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Comment by quicksilver03 | Hacker News Reader

I would tolerate the ICANN TLD money-grabbing scheme, but the "new" TLDs are a little more than an indication of bad taste. I can't be the only one to dislike anything more than 3 characters in a TLD, like .cloud or .engineering.

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I have to disagree. I mean, yes, the money-grabbing scheme is probably true, but I don't agree with the part about them being bad taste or too long. I will probably lose at most one hour of my total life having to spend extra time typing > 3 characters. And that's a purposeful overestimation. We have browser history and bookmarks. As far as bad taste, I don't know, I'm not really comfortable with creating this "legitimacy" for .com domains or any 3-letter domain over any of the others.

I agree with this. I feel it takes away from the standardization or uniformity 2 and 3 char TLDs bring to domains. Also it does feel like a bait and switch- where for so many years three character tlds (and then 2 char tlds) were so valuable and sought after, only to have these >3 char tlds come along and change the landscape/market.

Additionally, I always found it interesting how the .xxx TLD never took off (was essentially DOA), even after they were so popular and valueable in the pre-sale auctions icann and others conducted b4 their introduction/release several years ago.

> I feel it takes away from the standardization or uniformity 2 and 3 char TLDs bring to domains.

One of the original TLDs is .arpa, and I don't see any of that uniformity in a world where second-level domains like .co.uk domains are pervasive.

> Additionally, I always found it interesting how the .xxx TLD never took off (was essentially DOA)

The usecase driving .xxx was not from site operators but from third-parties seeking an easier way to censor porn sites.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.xxx

The concept was flawed from the start given the same site can be served through multiple domains, and it relied on site operators located in any jurisdiction from any corner of the world to voluntarily serve their sites thorough that TLD.

No there just shouldn't be a thing as a "TLD". I should be able to register abc.ou8hurbaskjdbflubsaduf if I want to. Or just 8huasidvbsd with no domain. Only way to fight domain squatting and the stupidly overpriced domain hacks.

I think they're needed so your DNS resolver knows who to talk to. But I agree they're kind of useless from a user point of view.

What’s the problem with longer length tlds?

In practice URLs often cannot be more than 2K characters. It's also more work to type and bytes to transmit and harder to see on small screens. For many use cases these are irreverent, but they do matter to some.

> In practice URLs often cannot be more than 2K characters. It's also more work to type and bytes to transmit and harder to see on small screens.

The longest vanity TLD I could find was .travelersinsurance. Two dozen characters are nothing more than a rounding error in the 2k character limit. You routinely pass 10 times more characters in path and query parameters than you do in the domain name.

Also, how often do people type in URLs instead of clicking links?

Also, keep in mind that some browsers are starting to hide path and query parameters in the address bar and instead only show the domain name. I presume that makes domain names and TLDs more relevant in terms of name recognition.

Where is 2K a limit these days?

Chromium based browsers!

> The Google Chrome browser supports a maximum length of a web page URL of 2 MB (2048 characters) in size.

taken from [0]. Do note that this is a restriction created by the browser developers. In theory a URL can be of arbitrary length. Some browsers (like Firefox) do comply with this, though they might now show the full URL to the user, cutting it off after a certain number of characters.

[0]: https://mywebshosting.com/what-is-the-maximum-url-length-lim...

What's interesting is how 2048 characters is 2 KB (a factor of 1000 difference) but this conversion of 2 MB = 2048 characters seems to have been copy-pasted around the web

2MB would be 2 million characters - if using ASCII characters, a bit less for special characters in UTF-8

Experimentally, you can easily verify that 2MB is the actual limit, not 2048 characters.

For example, the following domain renders just fine, despite being ~2076 characters long: https://postman-echo.com/get?foo1=aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa...

See the upstream chromium docs: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/refs/heads/...

I don't think adding ~10 or so characters to the TLD meaningfully impacts this limit.

That would be 2KB (the error is in the reference material; you cited it faithfully).

As non-native speaker, I always have to google how to spell `engineering`. And you can't really auto-correct domain name.

ICANN has clearly strayed from its charter of nonprofit root trustee, and is acting like any other for profit entity and arbitraging away their assets. I'd love to see a root-restandardization effort that aims to take anything that isn't (com/net/org, the country code tlds, and whatever other traditional ones I'm forgetting) and sticks it under a new .icann or whatever. So ICANN can "sell .google", but most everyone would end up referring to it as ".google.icann". The sooner this is done the better, to make it clear that attempting to use the root pollution will end up being a painful experience.

Heck, let Big Tech take .google/.apple/.amazon/.comcast etc if that's what it takes to get this done. Point being to keep the root pollution to a finite amount rather than the ongoing sell off of any name imaginable.

And invalidate every URL and hostname in existence? That's an absolute nonstarter of an idea.

If you think through the implications of my proposal you'll see that it is only invalidating hostnames in these ICANN-giveaway new "TLDs". Traditional domains would remain unchanged. Trustees of traditional TLDs would still continue their corruption (as was narrowly avoided for .org a few months ago), but that's probably inevitable. Meanwhile we'd preserve the root namespace for the adoption of better technologies (eg .onion).

And honestly we need better mechanics for machine-intended references regardless. It's ridiculous that you resolve and load a webpage, only for that webpage to require you to resolve a bunch more human readable (ie non-decentralized) names for loading subresources. For example, going to a bookmarked page shouldn't result in any DNS queries for human readable names.

> If you think through the implications of my proposal you'll see that it is only invalidating hostnames in these ICANN-giveaway new "TLDs". Traditional domains would remain unchanged.

And why should that distinction be made? "New gTLDs" have been active since 2013. That's nearly 10 years of usage you're still arguing should be invalidated.

Because it was clear at the time the trustee had gone crazy, and combined with being ugly as hell, they never really got used for anything serious. Rather why should ICANN be able to convert a public resource that had been held in trust, and we just have to accept it?

To be clear I'm not picking on things like .biz etc. Even though those were obvious cash grabs, they're at least widely applicable and thus widely adopted. But things like .christmastrees .business .companyname .morebiglongwords etc. Over "nearly 10 years of usage" I can still count on my fingers the number of times I've seen things like this used.

I think that as more and more companies and individuals get online there's absolutely a use for more TLDs, and having more descriptive ones doesn't hurt anyone. I do think TLDs like .sucks are a flagrant display of ICANN's greed and corruption.

I’m never going to remember a domain with a silly tld. I don’t necessarily think badly of the company when I see a link to one (I mostly think “fuck you ICANN”) but it is anti-memorable.

Oh please. A Cloud Guru's acloud.guru is awesome and easy to remember, and there are probably tons of other examples.

And a lot of the .com domain space is polluted either with people sitting on domains and wanting to sell them for thousands or just leaving it unregisterable. So you have this choice of either creating a really long .com, or a shorter .other

Granted, the domain name system is not ideal, but adding new TLDs, however long, is a better solution than dealing with having to name your company so you can get a .com that matches it.

Notion.so is another example. The gTLD in this case could even be considered part or the brand, as notion.com points to it.

.so is a ccTLD, not a gTLD.

> I’m never going to remember a domain with a silly tld.

I doubt this assertion is grounded in reality. Sites that resort to puns from cc TLDs like lobste.rs don't suffer from name recognition problems, and no one ever had any problem remembering twitch.tv.

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