.tel, .xxx and .mobi are all pointless and idiotic
blog.tommorris.org
blog.tommorris.org
- .aero: if IATA airport codes were all registered domains here, it might be useful, but they aren't, so it isn't.
- .asia: asia is definitely a country </sarcasm>
- .biz: sufficiently stupid that SpamAssassin has a rule for it
- .cat: meow? seriously, I've only seen this used for vanity joke domains
- .coop: there isn't a .llc, why is this any different?
- .info: happy fun SEO land
- .jobs: pity they won't take my registration for Blow, Inc.
- .mobi: as noted
- .museum: 1138 registered domains in 10 years is a sign of true irrelevance
- .name: personal names are hardly unique identifiers
- .pro: stupid hierarchy makes this one even more useless than you'd think
- .tel: as noted
- .travel: because .aero just wasn't enough
- .xxx: as noted
Perhaps I'm just not seeing the possibilities, but I suspect that there's no future for any of the gTLDs beyond com/net/org, and possibly a few of the up-and-coming IDN gTLDs. The future of domain names is really in better unique names, not a more complex hierarchy.
Plus it just rolls off the tongue and there's no weird confusion on the spelling.
Wales is recognised as a country, not a "regional community"
Wales is a constituent country of the United Kingdom and has some devolved power. However, it is the United Kingdom which is internationally recognised.
If Wales needs a tld, what about Texas? Texas has a distinct culture and was once an independent republic. I'm sure people from Wales think they are independent in some way that Texas is not, but people from Texas think those thoughts too.
Also, if Wales is already a country, why is independence the stated aim of Plaid Cymru :)?
I mean Catalán, not lolcat :-)
But still, deregulation and all. Domains will stop mattering somewhen soon. Search engines are important.
If Catalonia has its own TLD, why not California or Maine? If it's a català tld, why doesn't brezhoneg get one? Or cymraeg? Or võru, saami, euskara, söl'ring, cemhuî or ajië?
Politics.
Catalan is spoken in these regions: (spain) Catalonia, Valencia, Mallorca, some of Aragon in South-Eastern France a town in Sardinia (Alguer / Alghero) Andorra (a small country)
For the rest of cultural/linguistic TLDs... have they asked for one?
You may want to note that my comment had two clauses, and that this is handled in the second one.
So yeah, something useless is getting sold to "investors" - what else is new? and in this case, it takes money from those "investors" that would otherwise be used squatting on useful .com and .net domains, causing those of us who actually want to /use/ a domain to use longer and less-memorable names. So, as far as I'm concerned, this is a net win.
http://bl.uk/ (British Library)
http://nhs.uk/ (National Health Service)
http://police.uk/ (takes you to a page which links to all the individual police forces)
http://mod.uk/ (Ministry of Defence)
They did take RIM...
(http://rim.jobs is Research In Motion's careers site)
There should be no restrictions on the domain names at all. We only have the arbitrary segmentation into m.n form (where n is a limited set of (org, com etc.)) for technical reasons.
Preferably, there should be no such restrictions at all. Or the n part should be an infinite set. But I don't see why people are partisan about restricting the available namespace.
Of course, since this only gives you effectively two choices right now (Verisign = com/net and Afilias = org/info), it's not a particularly good reason.
Honestly, how often do you type in a full domain anyway? I generally type the first couple of letters into Chrome's address bar.
Duplication of data.
Go to any major site and you'll see it has been registered as the same site in almost all of the other tlds or the rest of the domains are run by domain squatters.
If I'm a major corporation, do I now have to buy up my .n tld? Cannon did. Will IBM have to buy .ibm? Will apple have to buy .apple?
1) Type www.gooogle.com (not google, google.com or the browser search)
2)Type facebook.com in google search bar at google.com
3) go to facebook.com
Now add to it facebook.mobi, fb.me, facebook.xxx (that is a nice idea thought :P) and how can we expect the average user to understand that all these point to the same DNS?
