Google owns TLDs: .web .meme and .lol | Hacker News Reader

Google owns TLDs: .web .meme and .lol

icannwiki.org

Google does not own .web. They were in the running to acquire it but it will ultimately go to Verisign (who runs .com) after a ~5 year legal dispute.

Yes, for a moment I thought Google acquired .web from Verisign. Latest News on .web [1]

>after a ~5 year legal dispute.

Is it finally "settled"? It seems some are suggesting Afilias will continue to sue.

[1] https://circleid.com/posts/20211228-irp-panel-sanctions-afil...

Google does not own .lol either.

Right. And .lol is open for business. I was registering one yesterday.

If ICANN wasn't just a giant extortion racket they would have yanked this from Google squatting on it years ago - clearly they haven't actually met any of the listed goals considering they have never used the TLD (or opened them for general availability like their original application implies).

In reality all ICANN cares about is $$$

Hasn't that been obvious for years? As far as I remember there were attempts to sell of lucrative parts of ICANNs responsibilities to private businesses that where coincidentally owned by the very people that made the decision to sell. The whole organization is openly corrupt and doesn't really try to hide it.

Yes, ICANN planned to sell the Public Interest Registry, responsible for .org, to a private equity group.

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fadi_Chehad%C3%A9

Note that the co-founder of Ethos was the former CEO of ICANN. The PIR sale was stopped but it looks like Ethos still ended up with the company actually contracted to operate the .org registry and the .org DNS provider. That whole sequence was and is outrageous.

ICANN makes a cut of every registration, not just the TLD application fee, or the quarterly registry fees.

ICANN has LOTS of problems, but it is actually incentivized to see TLDs in general availability.

Google will have paid ICANN $500k just to read the application for these TLD's ($185k * 3) and has paid them an additional $500k since then just to maintain them.

I'm not wholly convinced that ICANN is operating solely out of a sense of generosity. It sounds to me more like "pay me a lot of money and I will look after you" (i.e. a protection racket). I suspect ICANN is actually motivated to look after google as a high-paying customer and registrar, rather than be what they should be, which is acting independent, treating everyone the same, and not just using everything as an opportunity to cash-grab.

TBF, 500k + 500k for controlling 3 TLDs (333k/TLD) is not a lot of money. For Google it's a rounding error.

When you sell 1,200 TLDs it ends up being good money.

ICANN manage to make $200 million a year for just managing a database of 300 million value key pairs and 1200 tlds.

It sometimes is astounding how cheap bribery can be, right?

#Web3 Fixes this

Please don't take HN threads on generic flamewar tangents. The last thing we need is to repeat that one over again.

That's not to say there can't be substantive discussion about Web3 but it would need to be seeded with interesting new information, not a throwaway one-liner.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Oh god, I don't need my domain to be another form of currency.

If Web3 ever becomes a thing I look forward to seeing the chaos that ensues when the inevitable happens, and a major domain name gets stolen with absolutely zero dispute resolution and where the attackers can also hijack all incoming traffic to steal credentials or install malware. Then it will be mathematically impossible to recover without paying whatever ransom the attackers like for the return (if the attackers even decide they want to sell!).

DNS Poisoning was bad enough, this would be a total wipeout.

Don't know if this is a joke. "Web3" makes problems like this even more complicated because domain name resolution needs a single central point of trust.

I'm sure someone can make an ICO to "solve" that problem, write a white paper and promptly disappear after the pump and dump is over.

Yes! We could manage internet addressing on the blockchain instead!

DNS is quite distributed already but it’s far from “democratic”. Instead of domain squatting and hoarding through through multiple private companies, we could domain squat through… multiple _other_ private companies. That’s Real Democracy™.

We could even speculate with domain names and tlds and maybe steal them from each other in completely new and exciting ways.

Maybe we could make it so only the early adopters can afford these tlds or domain names for a reasonable price and then everyone else could prop up its price until a rug pull happens.

What if we we make this system consume an insane amount of energy? Our current solution is probably inefficient in certain ways, but we can always go further!

There’s lots of possibilities! #web3FixesThis

Web3 has been used to mean too many things (NFTs ETH crypto etc). Blockchains offer the ability to fix centralized choke points on the Internet, and some prefer Dweb (decentralized web) as a term to describe this.

The list of all their owned TLDs are at [0]. There is an icannwiki page with all the ones they’ve applied for, but not just the ones they currently own.

0: https://ntldstats.com/registry/Charleston-Road-Registry-Inc

How can a commercial company own a top level domain like ".app"? I get that they own .youtube or .google but isn't that way too generic? Like a company owning the copyright for the word "Company"?

