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.bestbuy

nic.bestbuy

126 pointsaendruk168 comments

There are a lot of these kinds of TLDs, and I always find it fun to skim through the root zone file to find more of them.

https://www.internic.net/domain/root.zone

Some other corporate/brand TLDs that exist are .allstate, .capitalone, .cookingchannel, .fedex, .honda, .lplfinancial, .marriott, .nike, .panasonic, .samsung, .statefarm, .toyota, and many more.

My personal favorite is .diamonds, strictly because it gets me the best personal website domain ever:

https://andrew.diamonds

(My name is Andrew Diamond)

Sorry to hear about that, because if you troll the zone files enough you'll find .diamonds is a favorite for piss fetishists

Does it matter? I'm sure 99% of .com is porn, but it doesn't seem to bother any of the stogy large corporations that have .com domains.

If I were Mr. Diamond, my opinion would be "why should I change, they're the ones who suck."

.bolton

If you troll the zone files, you’ll see the whole internet is a favorite for a whole variety of things.

I have http://edd.xxx/ as my personal domain, which I’m sure is not doing great things for my SEO (or accessibility from heavily controlled corporate networks!), but hey, people remember it. And I have another more sanitised domain that I give out when needed…

I suspect you mean trawl, not troll

Troll actually means a similar thing!

OED confirms, TIL! Thanks!

And that's why Internet trolling is called that -- back in the Usenet days it was "trolling for newbies". Dragging your baited line around and seeing who'd bite.

In this case troll makes even more sense as it involves dragging bait around rather than nets.

but why

… how would you know that?! Hahahahah

I own max.bond, but I've not done anything with it quite yet!

That’s the opposite of my situation: I have a tonne of ideas, but .pastuszak ain’t happening any time soon!

caleb.tennis checking in

Did you all pay $185k for these?

I paid an embarrassing amount of money (as I purchased it on the secondary market), but not even 1% of $185k. .bond was originally created for Bond University who presumably did pay something like that; they sold the TLD to ShortDot, and now it's marketed to people selling bonds.

My domain is like $8 a year from cloudflare

how much do these unique TLDs cost?

Back in the early 2000s, I was the (very short tenured) leaseholder of iam.coop, until I fell short of their registration requirements.

Were you simply being uncooperative?

(Couldn't resist)

Mike D enters the chat

Interestingly, I discovered a few years ago that my first name is a TLD.

How does one get such a tld?

Answer: To get your own TLD, you need to submit a completed, detailed application and fee (likely around $200,000) to ICANN. Then, ICANN will evaluate the application (and Afilias can help with this). If approved, you can proceed to launching with domain registrars.

Source: https://theaudacitytopodcast.com/afilias-explains-how-to-get...

That link is informative but the podcast is from 2016 and the last round for registering new gTLD's closed in 2012.

It looks like we're inching closer to a new round:

https://gac.icann.org/activity/subsequent-rounds-of-new-gtld...

Skimming the recommendations, they want wider participation from the non-western world and I suspect the $185k application fee may go down a bit (there's also an annual fee of $24k, +25 cents per second-level domain)

Anyone know how much a company like Afilias charges for its end of things if you choose to outsource the IT? (e.g. assistance with the application, spinning up the TLD, ongoing costs to maintain)?

EDIT: Some quotes from Instra: https://www.instra.com/en/new-gtlds/pricing

Here are some links to prior ICANN guides and other info if you want a better sense of the application process:

https://newgtlds.icann.org/en/about

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_top-level_domain

And dated from an era when the fee was a mere $5k: https://newgtlds.icann.org/en/applicants/tas

> I suspect the $185k application fee may go down a bit

Honestly, my expectation would be that the application fee will go up, because the first round received so many terrible applications (like brand TLDs that the trademark owner had no intention of using).

They used to be several megabucks.

It's still a scarcity filter by virtue of an absurd pile of money for flipping a few bits and claiming enormous "administrative" expenses.

... but first, you need a time machine to go back a decade.

not really. there aren't that many TLDs. So many good options are left for the young bitcoin billionaires to spend their money on.

There haven't been any new gTLDs delegated since ICANN ran round 1 of the gTLD expansion program in 2012. It doesn't matter how much money you have; you need to wait for round 2.