DNS? What the hell is a DNS? I just want to see last night's party pics on Facebook
Karl Auerbach was the wise Unix neckbeard type who was on ICANN's board for a while. You can read about his efforts to create ICANN transparency: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Auerbach
"has". Although the British pluralization actually does make more sense.
Not really: One organization is one thing, logically speaking.
But it was amusing of him to get that wrong while explicitly attempting to sound American.
By the way I'm used to the American usage, myself.
Metonymic pluralisation in British English isn't "blanket" but done with the specific intent of implying the importance of collective input. Google the corporate entity has many employees but Google's engineering team have won the search engine wars. Microsoft is still a corporate behemoth but they are often accused of being ineffective at interdepartmental communication these days.
"The Magic is doing really well this season," "The Heat is doing really well this season," (there are no non-plural NFL teams...)
Band names fare better: "The Who was awesome if somewhat cheesy." "Radiohead was awesome if somewhat cheesy."
Then why say "people love this" instead of "people loves this" (as in Spanish or French)? Saying "my people love this" while you say "my family loves this" is highly inconsistent.
This creates greater competition in the registrar market which will keep domain prices down. It also dilutes the value of any particular domain name, which is a Good Thing (tm). I would be very happy to see the whole domaining business model disappear.
The proliferation of new domains is one of the issues I'm grappling with in my work on delineal.com.
There is no more confusion created. (Almost) all existing TLDs have domains in them that should not be there based on the original "purpose" of the TLDs.
The .com domain only ever made sense in the context of a single language and a single country. It's only crowded because it is one of the first ones that anyone could register in. If all the TLDs that exist today existed at the beginning, the landscape would be very different.
The notion that "once a name is allocated, it's gone forever" is no different than today. More TLDs provide more opportunities for similarly named companies or organizations to have some form of their name. It "prevents" large companies from dominating all forms of a name.
1. First and foremost, filtration software isn't just about adversarial blocking. It can stop your grandma from getting tricked into going lemonparty.org. This is a big one.
2. Children looking for porn without permission are often under non-ideal constraints, like a time limit before someone else comes home. If you can get fairly good coverage, the kid will have that much less time, and many kids aren't going to invest in figuring out how to bypass it; they'd just as soon go to their room and fap there, or go to a friend's house where there is unmonitored access.
3. Filtration can be used to demonstrate a good-faith effort to keep your network and environment safe (at a library or net cafe, for instance). Same principles as number two here: if it's difficult enough and the user is under time constraints, they'll just wait until later.
There are other good reasons, but that should suffice. .xxx isn't about keeping a sophisticated, determined opponent out, and that's rarely successful no matter what measures you take. The internet is always going to have porn and there shouldn't be any enforcement forcing adult content onto xxx.
However, if xxx sees wide adoption, and the xxx sites move off of com (redirect), that's a big weight off the shoulders of blacklist and filtration vendors. To be able to block a whole huge namespace like that, where xxx is now hosting 30% or some other significant number of the new adult content that would have been on com if not for the xxx TLD, that's a big efficiency gain, even if you still have to filter com.
> if xxx sees wide adoption
I think xxx will achieve adoption by pornographers that want social acceptance. Basically, any pornographer that operates in the real world as an "adult media company", "glamor photography", etc. A xxx domain will demonstrate a willingness to allow your content to be easily filtered, which is important for porn companies because as much as adults love pornography, generally, they want some control over its introduction and availability to their children. xxx-exclusive hosted content will be seen as a good faith effort to keep parents in control.
I think that eventually any porn company that wants social tolerance will be on xxx because it will be better for their image. Topsites and other aggregators will probably stay on com as they don't really care and it doesn't effect their commissions and/or ad money.
I would assume that's existing domain and copyright holders who want to reserve their domain/tradmark before someone else does. That doesn't imply there will be a lot of usage.
I'm sure plenty of businesses, non-profits and governments are thinking the same thing in order to prevent whitehouse.com/whitehouse.gov mixups.
So, they should move to .xxx to facilitate being blocked? Somehow I do not see it.
The only reason I bought it is because I am a member of an informal organization whose name is "Shadytel", so an @shady.tel address looked real spiffy at the time.
