For $185k Brands Can (soon) Apply For Their Own TLD | Hacker News Reader

For $185k Brands Can (soon) Apply For Their Own TLD

reuters.com

15 pointsUrgo28 comments

Honestly, who cares?

(From a consumer's standpoint. Apple, microsoft, et al will care a lot, which I'll explain)

I predict that nobody will use this. People like Apple will probably buy .mac and .apple, windows will buy .windows etc., but as a poster pointed out below, they will probably just redirect to the .com

This really feels like a money grab by ICANN; and is in pretty poor form.

Consider non-technical people. They're just figuring out .com. Most of them don't understand subdomains that aren't www.

I'll see people type things like www.images.google.com or www.mail.yahoo.com or www.mail.yahoo.com etc. etc.

Even if it was .apple, you'd still have huge parts of their customer base typing something.apple.com -- getting the .apple accomplishes nothing but increased revenue for ICANN.

.com is a brand name. .ly is cute, .net is geeky, .org is kindof cool, but at the end, .com is what most people understand.

But I'm sure that ICANN will enjoy the $185k ransom that they're going to effectively be holding over everybody's head when this goes live!

"Pay us $185k or .apple is going to go to somebody other than you. Be a shame if that happened, wouldn't it?"

Disgusting.

I am not sure. Especially if that $185k is a one-off expense and not a yearly fee, I do not rule out that some good salesman will make a good living owning .cloud. Risky? Yes, but impossible? IMO: no.

In the sleazy department, a browser vendor could try to sway the issue by changing the way their browser does lookups if users enter incomplete URLs. 'ebay' does not have to go to http://eBay.com, it could go to 'eBay.whatever', where .whatever is owned by the vendor, instead. I doubt anybody could get away with that, though.

I don't think so...

in any time, you could write "apple" on your navigator, and instead of performing an automatic google search for apple, it will send you to apple website...

the same for a lot of words like google

Will the browsers play ball with that, though? Technically, the tld is .apple, so you'd have to type .apple into the browser.

Google isn't a charity; they want you typing "apple" into the address bar, then seeing ads for apple before clicking on apple.com. As it stands now, they could accomplish exactly what you're saying.

Check to see if there is a ".com" associated with the single word you type, and take you there.

Seems like such a bad idea and ICANN seems to be far more motivated by revenue than they should be.

The ICANN CEO is getting around $1 million/year in compensation.

I bet there is a line of smart internet people willing to run ICANN who are far more altruistic.

From the perspective of brands, this may be a big deal. $185k is a drop in the bucket, and large organizations with marketing budgets held in different divisions often have very different infrastructure (sometimes because those divisions are separate companies that have been acquired, have a separate P&L, etc). New product launches have to deal with domain availability and possible trademark squatters. Some brands have different websites for different segments of their audience. Some brands launch websites just to support a specific marketing effort, such as cause marketing or event support.

This is absolutely a head-scratcher for small orgs, but is pretty convenient (a convenience easily worth $185k) for the big brands. I think their example of .apple is a silly one. A better example might be P&G, J&J, Pfizer, The Pepsi Company, etc.

Apple's market cap is 300 billion. Johnson & Johnson and Procter & Gamble are both at 180 billion. Pfizer is 160 billion and Pepsi is 110 billion. So why exactly is Apple a silly example?

Notice he's talking about brands - because Apple don't have multiple brands, apple.com is fine.

But for big companies in the food & beverage, homecare sectors etc, they have a lot of sub brands. They want to de-emphasise their company name (because nobody cares about them) and sell the brand.

For example, do you know off the top of your head the brands of P&G?

However, if I told you Old Spice, Gilette, Oral-B, Pantene etc, it starts to make a lot more sense to have .oldspice, .gillette .oralb .pantene and so on.

That makes no sense.

http://apple/ might make sense.

But what would .pantene do? blonde.prov.pantene? They are not going to subdomain them under .pg.

I just flipped on a clip from Hulu.com and was served a Lowes DR pre-roll spot driving to the vanity URL Lowesracing.com/SummerSalute

This is what I'm talking about. Apple doesn't do that sort of thing, making them a silly example for a TLD.

I look forward to the day when I'm not sure if something is a URL or not.

I have trouble seeing why maps.google is such a meaningful step from maps.google.com.

Less to type... Maybe non-technical users who never understood why the hell everything ended with ".com" will be more comfortable.

Reminds me of when the W3C decided we should be able to do <header> instead of <div id="header">.

If large companies have the extra cash to drop extending their online identities in this very small way, then there's really no harm to the broader eco-system of domains.

There will likely be a few "fun" uses of this, say drink.coke, but coke.com will still remain the far more compelling implementation and their own personal TLDs will simply become presences that offer little practical benefits, but were bought simply because they were there -- and the press coverage that the purchase may achieve may in fact just garner equal to or more than the $185,000 they originally spent.

Overall, this will likely just be a small boon for the kind of consultancy firms mentioned in the original article: but it will offer little in the way of actual affects to the rest of us.

Does this mean domains like http://snort.coke are going to be available? Rock on!

Since this is going to effect large brands because you need to pay to play, this is going to make phishing attempts even more effective. Not because the phisher will have the .ebay or .paypal, but it will make the URL even hard to dechiper whether it is legit or not.

I think companies will just register these and re-direct to their .com

More and more adverts as well are now carrying facebook URLs rather than traditional URLs, so it will be interesting to see how marketing departments respond to this and what they do.

scratches head

This is news to me. Perhaps the author of the post has gotten some basic facts wrong?

Nope.

http://www.cojk.com/icann-issues-a-timeline-for-approval-of-...

http://www.icann.org/en/topics/new-gtlds/comments-7-en.htm

I'm not invested in the domain marketplace, but somehow this gives me a bad feeling about exclusionary access to what is sure to be a land grab. Who is going to get the .music or .law domains, for example? I understand they want someone who is capable of operating a domain registry and can put up $185,000, but there's a rather disheartening 'pay to play' feel to it.

So if this passed, who would be in control of a TLD like .london? What about .porn?

Hopefully this implodes the absurdity that is .com squatting.

I suspect the squatting will just continue on the new TLDs.

At 185k a pop? Plus I believe you also have to prove a legitimate claim on the name.

There are .coms that sell for millions, so $185k for a .whatever domain seems reasonable (well, not really, but it's reasonable to expect people will pay for it). I wonder who can legitimately claim .food, or .cars, though.

Great idea by ICANN, though. They've successfully just turned domains into beanie babies and magic TG cards.

I guess I misunderstood. I assumed the new TLD owners would be able to issue domains (e.g. the city of Boston buys the .boston TLD, then sells .boston domains to raise revenue for the city).

Enjoy the biggest regexp breakage since Y2K in 3 ... 2 ... 1

.yc ?

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