Is this just ICANN being greedy to get large companies buy and park these TLDs?

Neustar got .neustar and switched the UltraDNS domain to ultradns.neustar. Then they did some sort of corporate split last year and now they’re telling all their customers to switch back to ultradns.com.

Highlights one of the pitfalls to custom TLDs: the corporate sponsor might split or even go bankrupt. Then what happens to all those URLs? Talk about link rot… never thought we would have to worry about TLD rot.

Why would corporations drop $200,000 on their own TLD and not even route the bare root to somewhere?

ie. this works http://ai.

this does not but could work? http://bestbuy.

http://bestbuy will get re-write to .com by firefox, I don't like that, chrome will not re-rewrite

Dotless domains on gTLDs are prohibited. Technically can work (albeit with risks not easily solvable as explained in ICANN link) but is not allowed.

https://features.icann.org/dotless-domains

is http://bestbuy./ dotless?

I would think yes, despite the nomenclature, and that there is technically supposed to be a dot after the tdl.

You _can_ put a dot at the end, but it's not required https://news.ycombinator.com./

It's to clearly identify a domain as a FQDN and not as a subdomain of your search domain.

then how does http://ai/ exist?

That’s not a gTLD, it’s a ccTLD.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24442033 for why it’s allowed on ccTLDs

That only works in Chrome for me so I assume it became sentient somewhere deep in the googleplex and is trying to escape.

Doesn't seem to work in Edge.

Works in Waterfox for me as well.

Clearly, it is succeeding.

I guess the problem with this is interoperability issues with LAN hostnames.

ccTLDs are so old that no actual rules were codified. As such they can do all sort of stuff. Like bare domain names for things like email.

> http://bestbuy will get re-write to .com by firefox, I don't like that

You can disable this in firefox by setting "browser.fixup.alternate.enabled" to "false" in about:config

You might have to disable autocomplete too...

I always disable that sort of thing. I figure that when I type a URL in the address bar I'm not making a suggestion and I don't want my browser pulling up some other site instead, especially not based on some guess or assumption about what I "actually" wanted.

>http://bestbuy will get re-write to .com by firefox

Really? For me Firefox says it couldn't find the site and only asks if I've meant 'www.bestbuy.com'

http://bestbuy./ should force a non-rewrite.

Ah I am running much older ESR, maybe they finally changed behavior.

There is a better formatted version here: https://data.iana.org/TLD/tlds-alpha-by-domain.txt

https://ntldstats.com/tld shows how many hosts they have as well.

What do you have to do to get one added?

Bribe ICANN

Do they have this because they think it's useful? Or is it because they're afraid someone else was going to try to get ICANN to create this gTLD? Sort of like how companies will buy up alternate regular TLDs just to prevent people from impersonating them.

I'm not sure about best buy, but I've seen companies that use a TLD for their internal dns.

Like: server.nyc.company

Maybe they want to make sure the domain is under their control, and it may be cheaper just to buy the entire gtld than to change every internal domain name.

With so many laptops and byod, I've seen some issues happen when the external and internal domain names resolve differently.

Like when the internal domain.corp overlaps with the public domain.corp owned by somebody else.

You can kinda fudge it though. Like, I don't think too many people are going to fork out the money to buy and operate the .bestbuy TLD other than ... Best Buy. So if they wanted to have it just for internal stuff, they didn't really need to own the TLD.

What's even more perplexing is that they own bestbuy.com - which is IMO more desirable than any dot-bestbuy domain for public-facing stuff.

Dunno. It may be a defensive IP thing where it’s cheaper to spend $300k on the TLD than to litigate domain name versus TLD against someone who sets up cars.bestbuy and shoes.bestbuy and stuff.

Does Best Buy’s trademark for retail extend to all categories? Maybe? But consider that booking.com spent millions and took years to get the Supreme Court to decide that “booking.com” is trademarkable, where “booking” is not.

The more I think about that the more I think I’d make the same decision.

This makes sense; $200k is only what, a 0.01% of their weekly ad spend, and we're talking about it here so. . . That combined with defensive squatting, makes business sense to me, also probably fulfilled some VP's pet project

Well, Google as well.