(from the Twitter feed: https://twitter.com/#!/shadytel/status/47150260157562880 )
I'm aware I can pay for that with my Diner's Club, but will you accept Krugerrands if I can get them on the noon autogyro?
I suspect that this will be the ultimate solution to this sort of nonsense.
The exception of course is when you can build it into your website name like .io and .ly. Also browsers are moving away from domain names so being first on Google (just as hard if someone prominent is already on the .com you want) will be more important.
Sounds like a good opportunity for nslookup tools to justify requiring a credit-card payment for certain types of lookup.
The point where he questions if he is desktop or mobile, is actually very critical. The web is one. Especially with new ways of designing and developing a site including things like media queries make the entire point of a .mobi appear like a joke to me.
Looks like they were made with the purpose of being abused.
.co is for Colombia
Google uses both:
http://www.google.cat/ (in Catalan)
http://www.google.com.co/ (in Spanish)
.mobi should have been .mbl or just .m
To make the mobile TLD longer than allthe others, that is just plain stupid.
Too, it's pretty consistent when a lot of sites use subdomains to indicate you're going to a different portion of the same domain, i.e. a blog (blog.site.tld) or an estore (shop.site.tld) or even a 404 page (404.site.tld). 'm' should tell you then that you're on the mobile page of the same site, especially when we're now seeing so many domains that a .com can be a completely different, totally nonaffiliated group from the .net
Which makes sense, but I can never remember whether it is en.m.wikipedia.org or m.en.wikipedia.org
(And the fact that the iPad goes by default to the Mobile version despite the fact that it's not appropriate for the size of the device.)
All I can see is a major hook on which some damn do-gooder will attempt to hang yet another censorship scheme by trying to force all 'pornographic' websites to only have .xxx domains, and by 'pornographic' I mean 'everything the do-gooder disagrees with'.
We fought the CDA to the Supreme Court and won with the mix of justices we had then. I hope that if something similar happens again, that case is used as precedent and not toilet paper.
I agree that there is risk in regulating 'distasteful' domains to .xxx which then results in blanket blocking is a bad thing, but doesnt that just mean that the core issue we have here is not .xxx or anything other than the fundamental issues that we already have?
.xxx just makes it easier for regulators/high-horse 'do-gooders' to target whole swathes of content... that does not entirely negate the usefulness of the TLD though.
Why not have TLDs at all? Why not just have global content tags?
Not if obscurity is your only defense. I think obscurity of some forms, like using unusual port numbers, can be part of a defense-in-depth strategy to foil purely scripted attacks and save your resources a bit.
> .xxx just makes it easier for regulators/high-horse 'do-gooders' to target whole swathes of content...
And here we have it. It's a temptation I doubt they will be able to resist. Giving it to them that easily is just removing one more element of a defense-in-depth against censorship attempts.
> Why not have TLDs at all? Why not just have global content tags?
This is more of a technical issue, but my first reaction to doing everything via tagging is that spammers are going to spam: If you give them the opportunity to add tags to addresses you end up with the same scenario that lead Google to ignore keywords on websites.
I don't see why the same wouldn't apply for porn. If I'm running a pay-for porno site offering premium woman-on-horse action, I'm not interested in, I dunno, gay guys turning up. The people you want turning up are the target audience because those guys are going to pay you money. If the cost for lying in the tag is sufficient (i.e. Google won't rank you as high), then you've got a motivation for telling the truth.
All I know is, I remember the web before Google and I remember how much spam every single search pulled in on the engines that were susceptible to keyword spam. I think that's a pretty solid piece of empirical evidence that if you give people the ability to do it again they will. It doesn't matter why.
> The people you want turning up are the target audience because those guys are going to pay you money.
Spammers simply don't seem to think like this.
> If the cost for lying in the tag is sufficient (i.e. Google won't rank you as high), then you've got a motivation for telling the truth.
This might work. I know, however, it would be yet another arms race.
.ubuntu is a TLD itself (or it could be thought of as having an empty tld)
Getting rid of the suffixes eliminates this and brings us down to the free-for-all level of the .com for all sites.