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Comment by bduerst | Hacker News Reader

Just a random URL fact: the TLDs for domains could technically be used as domains as well, if ICANN ever allowed it.

It wouldn't make sense for TLDs like com, net, org, etc., but for trademarked TLDs like barclays, youtube, pwc, etc. visitors could essentially go straight to that webpage with the TLD, like https://youtube

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the TLDs for domains could technically be used as domains as well

That's because they... actually are domains too. Top Level Domains, as the acronym says.

It wouldn't make sense for TLDs like com, net, org, etc.

Actually it might --- that's a great place to put all the information about (and maybe instructions on how to register) a subdomain there.

But, to use the precise terminology, a domain name with a single 'label' has historically been treated as a "relative" domain, e.g. https://localhost , and no doubt many of you will be familiar with intranet sites that use similar "non-qualified" single-label names.

"Single name domains" as you refer to them usually only work because your DNS search domains are filling the rest in for you. This is why people who work for somecompany.com can simply go to http://intranet , because their DHCP server has somecompany.com in the DNS search domains and the browser/OS will be resolving it to http://intranet.somecompany.com under the hood.

That 'relative domain' problem is not specific to one-word domain names. In fact, ALL domains that don't end in '.' are considered 'relative' domains. There's a difference between http://somehost/ and http://somehost./ - the first says 'look for somehost in any of the available default domains', while the second says 'look for a top level domain name called localhost'. Likewise http://news.ycombinator.com/ and http://news.ycombinator.com./ are handled differently - the first is actually also considered as a relative URL, and tried against all your local DNS suffixes before being tried against the root.

Most of the time, www.TLD goes somewhere, but instructing non-technical users to visit "www.example" would likely confuse them much more than owning "example.com" with a CNAME set up for "www.example.com" as well. gTLDs are, IMO, a stupid cash grab which may or may not harm domain squatters.

Well, if you look at the history of URL use in the public offline realm, it keeps getting shorter.

URLs started as "http://www.example.com" in the late 90's, and then went to "www.example.com", and are now mostly "example.com". For major trademarks, it could be the natural progression to just go to "example". Or not - internet use is weirdly unpredictable.

My guess is that it'll stick to "example.com" unless we switch to a proprietary service (like Facebook or Twitter). A nice thing about "example.com" is that it gives you enough context to know it's a web address and you type it in your browser. Thinking back to AOL, they always had to say "AOL Keyword: Example" or "Keyword: Example" to give you enough context. Years ago maybe doing something like having it blue and underlined might have caught on and let you just use the word?

One way it could be shorter and keep context is if we hijacked a special character like Twitter does #example or @twitter--but I can't imagine standards bodies getting on board with using a special character (or trying to get people to adopt it as a replacement for web URLs).

One way I just thought of that wouldn't sacrifice a special character would be to come up with some symbol that means URL and have web browsers use that next to their URL bar. Could be an emoji-like symbol--maybe something similar to the html5 shield? But luck getting everyone on board with that.

Generic TLDs have mostly solved that.

There was a push for custom TLDs once upon a time.

Solved what?

If you are thinking about .xyz and similar, you still have to have another domain below those. you can't simply register xyz and have it point directly at a server.

Sure you can: http://ai./ (there are other CCTLDs doing this).

Only one new TLD does this, and the page is empty: http://мон./ or http://xn--l1acc./

And now that Google owns the TLD `google' with their whole com.google thing a while back, what's to stop them from setting up https://google./? Is there any technical reason? Do you have to go through ICANN?

I think you're mistaken. There isn't a TLD for google. Under some of the ICANN proposals, that would have been possible, but to date I don't think it's been done.

No, there is. https://com.google./ redirects to https://google.com/

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/11/26/google_turns_on_goog...

https://icannwiki.com/.google

They officially host their domain registration website on domains.google, too:

https://domains.google/

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