List of TLDs: https://ntldstats.com/registry/Charleston-Road-Registry-Inc

*.goog certificates (a bunch of [x].cloud.goog stuff ) https://crt.sh/?CN=%25.goog&exclude=expired&match=LIKE (page wil take a long time to load)

Coming next year: bestbuy.bestbuy

https://com.com

Anyone can use any word they want as a TLD on their local network. No need to register it on the public Internet.

Just set up a zone in your local DNS and you’re done.

In fact I could even use .bestbuy as a TLD on my own network. The fact that they registered it publicly doesn’t stop anyone from doing this.

That's true but best practice is to own the public one too. I'm pretty sure Microsoft recommends owning the domains you use for Active Directory, and not using anything that isn't it can't be made public

Some companies uses bare hostnames for internal systems. Those same companies use HTTP Basic auth to log into those systems. And some routers have weird behaviour for DNS resolution, like prioritising .net as the default TLD.

I ran into a situation where, even on VPN, going to https://<company>vacation/ on my home network would take me to https://<company>vacation.net (a valid domain). It would have been trivial for the owner of that domain to phish for credentials.

I had an issue with an old Access Point whose DHCP server set up the local domain suffix as accespointbrand.com, with no way to change it from GUI nor config file.

Unfortunately the AP manufacturer didn’t renew the domain and it was squatted by an ad serving website.

Every hare domain became subdomain.accesspointbrand.com

So now and then I would get those ads when using wifi. I ended up changing the Access point.

I think they used to recommend using .local as the TLD for internal stuff. Not sure if that is a good idea or if you are shooting yourself in the foot these days with if you plan on using AAD.

The former. ICANN wouldn't "give" it to any third party, and nobody is going to pay $250,000 to ICANN for a failed "application" if they don't own the trademark.

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=corporati...

Does Best Buy have exclusive use of that phrase? Doesn’t look like it. Why wouldn’t Best Buy Insurance or Best Buy Realty have just as much right to it?

https://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=toc&state=4804%3A...

Nah, it was a money grab by registries and ICANN. They marketed this to anyone and everyone, promising it was the future.

I happened to work for a registry at the time, and remember getting bizarre calls from places like doctor's offices and such inquiring about some email/flyer/call they got. I was honest with them, at least.

Bestbuy operates a "marketplace" much like amazon's, where bestbuy's inventory is blended with other sellers'. I can imagine this tld being used to further that arm of their business.

Excuse my novice understanding but what advantage does a TLD present in the distributed inventory scenario?

Selling features to sellers, locking them in? I'm just guessing here.

The other day i entered "maps.bing" in my browser and got redirected to maps.bing.com. That was actually useful for once.

When Best Buy goes bankrupt, what will happen to this TLD?

Dies (see: https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/the-death-of-a-tld). Something that anyone should consider before getting a domain on a hippy GTLD. Alongside with how "bad" reputation it has that is usually correlated with low price offers.

Nope. The public ones don't die, they simply get assigned a new registry operator. Check out EBERO: https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/ebero-2013-04-02-en

The link you gave says emergency operation is provided preferably for a length of 12 months. That's it's meant to be a temporary measure (which is self-explanatory by the "emergency" in the name).

The 12 months is more than long enough to get a permanent operator assigned to run the TLD if the emergency operator isn't going to continue doing so. ICANN isn't just going to let an entire TLD's worth of domain names fall off the face of the Internet. This isn't theoretical either; they already went through it for .wed: https://www.icann.org/en/blogs/details/next-steps-for-the-we...

I see. That's very good to know. Was remembering it the other way but seems I was wrong.

I imagine that it would still be up for the time the NS servers would be up. If they don't care about it, after the servers go silent the domains would become unreachable. But they would probably sell the ownership of it to someone else, or at least keep a few servers just for the sake of keeping it.

Edit: As forgotpwd16 pointed out, they can also give up their ownership

They'll never go bankrupt because they have enough remnants of ignorant mall customers to buy overpriced cables and because they're the last major game left in technology retail besides big box stores.

Not sure if the employee discount is still the same (close to cost) but a friend of mine worked there around 20 years ago and I was shocked how cheap he could get cables.

