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Comment by tristanperry | Hacker News Reader

Meh, I doubt it'll have any major effect.

The vast majority of TLDs that are introduced fail very quickly (.name, .biz, .pro, a range of ccTLDs whose country's citizens opt for the 'big 3' - .com, .net and .org - regardless, etc)

All that'll happen here - IMO - is that a few of the bigger names will waste $185k on their unique TLDs, realise that their users get confused by them (never underestimate the ability of big companies to misunderstand it's users..) and either switch back or stick ridgidly to using them with no positive effect.

So yep, I'm not too concerned about this. ICANN aren't a great organisation, and they seem to mainly bring out new TLDs to get more money.

</Rant>

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So yep, I'm not too concerned about this. ICANN aren't a great organisation, and they seem to mainly bring out new TLDs to get more money.

ICANN is a non-profit whom CEO gets ~1M/year. Executives earn a bonus of more than 50% of their base salaries if specific goals are reached, such as adding a new gTLD.

Source: http://www.thedomains.com/2010/02/11/nonprofit-icann-release...

I really hope this top-level domain thing isn't going anywhere.

For comparison, the CEO of the American Red Cross has an annual salary of $500k.

I don't think this is a relevant metric at all for judging a non-profit's goals or performance. There is a certain point where the organization has become so big or important that any person whom the stakeholders can trust to run it will command a high salary.

So as a stakeholder in a non-profit, I'd want the non-profit to be as efficient with money as possible... yet I'd want a a CEO that burns through way more money than he needs? Please explain.

I'm not the grandparent poster, but I think he's saying that executives skilled enough to run the Red Cross are motivated primarily by their salaries, and so those salaries have to be competitive with what the same highly-skilled exec could make in the private sector.

I might argue that the situation is in part a matter of "like attracts like". I've you're going to get executive types to contribute and to encourage/force their workforces to contribute, you have to present them with an "executive" type interface. (If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck... and plays golf like a duck...)

My thoughts next turn to "hypocrisy". These are supposedly charity endeavors. But much of their activity -- fundraising activity, at least -- is just more status seeking and building and fraternizing.

There, for me, lies the heart of the matter. When in the minds and/or actions of the top level participants, charity work is anything but.

(I'm "on the outside" looking in, and perhaps I'm too cynical. I want to believe that people have more depth than this, and some individual acquaintances who travel in those circles sure seem to. But it makes me wonder.)

No wonder they are not more effective.

I'm not entirely comfortable with my comment, but I'll make it for the sake of the point about "like attracts like".

Efficient is not strictly synonymous with cheap.

It's not strictly synonymous with "expensive" either. If it correlates, it probably correlates in the direction of "cheap", if only marginally. And any way you slice it, "expensive" is synonymous with "expensive".

Let's come up for air here and ask the simple question: do we believe we have better domain policy because we pay some guy at ICANN a 7-figure annual comp package?

I don't believe that. Do you?

Well, define "better domain policy"...?

Due to its ARPANET origins, the Internet namespace was technically property of the United States. Obviously that situation had to change, or the other nearly 200 nations on the planet would have difficulty accepting the Internet as the true global network.

The ICANN is necessarily a compromise between the interests of powerful nations. It's not reasonable to assume that it could be run completely differently from all the other global intergovernmental organizations. Most politicians don't consider Internet policy to be all that special compared to trade, foreign aid, patents and everything else that needs to be similarly balanced and negotiated. Hence, the head of the ICANN is someone who's acceptable to governments foremost.

I'm not really inclined to figure out what the appropriate compensation for ICANN's CEO is. My comment was not about ICANN in particular.

Gail McGovern, the CEO of the American Red Cross, makes $995,000. Charity Navigator gives the Red Cross 3 of 4 stars.

By contrast, Ophelia Dahl of the 4-star rated Partners in Health makes $86,000.

PIH is a smaller organization than the Red Cross, but there are people who could argue that PIH is also more impactful. It's also the case that part of the reason the Red Cross is so much larger is that it's a key mission of the Red Cross to be larger. It's not unlikely that charities with highly-compensated CEOs share that trait. You pay a CEO a lot of money because their market value is high. What makes a manager-type CEO's market value high? Sales and financing skill.

It's absolutely reasonable to point out and question the salary of a nonprofit's CEO.

> By contrast, Ophelia Dahl of the 4-star rated Partners in Health makes $86,000.

That's still tens of thousands of dollars. Can you point to a CEO of a non-profit making less than $10k? Less than $1k?

http://kittyrescueandadoption.org/how_to_help.html

"The shelter depends entirely on the generosity of others to sustain our efforts. There are no paid personnel and all monies/donations are used to care for our cats. KRA is a non-profit 501 (C3) corporation and donations are tax-deductible."

$86k in many places (say NYC or SFBay) is (just below) a living wage. Must all do-gooders be penniless?

SFBay average is about 76K:

http://www.bayareacensus.ca.gov/bayarea.htm

Equating 86K a year to penniless is a statement very very far removed from reality.

