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Comment by setrofim_ | Hacker News Reader

The US are claiming legal dominion* over all domains under a large number of TLD's (.com, .org, etc.). New TLD's may help mitigate that.

*http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/feds-seize-foreign-...

"If you just add one character to the length of the domain name you have 26 times as many names you can choose from. There's no shortage."

True, but TLD's like .pepsi and .HTC are a lot easier to remember than random combinations of letter.

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Purely anecdotal, but my experience watching mere mortals use the Internet has been that they almost always Google for the company/site they want, not blindly type <companyname>.com. I'd be shocked if Pepsi owning "www.pepsi" somehow changes this.

You're probably right. But given the choice, isn't it better to go with something that's easier to remember, even if it won't matter most of the time?

pepsi.com or www.pepsi or site.pepsi or brand.pepsi. You've then just got a multitude of hostname parts to guess - which is more confusing.

Not really. If you don't know what you're looking for, you just go to http://pepsi/ and navigate from there.

I don't fancy hostname clashes.

I wonder how chrome will handle it. Type in "Pepsi" and you get taken to search results that make google money. What if it becomes a valid URI?

It may work like with a custom host file, but with better UX. If you add something like domain.dev to your hosts file and just write it onto your search bar without http:// Chrome will do a search and while searching check if there's a DNS entry for that 'weird' domain, if there is it will show you a tooltip asking if you wanted to go to http://domain.dev.

If VeriSign or any of the other US registrars ends up with control over the new TLD, the US has de facto control over them anyways. All it takes is some government lackey with a piece of paper and VS will bend over backwards for them.

pepsi@pepsi.com seems better than pepsi@pepsi.pepsi in my opinion.

moreover, it would make no sense to own www.pepsi without also already owning www.pepsi.com

Why not? Some companies only own <company>.net or <company>.co.uk, without owning <company>.com.

Fair point. But www.pepsi looks broken to me. If you're going to decide you care about people who type addresses in by hand, it seems counterproductive to go against the conventions they're used to.

But if new TLDs become common I guess that will change with time.

www.pepsi does look broken, but http://pepsi/ is fine. We just need browsers to stop ignoring bare TLDs, like they do now if you don't put the http:// before.

This opens up more problems though.

For example how would the Google Chrome browser work (and search to a degree), does a user who types "pepsi" into their omnibar want to go to http://pepsi/ or search for pepsi?

It also adds confusion for webmasters trying to parses URLs on their website. When a user types pepsi.com/coke into their blog for example that link can be made clickable to http://pepsi.com/coke/ where it can't for pepsi/coke

The problem of detecting URLs with weird TLDs could be solved by using relative URLs (RFC 1808 §4) with the protocol omitted. It would put that vestigial // to good use—//coca-cola is a URL just as @cocacola is a Twitter handle.

Yes, but you're not forced to repeat "pepsi". It could be alex@customerrelations.pepsi or inquiries@distribution.pepsi

there's no need for pepsi.pepsi as the domain, it could be pepsi@pepsi

There's a ton of legacy code and email software that will make that not work.

At best, it would be pepsi@pepsi. (note trailing dot).

My buddy used to be root@ws. but only a few MUAs and MTAs could handle delivering mail there, and always with the trailing dot.

You have to put the dot at the end to make it a fully-qualified name otherwise the resolver will think it is a hostname and add the local domain.

Why do I suddenly feel like buying pepsi..

These will be ICANN domains, thus still under US jurisdiction.

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