When I worked there, margins on the cables were something like 85-95% so employee discounts were huge. On other items, TVs and such, the margins are much much lower so at most you got $25-50 off of the sale price.

There is also:

Is nic.* the new *.com ?

not really? nic.* is just an "About this TLD"

The question wasn't "what's nic mean?", it was "is buying your own top level domain going to be the new normal?" Presumably if you have enough cash, I'd say yes.

So what does "nic" stand for? And why not www.* or about.*?

(Google search wasn't too helpful)

"NIC" stands for "Network Information Center".

For basic information, check out https://www.sri.com/hoi/domain-names-the-network-information... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InterNIC

For the second question nic.* is conventionally the domain utilized by the TLD operator. So nic.brand may contain info and functions related to the .brand TLD and then www.brand and about.brand be other sites. E.g. nic.google redirects to registry.google, Google's domain registrar whose engineers also operate .google, whereas about.google can be considered the actual brand home site.

> E.g. nic.google redirects to registry.google, Google's domain registrar whose engineers also operate .google

Negative. Google's TLDs are operated by Google Registry, as shown on that site, which is an entirely separate team from Google Domains (the registrar).

Yeah, true. Was deceived by the check domain field and mixed them up.

Network Information Center. They did DNS stuff before ICANN

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InterNIC

Network Information Center.

Tld and domain system are a mess.

Number one problem is scarcity. Two persons can not own the same domain and tld combo. Number two problem is speculation. People buy domains and hold them hoping to resell for 1000x. Number three problem is expiration.

I would like to see an alternative in which we can assign word combinations to IP addresses and solve all these and other issues.

What's your evidence that it's a "mess"?

Either there is one domain system or there are multiple systems and fragmentation.

How would you administer it and "solve" it?

How would you route ".foo.com." to a set of servers such that everyone in the world can reach them?

One obscure downside of having so many TLDs is that if you type something like "chrome.search" in the address bar and press Enter, it won't search for "chrome.search" in your default search engine. It will try to navigate to it (unsuccessfully), because ".search" is a TLD nowadays.

I do this all the time with the iPhone keyboard. Because the dot is only there for URLs it’s exactly where I normally hit the spacebar at (which expands to fill where the dot for URLs is). Drives me nuts. I can’t be the only one.

As far as I can tell this bites 100% of iOS users and is objectively bad design.

Nope. Drives me up a wall.

Or successfully, to a phishing site...

I would contend that that is a downside of combining the url and search entry fields in the browser, not a downside of having many TLDs.

Start with a space.

Leclerc, a French hypermarket chain, actually uses its fancy TLD for everything: https://www.google.fr/search?q=site:leclerc

Amazon owns .free - http://nic.free/

Also .call, .hot, .now, .smile, .you and lots of others. Most aren't used in any way so far.

One domain they currently do use is .bot [1] – it's limited to verified chatbots only.

[1]: https://www.amazonregistry.com/bot

They only seem to have made .moi, .bot, and 5 Japanese gTLDs generally available.

There are many more they’ve been sitting on for a few years now. .bot was the most recent to launch and that was a good few years ago now [1].

Of course, there’s also the saga with Brazil over .amazon

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-bot-gtld-from-amazon/

Also https://www.home.sandvik

Surprised they didn't do something like https://u.ale.sh/dotbestbuy.png

I don't understand, what do you mean by your link?

I mean their generic logo (which you can see on the OP page) reads a bit like “Best Buy.” with the hole in the price tag looking like a dot. Given the page is about a domain, they could've moved the price tag to the front so that it reads “.bestbuy” – as a subtle joke.

Anyone have any comment on the Handshake protocol(HNS)? looks like this may solve all theses issues, just need some Innovation around it?

https://nic.joy/

Why does this need to be a thing that exists?

Also, why hasn't one or more independently wealthy folks disrupted this by obtaining their own TLD and running it on donations. Allow the registrar give out names for free. The only rules would be "no spam or activity illegal in <Country>".

The initial goal was to try to remove the artificial scarcity and value of .com domains by opening up the field.

This would also avoid the onslaught of startups with weird spellings of uncommon words because everything is being squatted.