My point's just: there are CEOs of highly effective well regarded charities who are not taking 7 figure salaries. It is not true that charities basically have to shell out 7 figures because that's what people who can manage charities cost.

I don't understand what point you're trying to make.

I'm sure there are many instances where the chief executive of a charity does not take a salary or personally contributes more to the charity than their salary.

It's reasonable and it tells you something about the organization's values, but it only goes so far. Overhead costs are a poor way to judge a charity's effectiveness. More:

http://blog.givewell.org/2009/12/01/the-worst-way-to-pick-a-...

It does not ring true to me that looking at overhead costs are the "worst" way to pick a charity. Is there more to the picture? Sure. Is the Red Cross as impactful as PIH dollar for dollar? I doubt it. And if you look at the numbers and engage critical thinking, instead of just setting an arbitrary "overhead" threshold, you can spot things like growth for growth's sake, or fundraising for fundraising's sake.

If profit is their motive, why didn't they do this 20 years ago? That's 20 years of lost profit.

Market timing. 20 years ago a top level domain wouldn't have been such a valuable asset.

ICANN is less than 13 years old. The Internet only went fully commercial 16 years ago.

~1M a year!? That poor CEO...

I think you're missing the significance of this change. It's not clearly stated in the announcement (in fact, nothing is) but in section 1.3 of the Applicant Guidebook[1] it shows that for the first time it will be possible to have IDN gTLDs, that is, gTLDs in any standardised script. Latin1 is gone. This is big.

Sometimes the anglocentrism (and USA-centrism) on this site worries me.

[1] http://www.icann.org/en/topics/new-gtlds/rfp-clean-30may11-e...

I think you've missed a couple of IDN gTLDs, some launched more than a year ago, i.e. http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/111710_470000_Domain... .

They are country-code top-level domains. Currently IDNs are limited to country representations only.

The current non-IDNs are also limited.

Which makes the issue of IDNs unrelated to this discussion.

The anglocentrism on this site is nearly entirely because the overwhelming majority of developments in the computer industry, from the Mark I to the iPad, have been created by Anglophones.

Let's keep this tangent short but, so what? It doesn't mean we need to be blinkered about what the gradual relegation of English as tech lingua franca might mean for non-anglophones. Do we really need to be in a minority to be interested in remote perspectives?

Personally I want the Internet to bring the world together, and I see IDNs as a step toward maintaining the existing segregation between nations and languages.

And to do that you force everyone to use english?

English is a great lingua france but there are parts of the web that are only targeted at speakers of one language. Why should they have to type strange stuff into the address bar to get there?

Ausserdem habe ich so meine Zweifel ob du mich ploetzlich verstehst nur weil ich ISO 8859-1 verwende. Man kann die fehlenden Zeichen auch umschreiben.

Google and Mozilla have both stated intentions to get rid of the address bar; the number of users that will even see IDNs is a shrinking market. Rather than "typing strange stuff into the address bar", in a year or two most people will be "typing native stuff into a search box" -- if they aren't already.

This move by ICANN is already irrelevant.

> Ausserdem habe ich so meine Zweifel ob du mich ploetzlich verstehst nur weil ich ISO 8859-1 verwende. Man kann die fehlenden Zeichen auch umschreiben.

"I also have my doubts whether you understand me suddenly just because I use ISO 8859-1. One can also rewrite the missing characters."

(Provide your own translation to the dominant language or rely on software to do it for you. That was Google's translation service.)

I think you missed the message.

The majority is actually not as overwhelming as it appears at first sight if you think of people like Linus Torvalds, Guido van Rossum or Bjarne Stroustrup.

BUT, I think most IT folks who are not natively anglophone have wholeheartedly embraced the english language as the lingua franca of the industry and of science in general. The practical advantages of having such a lingua franca are simply overwhelming, and I really think that any step towards localization is a step backwards for everybody.

Very good point. The development of Linux I think of as an English-speaking effort, but that's because Linus conducted all the discussion about it in English (because, as you say, English is the lingua franca of the technology world).

So I guess the actual truth is that the vast majority of technology developments have come from people who speak English (some Ruby stuff excepted), not necessarily native English speakers.

It isn't anglocentrism. It is that English is the language of science and diplomacy. If this whole crazy thing had started in the 18th or 19th centuries it would have been in French or German. If you want to communicate to the world in scientific literature, you publish in English. I think that this spilled over into technology for obvious reasons. You can argue owe the merits of this, but having a common lingua Franca (if you will) was important to bootstrap the Internet. Now that it is more commonplace, it is important to support more languages. But if we had started out supporting everything, it might not have gained traction. Or it would have balkanized and been multiple networks separated by language. (which is what we might get anyway)

People can register unicode domain names (not tld) for years now. Do you know any major sites with a non-latin primary domain name?

I don't get around all that much, but the biggest one I've seen was Daring Fireball's web shortener at ✪df.ws . It was later pulled due to widespread software problems with Unicode glyph handling, with a big offender being AT&T's name servers: http://daringfireball.net/2010/09/starstruck .

