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Comment by jdlyga | Hacker News Reader

Adding more TLD's is such a bad idea

I really dislike corporate brand TLDs. But I’ve long ago wished we had expanded the TLDs earlier to include a lot more obvious things like:

.movie, .book, .museum, .news, etc.

This would have avoided this problem where you have “book-name-book.com” and “newblockbuster-movie.com” and so on.

Correct! Even something as simple and obvious as '.api' is not a TLD.

To be fair, due to the hierarchy of domains, it does make sense for api to be a subdomain rather than TLD.

It would be a cool alternative to guarantee that example.tld owned example.tld.api though, as you could assume that any .api domain would be an API.

it does not make sense, right now apis are hidden away under the domain hierarchy but are used as first class citizens of the web.

lots of times you don't care about anything on a domain but the api

TLDs for things, not TLDs for trademarks.

.museum has been around for a while (~2001), but I have never seen any use of it.

I recently came across this!

https://www.californiarailroad.museum/

(no affiliation with them, but was pleasantly surprised to see it in the wild)

.coop for co-operatives has also been around for a while (2001), with domains like: https://chicken.coop/

what, exactly, is the problem with having “newblockbuster-movie.com” ? These sort of domains are usually abandoned within a couple years, anyway.

Having a limited set of gTLDs decided by ICANN etc didn’t really seem a long term solution either to me. ICANN itself doesn’t really seem like a solution for a truly global distributed network either, but that’s a whole other topic.

I’m not super excited about letting anyone who can afford to run a TLD make one either, but at least so far there appears to be relatively little mainstream appetite for using them.

anything that screws over cybersquatters gets my vote

ICANN’s UDRP already gives trademark holders huge leverage over cybersquatters, arguably too much power. Not sure we need much more in this regard. If you look at the UDRP’s case load, it’s extremely rare for trademark holders to lose a UDRP case.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Domain-Name_Dispute-...

UDRP process is often abused to shut down criticism: https://www.wipo.int/amc/en/domains/decisions/text/2017/d201...

The world would be better off without UDRP.

Domain name investing is not the same as cybersquatting.

How do you distinguish the two?

There are laws that define cybersquatting.

A domain based on generic words (for which you pay a premium) could be considered an investment.

Why?

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