It would also permit per tld rules. For instance, you could require someone looking for say .salon to submit documentation showing they're a salon. So then sassysalon.com may be $15,000 but sassy.salon requires documentation that you're doing salon business and it's $10 because someone can't just squat on 10,000 of them and then auction it off.

Noble goal and things like this are a consequence of it.

It's fine

> Why does this need to be a thing that exists?

My guess is that it's an outgrowth of the fact that .edu, .com / .co, and .org weren't rigorously enforced. So except for .gov, the TLDs were no longer a reliable source for any important information.

But I'm just speculating; perhaps someone can correct me.

Around 1992, I applied for and obtained a .com domain name and a Class C network, free of charge, no expiration dates.

I had seen (probably on Usenet) a little tutorial about what information was expected in the applications and so I faked up a consulting company with a catchy name, and explained how our board met N times per year.

I was never once able to use the Class C - I worked for an ISP but I still didn't have enough clout to get a BGP announcement for my 28.8k SLIP dialup.

I think I sort of used the domain name, at least as a reply-to email address, but I don't remember operating authoritative NS or anything.

They were both eventually reaped. The Class C was under 192.x.x.x and surely was hot property within a few years. My boss engaged in a little speculation and snagged some really hot domain names, and probably did better than I had done.

To make ICAAN money. That's why they started doing this. You have to pay them a lot of money for the privilege.

you can get what you want when you can bribe enough people apparently

For a $185,000 application fee

https://newgtlds.icann.org/en/applicants/global-support/faqs...

Freenom has free domain registration under a a handful of TLDs (.TK / .ML / .GA / .CF / .GQ) with various requirements for registration.

https://www.freenom.com/en/freeandpaiddomains.html

You could say that about 99.9% of the stuff on HN.

because virtually all .com domains are already taken / squatted and other tld's are useless

What a pointless TLD. They didn't even bother adding SSL to the site.

All these TLDs break in the internet and open it op to more scammery.

There’s a list of dead ones like this somewhere.

The selective coloring on that Happy Employee is telling: drain the human of all color, but leave their BestBuy shirt corporate blue.

Humans live and die. But the brand is immortal!

this is getting ridiculous...

At this point ICANN is hopelessly corrupt. Every giant corporation with money to throw at having its own GTLD is not how the internet was supposed to be.

Look at the revolving door between ICANN and private for-profit domain name companies like the people who tried to "buy" .org, and the people who run Donuts and its competitors.

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=icann+fad...

https://www.theregister.com/2020/07/21/chehade_ceo_ethos/

Also google "ICANN ethos capital"

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=icann+eth...

>is not how the internet was supposed to be

Don't really see the issue. Is having just few TLDs (com/net/org) somehow better? Is there a significant difference in having a domain on those and having an entire TLD? Other than the later being much more expensive that is.

Having some hierarchy or structure to DNS would be better. But that ship sailed around 1996 when Postel explicitly rejected the idea of closing .COM

            So, the argument goes, just close the COM (and NET and ORG)
            domain to new registrations and tell all those making
            registration requests "were sorry, COM was a mistake, you
            now have to register under your country code".  After all,
            by the growth argument, in a couple of years the number of
            companies in COM will be a small percentage of the total
            population.

            I don't think this will work.  There would certainly be a
            lot of complaints (and probably legal actions) suggesting
            that some unfair practices were being followed and that the
            new requesters were being arbitrarily disadvantaged.  I
            think it would be hard to argue that over 200,000
            registrations following a procedure in place over 5 years
            was a small mistake.

Leaving .COM to be the everything TLD pretty solidly settled the non-existence of hierarchy in the public space, which I see directly paving way for these "new" gtlds.

that would've been a fucking nightmare

>Don't really see the issue. Is having just few TLDs (com/net/org) somehow better?

One way it (may) arguably be better is that there are fewer avenues for impersonation or abuse. Ten years ago, bestbuy (or, insert your own small brand here) would buy bestbuy.com, bestbuy.net, bestbuy.org, bastbuy.com, etc to make sure malicious actors couldn't commit any tomfoolery against their customers, devalue their brand, etc.

Adding more gTLDs, as we see with examples elsewhere on this thread, means some companies now feel the need to spend hundreds of thousands more buying up gTLDs lest someone sets up cars.bestbuy, shoes.bestbuy, a malicious login.bestbuy, etc.

