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Comment by JoshTriplett | Hacker News Reader

> Certainly. Ideally, I'd have left it as .com, .net, .org.

(And .edu?)

Ideally, we would never have had more than one TLD; even before the new rounds of TLDs showed up, people found it annoying and confusing to have example.org and example.com go to two different places. Why did we need more than one TLD in the first place, other than as a license to mint money in the form of domain registration fees? I don't think it makes much sense as an organizational mechanism.

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I suspect if there was a flat gTLD with no suffixes, everyone would have domain names that looked more like AOL screen names (lots of numbers after the names.)

I'm okay with a few TLDs, but the original distinction is kind of vague. There's really no distinguishing characteristics between .com and .net, and even though for some reason .org became popular with open source, a lot of OSS sites (including mine) are not organizations. If not for Google, .dev would have been a great one for developer sites.

What I don't like is the idea of adding an infinite number of gTLDs. It's bound to do nasty things: break a bunch of old URL matching regular expressions, collide with some poor businesses that made bad choices for their internal networks, etc.

> I suspect if there was a flat gTLD with no suffixes, everyone would have domain names that looked more like AOL screen names (lots of numbers after the names.)

I don't tend to see lots of numbers in domain names today, even in popular TLDs like .com.

Because there are alternatives. You can grab foo.(net,org,io,country-code,etc) if foo.com is already taken.

That was the whole point in theory, yes. But in reality, almost all new gTLD registrations are being made as brand protection, and redirecting to the company's existing .com domain. Only a very small minority of websites are trying to build a brand on a new gTLD domain name.

Technically, there is one single TLD at the top of the tree; the root zone is called empty-string-dot and exists at the end of every DNS name, although resolving software doesn't normally require it. But it's why news.ycombinator.com. works as well as news.ycombinator.com without the trailing dot.

Interesting that it works now. Previously some browsers at least would reject https sites like that for a cert name mismatch.

ICANN has made $400 million with new domains. Doesn't include the $135 million for .WEB. Non-profit? BS!

Non-profit has nothing to do with how much money they make, but with how they spend it.

This is the most annoying misconception on the internet.

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