These companies don't really "own" the names. They're paying $180k/yr for the privilege of ICANN delegating the responsibility of managing that gTLD to them. But this privilege isn't any kind of legal right; the company doesn't have a deed to or easement on that gTLD that would hold up in court. ICANN has just agreed, as their side of the contract, to 1. accept that company's zone-registration modifications vis-a-vis that gTLD; and 2. to not accept any other third-party entity's zone-registration modifications vis-a-vis the gTLD. But if ICANN don't like what's going on, they always have the right to just cancel the relationship (probably with a pro-rated refund for the rest of the contract period, but still) and then do what they like with the gTLD from there.

The thing I'd compare it most closely to, is an exclusive licensing of IP rights from a copyright-holder to another entity, where those rights include a sub-licensing right. While that contract pertains, the entity who licensed the rights can basically act as if they owned those rights; but the actual legal right-holder can always just revoke the licensing agreement — in the process, either "absorbing" the transitive license grants to themselves, anuling those transitive licenses, or finding a new contract-holder and transferring the "stewardship" of those transitive licenses to them.

You're incorrect on the fees. The 180k was the application fee for the 2013 round of new gtlds. Actual on going costs are $6,250 per quarter, plus a cut from each registration or renewal, as per the registry contract.

ICANN can only cancel Registry contracts under specific circumstances. Listed here: https://newgtlds.icann.org/sites/default/files/agreements/ag...

Our company tried to register a TLD with ICANN. ICANN's process was so complicated, when we asked questions, they suggested we hire a law firm to help us. Turns out the partner at the firm was a former ICANN employee so they referred us to their former colleague.

This law firm wanted $250k up front for the application, told us it could take over 2 years, and did not offer any guarantees that the TLD we wanted would be approved. It's a total scam up and down.

I'm no expert on Handshake, but it has a built in open auction system for registering TLDs. It seems to be the best alternative to the ICANN cabal and an actually decent use case for a blockchain. We bought the TLD we wanted on Handshake, and it cost less than $1,000. If we could only get browsers to support it...

https://handshake.org

If browsers supported Handshake just like they do DNS, you can bet you wouldn't have just paid 1000 bucks for a TLD. You'd probably have paid more than what it costs for a TLD under ICANN.

For these companies these licenses are pennies, so "own" is probably the right word.

Whether Google owns it legally is irrelevant to the concerns people have regarding the control Google will have. ICANN won't revoke the license agreement if Google is "naughty" and decides to deregister some GoogleSucks.app or ControversialOpinion.app domains. This is Google, and not worth the effort for ICANN to even bother unless the above domains cause enough noise to rock the boat, which they won't. It'll probably be some conservative ("right wing propaganda") or misinformation or plausibly illegal type of domain that everyone will choose to ignore and dismiss for various reasons. End result of this is definitely more censorship.

Because gTLDs were sold to the highest bidder; there’s no requirement for them to be sold for the good of humanity. For-profit companies like Verisign own .com and donuts owns a few hundred https://donuts.domains/what-we-do/top-level-domain-portfolio...

Verizon does not own .com in the same way as people owning other gTLDs. They operate it under contract with ICANN

It may seem like a pedantic point, but these top-level domains are not owned. They currently have registry operation rights which does not confer permanent ownership.

IMHO Europe should do a hard fork of DNS before it is too late. States already mess with the DNS of major telcos for censorship anyways. Regaining control over the new purely capitalist take of the Internet would finally be something good.

(Living in Europe)

I think most countries have already have their own TLD under their control anyway (or under an organisation that they control), and I find a lot of companies for the services I use already using a domain under the country level TLD. In addition, since Europe was mentioned, the .eu TLD is already run by a non-profit appointed by the EU commission.

I'm not really sure what doing a hard fork of DNS would achieve? I wouldn't want the rest of the internet being cut off from me. It would also be incredibly confusing which DNS system is being referred to when giving/receiving a URL.

They also have .new, enabling links like https://sheets.new.

More details: https://whats.new/

That looks awful as a concept. I hope it doesn’t get any traction.

Some of these are pretty pretentious and it means one company can claim the 2ld for their industry, eg https://story.new and https://repo.new

That's no different from the current world. Three different apps claim to just be "Messenger" on my phone. Books.com goes to only one seller.

I agree, writing more about my reasoning last year at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27162905. It gets you an only slightly shorter URL, while significantly diluting trust.

Why? From my point of view it's no different from any other 'pretty' domain name.

A TLD shouldn't have semantic meaning already covered by protocol operations.

What do I put in my URL bar to make it POST?