In a perfect world without any abuse, I think more gTLDs would be desirable. As a small business owner who has felt pressured to buy up several similar-sounding domains after others caused mischief with them... I'm less sure.

It's AOL keywords all over again.

I've also seen TV ads where they just say "Search for $BRAND $PRODUCT to learn more", and by "search" they probably meant "google".

Or brands just advertise with [f] (their facebook page), and if you go down the list you'll also see their Instagram, Tiktok and formerly Snapchat usernames listed.

No it isn't. BestBuy is still sending people to bestbuy.com

You cannot using a raw TLD as a domain.

Sure you can! Some web browsers might be confused, but you can just put a . at the end.

http://ai./

That’s a valid url

It's not allowed on gTLDs though. .ai is a ccTLD.

http://ai./

That's neat! How'd you have that so ready?

It's well known for being special/short like that.

who even needs DNS https://1.1

Looks like they turned it off in response to your comment, though!

Actually my home ISP won't resolve it, curious...

Why not?

What's corrupt is that ICANN is somehow the gatekeepers of new GTLD's. And they demand $185k with no details on what the "evaluation process" is and no transparency. So you're right the internet was supposed to be open.

It is open. You can run your own DNS server and create your own GTLDs. Might not get a valid cert, but then you can also add your own root cert to your devices and everything will work just fine.

It's the "all of the major browsers, OSes and DNS resolvers should comply" part that's the hard part

While it's cool to hate corporations, can you provide some substantiation on why GTLDs are bad? What harm is .bestbuy causing you or to the internet? That name space didn't exist. Now it exists. I immediately went "Cool", but then comments are again needlessly negative. I just want to know why.

It's polluting the namespace.

Just because you can, doesn't mean you should.

It's quite simple.

What does "polluting the namespace" even mean? Is getting a new domain polluting the namespace? Maybe shutdown the web and have only a single site to be more cyberenvironment friendly?

This isn‘t polluting anything, this is a new namespace entirely

Polluting the gTLD namespace, I suppose. Though I have zero thoughts on the matter personally.

This is a good use of namespace. No other global trademark should ever get this TLD

Canon is another one that has their own gtld

https://global.canon/en/

There's literally thousands of them https://www.internic.net/domain/root.zone

Sony even uses theirs all the time: https://pro.sony/

Or no other trademark should get any TLD maybe?

Corporations are not the owners of the the internet.

Okay, let’s not let “corporations” buy domain names at all then. The difference between foo.bestbuy and foo.bestbuy.com is cultural, namely that you personally are used to one but not the other. Corporations are as much the owners of the internet as they have been for…decades. The registries for .com and .net are operated by publicly-listed billion-dollars-in-revenue-earning Verisign. The majority of the internet’s underlying infrastructure is owned by for-profit entities that are in it to make money from you.

The reality is that the commercialisation of the Internet is the only reason that you or I or venture capitalist plaything Hacker News are all even here at all. ICANN just found a way to extract buckets of money from brand-obsessed companies for essentially just adding a line to a database. It’s hilarious and I challenge you to point out how this itself is affecting the openness of the Internet in any tangible way.

Of course it is also notable that the whole DNS hierarchy was managed by Network Solutions, with even less oversight, before ICANN was established.

So you must be against all GTLDs, not just .bestbuy right? They're all polluting the namespace. It shouldn't matter who bought it, "pollution" or whatever that constitutes, still exists?

I am frankly, it's an abuse of power that's forced on the populace without recourse.

Why are TLDs so special? Why are the few known private TLDs (com/net/edu/gov, etc) so important, how are they so special that it is valuable to society to keep them limited?

I think the everyday person doesn't even understand that google.com is a little endian hierarchy.

Somebody forces you to click on bestbuy links and shop in their stores?

Are they in the room right now?

I am anticipating exciting new phishing attempts from customers of unscrupulous registrars on everything from apple.comp to zoom.uss

I doubt it's that easy to pull something like that off. And besides, people fall for phishing scams even when the domain name isn't even close to what they're trying to imitate.

Is it any different from them "polluting" the .com namespace previously?

How is this polluting?

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