't reviewed the RFC, so this might be too strict)
- crikli 14y agoSemi-related: I've started several businesses, consulted with other startups...basically spent a lot of time trying to come up with business names only to find that a depressingly high percentage of the corresponding domains are being camped on by some clown who wants a ridiculous sum of money. Domain squatting is without worth and indefensible. Squatters create nothing and they provide nothing of value in exchange for the extraordinary premiums they demand. It is a wholly extractive business model that costs entrepreneurs like myself thousand of dollars with no discernable return. I recognize that squatting is the (semi)free market at work and as a pretty hard core libertarian I respect that. This does not, however, make me any less contemptuous of the business model or any less desirous of the opportunity to beat a squatter with a shovel. EDIT: Changed verbiage, replacing the term "domainer" with "squatter."
- nahname 14y agoYou mean a domain squatter right? When did we start calling them domainers?
- crikli 14y agoGood question. I think the term domainers is me succumbing to sqautters' attempt to sound more legit. I've updated accordingly and will give my brain 20 for falling for their attempted re-labeling.
- scoot 14y agoA domain squatter[1] sits on a domain name that relates to trademark (but without abusing the trademark) in hope of a sale on that basis, a "domainer" holds domain names that are brandable, or have keyword value, but are otherwise IP free. They are often "parked" (those god-awful advertising pages, or worse psedo-content wrapped with advertising) which through type-ins and long-tail search can attract enough clicks to cover the annual cost of registration, or in some cases, many times it. In this way, "domainer" will aim to operate at no cost, or modest gain across a portfolio, with domain sales being the core revenue opportunity. [Edit to add a reference] [1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybersquatting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybersquatting
- sillylogger 14y agoI dont understand how 'domainers' see opportunity in this. The market they operate in is being flooded with new product. This enables people to get more creative with their domains... running.com can now be run.ning.
- notJim 14y agoWho do you think is going to try to buy all the domains like run.ning? Domainers, of course.
- rwhitman 14y agoAre there restrictions or requirements for owners of new TLDs to offer domains for sale at a reasonable price? Or if someone wants a website at myrecipes.food do they now have to pay a premium extortionate amount to the gTLD owner?
- alexro 14y agoIf this scheme takes up then domain names like mint.com which are currently make sense solely because they are short and easy, will have no way of sounding great for a financial webapp. Many websites will have to revise their names.
- krschultz 14y agoWe barely got people to use .net, .org, .ly, .info, .me, .tv. What makes us think they will use these effectively?
- eli 14y agoMoreover, I'm having a hard time imagining a situation where it would be a good idea to own www.foocorp but not www.foocorp.com
- jmduke 14y agoICANN isn't doing this as a B2C venture -- they're targeting companies with enough cash to protect their names.
- ohashi 14y agoWhich is exactly what .info, .biz and other new TLDs did to make cash as well. Each TLD that launched was assured something like 200-300k registrations from brands/speculators. Now, ICANN can jump on the money-printing bandwagon.
- mjwalshe 14y agoyep people have been contacting CEO's CTOs and CIOs of big companies (FSTE 100/DOW 30) trying to sell them on this protection racket.
- larrys 14y ago"He's put up $60 million of his own money to stake his claim on a giant" Unfortunately this is a typical article simply quoting what someone says as if it is fact. If you do the math on what it cost to apply for the TLD's it would be more like $10,000,000 not $60,000,000. At the very least it would have been correct to say "He says he plans to invest up to $60,000,000" not to make a statement of fact. This is exactly how the media builds legends. "He's put up" indicates a statement of fact that is to be believed.
- sopooneo 14y agoCurrently, the "dot com/net/org" at the end of a spoken domain name clues the listener in to what they just heard. You think, "oh, a domain name, I'll visit it on my browser." But without that, a new spoken standard may have to be developed. If I hear "go to mint", without any other context, I will not know if that means a night club or a web site. Perhaps we'll have to say "www dot mint" to make it clear, but that's not optimal.
- ajays 14y agoWho will have control over these gTLDs? What I mean by that is: .com is controlled by the USG (indirectly). They can get a judge to take away a domain on a whim. Will that be the case with these new TLDs?
- thatusertwo 14y agoA lot of the extensions his company is offering seem to have a pretty limited range of potential customers.
- dmbaggett 14y agoAt $185,000 per gTLD "processing fee", ICANN seems to have "earned" over $350M from this effort. Nice work if you can get it. I totally get why this is great for the Internet now.