A lot of these TLDs just put anything up to justify their reasoning for registering the domain. They don't believe that is how the domain will be (ab)used, but they have to publicly provide some nonsense reason for its existence.

I looked up the application for .one gTLD today. I own a subdomain and I wanted to know the original reasoning behind it. It is (now) owned by one.com and they basically told ICANN "we are going to do ONE stuff with it. Like stuff to do with ONE. And we have customers. And like, er, Beanie Babies?" And ICANN said "That sounds excellent, here's the domain, please continue with your master plan."

For the most part ICANN is doing them a solid. If your name lacks any real purpose, you are going to be on the hook paying for the registry to exist with nowhere near enough customers to justify it existence. So, get a purpose or expect to throw away your money.

Successful non-CC TLDs are rare. There are a few, but they have a clear purpose. For example Russia's .рф is er... for Russian stuff. In Russian. But what is .horse really for? Not very much besides hooking me up with "My Lovely Horse" http://my.lovely.horse/ any time I want to listen to it again.

That's awesome. As soon as I heard it I thought "That sounds like The Divine Comedy" and I looked it up, and there it was. Fantastic. Can highly recommend the rest of The Divine Comedy's oeuvre too.

Yes. I can likewise recommend the British TV comedy that clip is from, "Father Ted".

I wonder if it feels more natural for different cultures or language structures, to me doing something like sheets.new isn't the order I output in - something like "/new sheets" (and without the .) feels normal, natural, but perhaps because of my own personal experience and exposures.

In fairness, that's because domains are for some reason written backwards from the rest of the URL anyways. By rights, that URL should be https://new.sheets/ just as this discussion should be https://com.ycombinator.news/item?id=29769511

It already has traction. sheets.new is a very common shortcut.

Before Reddit settled on the name "reddit", snew was one of their name ideas..as in "what'snew"...another was 360scope

Is that the origin of the mascot, Snoo?

Exactly

So the ICANN application says they will apply no restrictions to registrants, yet when you try to register they have a requirement that you provide certain content, and by a deadline - is this not in violation of the application?

-- https://gtldresult.icann.org/applicationstatus/applicationde...

-- "the .new gTLD will best add value to the gTLD space by remaining purely open and unencumbered by registrant restrictions. There will, therefore, be no restrictions on second-level domain name registrations in the proposed gTLD, .new."

-- "Extension Requirements .NEW is open to anyone but all domain names must be used for action generation or online content creation where the user should be able to “create” something without any further navigation. Examples from Google include docs.new and slides.new, which resolve to a new document creation page. Any .NEW domain name need to be live within 100 days of registration"

never seen those in use

I use it all the time. It's nothing you can see "in use" since it's just a shortcut for opening a new Google Spreadsheet, like an alias in your address bar.

And .dev, which IIRC they were not going to make public but then did. And requires SSL

I get the issue of making .dev public, what's the issue with requiring ssl certs beside it being unnecessary in some cases?

If you were using .dev locally before then you almost certainly didn’t have TLS, since it’s usually local testing.

By making TLS mandatory you not only break local dev environments (that use that TLD which maybe have a legitimate domain outside of your network) you also make it so that it’s not even possible to run locally unless you do a lot of CA trickery to get a legit looking TLS cert.

My personal opinion was that this was a good move, as it forced developers to stop using .dev as soon as it was being used on the global internet- which avoided a lot of really awkward and annoying dual-home misconfigurations.

The fact that it broke anything for anyone is a strong argument that it never should have been created in the first place, alongside .home and .corp.

They were aware of the issue, buried it in the report and reneged on their promise to keep it internal-only. That was the mitigating argument for allowing it despite the known existing usage. Google acted in bad faith and I'd need to see concrete proof to convince me otherwise.

I agree with you completely; I had this discussion 41 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29304536

A lot of people had local domains (only entered in their hosts file or the router) on the dev TLD. Adding that domain to the hsts preload list not only broke their current setup, but also made it hard to bring it back to live - if you don't own the domain, the only option is to set up your own CA, with all included drawbacks.

I thought a host file entry overrides dns resolution— wouldn't a .dev domain that's already pointed at localhost not be affected by this? Or am I misunderstanding?

No matter what your DNS says, browsers are hard-coded to refuse to send requests via plain HTTP on a TLD with HSTS required (like .dev).

ICANN is a fat American corporate body.

At some point ISLANNDs (Internet Small Local Authority for Name and Number Designations) could override it. That way, you could link to http://google.lol/posts/39-put-google-in-the-can and your cohort will enjoy this and the rest of those posts making fun of google, while the rest of the world is disappointed over dead links.

