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Comment by wallacoloo | Hacker News Reader

> I’m also never going to rely on anything but .com because I don’t trust ICANN.

what's wrong with the other 2 of the "original 3" gLTDs: .net and .org?

i spent an afternoon digging into the ownership of all of this stuff, and .org felt like the safest option. .com and .net are more directly owned/operated by a US for-profit company (Verisign) who has complied with US requests to seize .com domains in the past. .org at least still has structural ties to a non-profit with chapters across the globe, even if it's incorporated in the US.

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.org almost got bought by scummy rent-seeking bastards as of like a year or two ago. Wouldn't consider it that safe, personally.

Everyone running a high-level domain like that is essentially rent-seeking, no?

(Is there a better term for 'high-level domain'? It doesn't necessarily have to be a TLD after all.)

> Everyone running a high-level domain like that is essentially rent-seeking, no?

Possibly as a technical, economics definition. I'd say no because real registries are adding value. What I'd call rent-seeking here specifically is destroying the market just to increase one's share of it.

The value I see registries providing is in large-part just consistency. A .com should cost and act about the same 10 years from now as it does today. If you start exponentially increasing cost (well past inflation), you're mostly just holding everyone hostage that currently owns a domain, until everyone is priced out and the TLD is destroyed.

> there a better term for 'high-level domain'?

IMO TLD is fine for this level of conversation, I'm not 100% sure if it's technically correct or not in _all_ cases, but it gets the right idea across. A "domain registry" or just "registry" is a good term for an entity running a TLD.

They’re probably ok, but .com is massive by comparison and there’s strength in numbers. Anything shady involving the .com TLD will get immediate, large scale publicity and pushback.

> what's wrong with the other 2 of the "original 3" gLTDs: .net and .org?

I find it interesting which TLDs took off and which didn't. I see exceedingly little use the venerable of .biz and .info, for example, yet .co has seen broader adoption in a shorter time frame.

Not to be over picky, but from my first memories of the Internet at uni (1990) there were 5 tlds, in addion to the ones you mentioned were ac (academic) and gov. Both are not open to the general public though so your point stands.

> in addion to the ones you mentioned were ac (academic) and gov

Wasn’t it .edu for education? .ac is the ccTLD of the Ascension Island.

.mil was there from the beginning IIRC. And .int came not much later.

Maybe thinking of ac.uk and such? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.ac_(second-level_domain)

You can easily look this up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_top-level_domain

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