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Comment by walrus01 | Hacker News Reader

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...

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>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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

How is this polluting?

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

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.

Canon is another one that has their own gtld

https://global.canon/en/

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

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

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

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