Is "TLD hogging" going to be the new "domain hogging"?

Could someone write a browser extension to override DNS?

And basically create a new domain system for people with that extension installed?

Something similar was attempted decades ago and failed, with alternate DNS roots. See AlterNIC for an example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlterNIC

And opennic.org

The "usual" way of doing that is by making DNS servers that create their responses based on whatever other name resolution system you want them to do.

ENS is the way forward

Fix the title OP to just Google owns .meme or something since the rest is incorrect.

You can have a cool TLD too. You just have to bribe ICANN.

What does it take to register a new TLD?

In the last round which spawned all the "new gTLDs", pretty much everybody could apply who could afford the $185k application fee and $25k/year maintenance fee and could present some plan on how they'd use and run the TLD.

Ah, every time I read about vanity TLDs (are they called that? Can I call them that?) I sigh at the brokenness of attaching structure/constraints to domains and TLDs...

At least the country TLDs made sense, plus things like .org for non-profits and .gov for US governments. And then things like bit.ly, look.at, blah.io overrode all of that. I wonder what ".lol" should be for, parody sites? Like whitehouse.lol, google.lol? ycombinator.lol? The first 2 probably can't exist because hey, this is an oligocracy.

Congrats to AOL, I guess, their idea with AOL keywords was actually superior, and we're returning to that. Already on TV ads that I see, they just say "Search for $BRAND/$PRODUCT to find out more".

In a sense, dangerous. Google has a history of (and currently practices) censoring viewpoints it disagrees with. Will its censorship reach extend from omitting / deprioritizing search results to entirely canceling those using its TLDs that it deems undesirable?

Source? What i see, is that it's blocking illegal things.

Well, there is the Wikipedia article [1] but even there most of what it mentions could be considered hearsay, so I'll go with a couple others:

- 4chan's /pol/ board straight up doesn't show up. It's easy to directly go to a board by writing "4chan" and the correspondent letters, /pol/ is censored from the results though, this is most probably political in nature since even /b/ shows up.

- The "substitute" for the r/The_Donald subreddit at communities.win is similarly unreachable.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_Google

> Wikipedia

Like what part would censor opinions ?

> 4chan

There sitemap is even wrong ? https://www.4chan.org/sitemap.xml It redirects to the http version. Also, i can't access the page without accepting the rules ( perhaps that's related?)

> communities.win

I found it with Google, but it really isn't SEO optimized even and it's backlinks ( low quality) + domain authority is really low: https://ahrefs.com/nl/backlink-checker

Additionally, the content seems to be misleading/untruthful. So that would bring down the trustworthiness of the entire site ( backlinks of similar sites). It's the same way spam is threated, by their organic links.

Backlinks include: conspiracies.win , cancelthiscompany.com, patriots.win, greatawakening.win, weekendgunnit.win, ...

A search engine is about finding usefull results. And while communities.win could be usefull for the ones that know it and they can find it through Google. I doubt many other people would even look for it or find it useful.

Anecdotally the same for other sites like KiwiFarms. I may not agree with all content posted on such sites, nor spend my day there, but I certainly don't believe in censoring unpopular opinions. There were also screenshots of Google censorship posted during the 2016 election that were concerning and I verified a subset of these myself.

Regardless of one's political and social viewpoints, we should stand united against censorship.

KiwiFarms is excluded for all the doxing and stalking material, not for "unpopular opinions".

KiwiFarms isn't the only example. And would you provide a source for your assertion?

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

> Kiwi Farms, formerly known as CWCki Forums, is an American Internet forum dedicated to the discussion of online figures and communities it deems "lolcows" (people who can be "milked for laughs"). The targets of threads are often subject to doxing and other forms of organized group trolling, harassment, and stalking, including real-life harassment by users.[2][3] Harassment stemming from Kiwi Farms has been implicated in the suicides of three people targeted by users of the site.[9]

Putting a reply here because HN won't let me reply to the other leaf comment. 1) Implicated by whom? 2) That KiwiFarms doxes, or that the doxing bothers people, wasn't my question. My question is where is it stated (convincingly) that doxing is the reason Google filters the results?

Censoring their search results is not the same as censoring domain names

Read the original comment again.

From reading that Wiki article, I can surmise that Google just dances in the middle ground to protect their profit stream. You could also say that corporate capitalism has no soul.

Sadly you might be right, depending on where you live. In the US free speech is still supposed to be free, and Google blocks a subset of results it deems undesirable.

Domains aren't like your Google account.

But they could be owned by a Google account if bought through the Google registrar.

What happens when that Google account gets locked or banned?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com