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Comment by CydeWeys | Hacker News Reader

They wouldn't use amazon.amazon obviously. Some options would include www.amazon, store.amazon, home.amazon, {product_category}.amazon, ec2.amazon, aws.amazon, etc.

See how we're using .google for some examples (which fortunately is a completely made-up word, hence no contentions).

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I think the product category thing is most likely. They already do a form of {product_category}.amazon, except in reverse: amazon.{product_category}. See:

http://amazon.party/ (party supplies)

http://amazon.dog/ (pet food, toys, etc.)

http://amazon.bible/ (bibles)

http://amazon.fail/ (support contact page)

and my favorite: http://amazon.horse/ (directly to the product page for a horse mask)

Pretty sure they could also put a website right at https://amazon/

pretty sure it's against the DNS rules (too lazy to check the RFC)

There are other, e.g. http://ai

http://ai./ is the canonical way to refer to this, and avoid the link directing to ai.example.com if such a host exists in the local network.

.ai is allowed to do this because .ai is a ccTLD administered by the government of Anguilla.

.amazon is a gTLD covered by different rules, they are technically able to do this but it is explicitly forbidden (contractually).

Wow, they're bragging about cryptography on that site but they're not even serving it securely.

Can anyone explain what happens when I click this?

I'm on the University of Waterloo network and I get sent to [1], rather than what I get when I add the period for: http://ai./

[1] https://uwaterloo.ca/artificial-intelligence-group/

Here's my /etc/resolv.conf (I'm running Linux, though the theory is cross-platform):

# Generated by NetworkManager

search my-university.edu

nameserver their-dns-server-ip

nameserver their-other-dns-server-ip

nameserver their-third-dns-server-ip

DNS queries get sent to the nameserver, but the search domain is what's important here. The search domain is used to resolve non-fully-qualified domain names. So if I just type in http://cs, that's not a FQDN since there are no .s - with cs.my-university.edu, it goes edu->my-university->cs, but just cs is not fully qualified. So since the search domain is 'my-unversity.edu', if I just type in http://cs into the browser, it will look up cs.my-university.edu.

In your case, going to the URL ai.uwaterloo.ca redirects to the URL you linked. Adding the trailing . to ai makes it fully qualified, so going to "http://ai." makes your DNS lookup just 'ai' instead of 'ai.uwaterloo.ca'.

The search domain stuff is mostly useful for addressing other devices on the network. My home router sets the search domain to 'lan' when configuring DHCP devices, so I can use my-server as a hostname and it will resolve to my home server's IP. E.g. "ssh my-server" will turn into "ssh my-server.lan" which gets resolved by the router's DNS server to the correct IP.

I expect that several people can.

* http://jdebp.uk./FGA/web-fully-qualified-domain-name.html

    % dnsqr a ai.uwaterloo.ca.
    1 ai.uwaterloo.ca:
    74 bytes, 1+2+0+0 records, response, noerror
    query: 1 ai.uwaterloo.ca
    answer: ai.uwaterloo.ca 286 CNAME wms-redir1.uwaterloo.ca
    answer: wms-redir1.uwaterloo.ca 286 A 129.97.128.216
    %
    % fetch -v -o /dev/null http://ai.uwaterloo.ca./ 2>&1|head -n 6
    looking up ai.uwaterloo.ca.
    connecting to ai.uwaterloo.ca.:80
    requesting http://ai.uwaterloo.ca./
    301 redirect to https://uwaterloo.ca/artificial-intelligence-group/
    looking up uwaterloo.ca
    connecting to uwaterloo.ca:443
    %

Would be a nightmare to type in the browser's URL bar. I guess there'd be a marked decrease in search traffic for the term "amazon".

This is against the new gTLD rules¹, not DNS rules. ccTLD operators are allowed to do this, gTLD operators are not.

If you want to know more, these are usually called apex records or dotless domains.

¹https://www.icann.org/news/announcement-2013-08-30-en

You can, but iOS won't load it.

Why not? AFAIK it will load http://localhost/, is this the exception?

Yes, localhost IS the exception. There is a lot of code that treats "localhost" specially. IIRC Chrome will let you do things on localhost:XXXX that are normally only possible for sites over HTTPS (Think geolocating and some other privacy-related things).

iOS does load it, for example http://ai/ opens just fine in iOS

This only opens if http://ai./ has been loaded before. Otherwise you get ‘host not found’.

I...what?

That's really impressive, that between the choices of "yes it works" and "no it doesn't work" they managed to make a third options that's far worse.

It's doable, but iirc against the terms of the new tld program.

That'll have a wide variety of problems, and ICANN may not allow it anyway.

"Amazon" is the English spelling of the original name, so it could be argued it's a made-up word too.

All words are made up

English is the de facto language of international relations, more so than any other language anyway. And English is also the working language of ICANN, IETF, and any other technical body dealing with the Internet I can think of.

Point is, the fact that slightly different words are used in Spanish and Portuguese really doesn't matter. They might also want those words as well, but they have claim over the English version too. For example, even though the word for Japan in Japanese isn't "Japan", ICANN would never delegate that TLD to anyone else besides the Japanese government (and indeed even that TLD would be unlikely to be created because it's redundant with the .jp ccTLD).

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