Most popular domains: .net bigger than .com | Hacker News Reader

Most popular domains: .net bigger than .com

ftp.isc.org

15 pointsemanuer11 comments

Anybody care to explain the values in that chart? It says there are 332,395 level 2 domains under .net and 2,705,157 under .com. Perhaps the chart is quite old?

E.g. http://www.domaintools.com/internet-statistics/ gives different values: 13,100,186 registered .net domains and 87,707,437 .com domains.

In any case, I think .com clearly outweighs .net in terms of registered domains. Hostnames don't really matter anything.

.net doesn't mean anything these days. .com is still mostly limited to companies (that is, .com, .org, .edu and .mil partition the space of real-world organizations), but .net has always meant "a computer network", which, these days, could be attached to any or none of these organization types. ISPs have never really favored .net over .com either. (They stick their users' IPs' reverse-resolution names under a <provider>.net domain, but they could just as easily put them under the .com, since they always already own it as well.)

I really wish all the current .net registrations could be shunted into the .com namespace, and then .net redefined to mean social networks. That is, every .net domain would be expected to have a public Diaspora/other social-networking-mesh-server running, in the same way that every .com is expected to have a public web server running.

I for one do not except every .com to have a public web server running. And I rather not bind TLDs to services.

You, for one, are not an average user. :) By "expect", I meant something closer to "grandma knows that .net addresses go at the end of emails and usernames, the way .com goes at the end of websites, and since she only visits five sites and has three people she e-mails, she doesn't need to worry about the exceptions" sense, not a hard and fast rule.

There wouldn't be a binding any more than TLDs today are bound to the web—the .net TLD would just mean "owned by a social network", just like .name means "owned by by a single person/family" or .org means "owned by an organization." All services that collected users for the explicit purpose of letting them communicate with external services and/or one another—Facebook, Gmail (or rather, Google Accounts), Twitter, Reddit and HN, any forum, Battle.net, etc.—would qualify as .net domains. The fact that they're currently web-based (or custom-protocol based) social networks makes no technical difference.

(And alternatively, services like Google Wave and Buzz wouldn't really be separate .net domains—since they're not separate social networks, but rather subsets of the Google network that have a flag in their accounts flipped. The clients for them could live on the website at "google.net", but the services themselves would no longer give you separate, secondary identities.)

It's just that, once something like Diaspora got going, social networks would become a distinct kind of site—they'd be the only kind that would bother running Diaspora servers at all (why run one for your company/organization? Everyone's already going to have an externally-bound identity anyway.) So, being able to guess that something is a social network/is running a Diaspora server by seeing the TLD (like grandma is able to guess that something is a website because it ends in .com: a "type it in and see" kind of guess, not one you place bets on) would be a nice convenience.

http://www.registrarstats.com/Public/TLDDomainCounts.aspx

I don't know where these numbers come from (original article) but they are wrong or I've misunderstood their meaning.

That makes plenty of sense to me based on what they used to mean. Nowadays, most people seem to think of the domain as the part they put into the browser to see your web page.

I dont think its accurate. Why does it only show a few domains for .mp ? Theres literally hundreds of thousands of .mp domains

And why do you think that is?

One factor, but not nearly enough to explain it all: Everyone who gets a .com will also get the .net and often the .org, whoever someone who gets a .net (for a online community, a blog, ect) will not always get the .com?

These aren't registrations; these are hostnames in use.

For some reason -- perhaps just traditions -- it's especially common for bulk service providers to assign individual machine/address subdomains from .NET rather than .COM.

Indeed: I'm using a Comcast cable modem, and you reach Comcast's web page at comcast.com -- but my dynamic IP reverse-resolves to a comcast.net subdomain, and is obviously one of many thousands from its formulaic construction (including within it the IP address and region hints).

If this is 'hosts in use' then discrepancy comes from security concerns. The majority of computers in *.com concerns will be behind firewall and not have publicly exposed names. The .net orgs are more likely to let it all hang out.

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