If it's not clearly stated, then perhaps people didn't miss it because of their bias but because... it wasn't clearly stated.

How do you decide that a TLD has "failed"? Do the domains still resolve? They are obviously not going to attain a critical mass of public awareness overnight.

If startups are willing to go with goofy abuses of ccTLDs like .ly and .us then they would likely accept or even prefer gTLDs, when there is a rich variety of them available.

The domain scarcity problem will only get worse with time. Unviable options will eventually become viable by sheer necessity.

Let me illustrate how they failed with the example of the .aero TLD. When I want to visit the website of British Airways, one of the largest airlines in the world, I typically Google for "ba". The first search result is britisharways.com, not britishairways.aero. Now you can repeat the same experiment with all the other major or minor airlines, and the top search result always will be a .com (or a ccTLD) domain.

This how you can tell .aero has failed; it's main target users are simply not using it.

If you already have your .com then you don't need new TLDs. But .aero may come in handy the next time someone wants to start a new airline (which is admittedly pretty rare, so .aero in particular was probably a dumb idea).

I think the succesful gTLDs will be the ones that appear commonly in trademarks like photo, pizza, sports, mart, lube, etc. It may become much more common for the domain to be the primary trademark, even for businesses that aren't particularly internet related. Fredspizza.com would be a confusing name for a restaurant but Freds.pizza less so.

> But .aero may come in handy the next time someone wants to start a new airline

The problem is that ICANN has already set it up so that if you have the trademark on "flying.com" that nobody can get "flying.aero" (well they can, but you can take it off them easily). So why would you even bother with the .aero domain unless you own the .com too?

This is simply a money grab by ICANN.

You make .aero part of your trademark e.g. crazyclown.aero. As long as crazyclown.com is not another airline, you should be fine.

You're very unlikely to get away with that. Try starting facebook.aero and see how long it lasts.

If ICANN goes by trademark law, then you should be able to register something generic like friendly.aero without infringing on friendly.shoestore. If they don't then they are being stupid. If there are going to be hundreds of TLDs, you can't automatically protect every trademark in every TLD. Trademarks are not supposed to work like that.

They might not be supposed to work like that, but they do under WIPO.

You can see results here: http://www.wipo.int/amc/en/domains/decisionsx/index-gtld.htm...

Yeah, but who's actually going to do that?

Apparently, just about nobody.

I don't understand the situation well enough to say if it is a "money grab" or not, but it seems like another good reason to abolish intellectual property.

Doesn't sound like a failure at all; you navigate using Google. I would assume this is typically where their traffic comes from. With that being the case it might as well not have a TLD at all; it's all but invisible to the user. The domain could very well have been .aero and you still would have navigated to it successfully. Isn't that all that matters?

Ok here's another example: easyJet, one of the largest budget airlines in Europe, paints easyJet.com on the sides of their airplanes, not easyJet.aero, as you can see on this photo:

http://www.easyjet.com/common/img/photo030.jpg

What I'm saying, airlines simply don't use the .aero TLD.

Whether a raft of new generic top-level domains succeeds or fails depends on whether there is a mind shift in the average user from ".com" to ".anything". IMHO, the new entrants like .biz haven't succeeded because there hasn't been that shift yet.

Now, if Google starts using .google for its products, and other key services you use every day stop using .com as their primary URLs, I think that mind shift could happen and you could get a very different result.

just names - one day it will be without www or top level domains just the pure company name or service. Like tinyUrl and other rerouts this will become possible and the background of the domain structure will only be a registration and admin thing.

That works just fine today. Type the name into your address bar and it will either go right there, or google it for you.

Technology has made this move by ICANN obsolete. However the big problem is if you're a large company you HAVE to protect your trademark, so you'll have to register these other domains anyway - meaning it's just a pure money grab from ICANN.

Agreed -- if anything, it will just make .com domains even more valuable. The average Internet user won't understand these new TLDs.

Really? I mean how valuable is a .com domain to an average user? As far as I can tell, most people don't type in URLs at all, they type the site name into Google or have a bookmark. They mostly don't even look at the url, they look at what the page says. If you want to send the link to someone, you copy the whole thing anyway. If you do a little word of mouth, you probably won't include any TLD at all, so Google is again your target destination. I don't have any knowledge on how Google weighs TLD, but I highly suspect that they don't care. It's about content, they might even favor specific TLDs like "mybusiness.usa" over "mybusiness.com"

Domains couldn't be more irrelevant right now, and adding more TLDs is only exacerbating the situation.

> I mean how valuable is a .com domain to an average user?

> If you do a little word of mouth, you probably won't include any TLD at all

From my experience, mentioning .com verbally after the domain name is what makes regular people realize that they can put that name in Google and reach the website.

Google most definitely does care about the TLD. It's well known that .edu pages are given more weight than others.

The average user types 'facebook' and through the magic of browser search gets to Facebook.com already. This just cuts out one step.

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