Comment by duskwuff | Hacker News Reader

Comment by duskwuff | Hacker News Reader

I'd go a step further and suggest that all of the new gTLDs are pointless and idiotic:

- .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.

I agree that pretty much all of those are dumb, but I still think there should be a .app TLD, if only because there are so many perfectly good .com names just sitting on parking pages (and I would totally use .app domains).

Plus it just rolls off the tongue and there's no weird confusion on the spelling.

I too think .app would be a good fit as a gTLD, compared to dumb gTLDs exist today..

That would actually make sense and solve a real problem. As such, I'm pretty sure it'll never happen. ;)

I'm really, seriously considering the idea of raising some money to cover the registration fee ($50,000). Trying to figure out now if there are more fees involved. I'm confident I can build a complete registrar and global DNS setup in 5 years (or however long it takes to get through their process).

They are operationally useless, yes. However, they are not meant to be operationally useful. They are meant to be vehicles for extracting money from domainers.

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.

Most of them aren't even accomplishing that, though. Many of the new gTLDs (like .cat, .aero, and .jobs) have restrictions on ownership and usage which make them worthless to speculators; the rest just don't have the name recognition that the Big Three do.

> - .jobs: pity they won't take my registration for Blow, Inc.

They did take RIM...

(http://rim.jobs is Research In Motion's careers site)

Hey come on there has to be uses, such as lol.cat(taken), malay.asia(taken), steve.jobs(not taken).

whoa there, slow down, there's .cat?!

Catalan culture. A regional-cultural TLD. If small countries get TLDs, why shouldn't a tightly connected culture of ~5 million get one too?

I'm all for .cat, but I can see the arguments against. People are already campaigning for .cym for Wales, so where do we stop? Do all the regional communities on Spain get one (Basque country, Asturias, Galicia, the list goes on). Do the Saami in Scandinavia get one? (They have their own parliaments, so why not TLDs?) What about Native Americans / First Nations? At least being a country is a criterion that works 95+ percent of the time

>> People are already campaigning for .cym for Wales, so where do we stop?

Wales is recognised as a country, not a "regional community"

Um, actually the constitutional status of Wales is a murky topic, and even if that were to be cleared up unambiguously, how do you compare statuses across constitutions?

It's really not that murky. I'm hard pushed to find any organisation that doesn't classify Wales as a country.

The EU? The UN?

Wales is a constituent country of the United Kingdom and has some devolved power. However, it is the United Kingdom which is internationally recognised.

They don't have their own seat at the UN for instance. They don't field their own team at the Olympics.

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.

It is actually extremely murky, because there is no single document which states what the constitutional status is, there is a patchwork of legislation which refers to England and Wales, then there are the Wales-specific acts such as the Welsh Language Acts, and then there's the devolution and the devolved legislation (which establishes that Wales is to some degree independent within the UK). The constitutional problem, in a nutshell, is that Henry VIII introduced the Laws in Wales Acts to create the legal entity "England and Wales", but there had been no legal entity "Wales" before he did.

Also, if Wales is already a country, why is independence the stated aim of Plaid Cymru :)?

.cat is because of their language. I think it makes sense.

I mean Catalán, not lolcat :-)

I'd think .cym for Welsh language sites would be a good thing. I'd see a lot more point in that than .net, a general-purpose namespace which is used generally by people too slow off the mark to register the .com (yes, I know it wasn't intended to be that way).

What's wrong with cym.uk?

Wales isn't a country!? I would have thought of all people, someone with a handle like "anghyflawn" might be a bit more compassionate to the plight of the cymry...

Wales is not a sovereign state, which is what "country" means in this context.

If you're going to abuse Wikipedia that way, you should be referring to him as Jimbo.

I think you misunderstand me :). I don't think .cym is a bad idea at all, but I can understand those who might think it is not. Wales is not a country in the way that Russia, Tuvalu, Kenya or even Jersey are (and even in the latter sense there are fringe cases such as Western Sahara, Kosovo and South Ossetia). If Catalonia and Wales are OK, is Sápmi? What about culturally distinct minorities with no political recognition such as the Roma? It's just too messy.

Doesn't that argue for .trek as well?

If you can find a few million who spend most of their time in the cultural group of trekkies, then yeah.

But still, deregulation and all. Domains will stop mattering somewhen soon. Search engines are important.

In the same way as .tv is for Tuvalu.

Tuvalu is an actual country (which is why it gets a cctld). Catalonia is an administrative division of Spain.

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?

> If Catalonia has its own TLD, why not California or Maine?

Politics.

It's not Catalonia, it's Catalan.

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?

> It's not Catalonia, it's Catalan.

You may want to note that my comment had two clauses, and that this is handled in the second one.

In defense of .coop, .com and .org are rather poor fits for many cooperatives. However, I think TLDs are rather pointless and idiotic in general.

Oh come on--- I kind of like .museum. Be even better if a few more folks actually used it...

Museums probably belong in .edu (or .ac.uk here), but some haven't bothered with all that TLD malarkey (e.g. the British Library is simply www.bl.uk)

I think the idea of .museum is to group all museums on a global level, instead of an arbitrary per-country or local level. It does make (some) sense.

It might have made a bit of sense at that level when the TLD was created in 2001, but the wide availability of excellent web directories and search engines has long since made that a moot point.

I quite like their http://the.british.museum/ url

... which redirects to http://www.britishmuseum.org/ .

The UK has some interesting ones:

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)

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