Show HN: TLD Squatting | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: TLD Squatting

captnemo.in

59 pointscaptn3m051 comments

Nit pick: This isn't a "Show HN", and see it quite often lately, so I think it's worth pointing out. A showhn is:

> Show HN is for something you've made that other people can play with. HN users can try it out, give you feedback, and ask questions in the thread.

> Off topic: blog posts, sign-up pages, newsletters, lists, and other reading material. Those can't be tried out, so can't be Show HNs. Make a regular submission instead.

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

Thanks, I wrote a lot of code for this (scraped several sources before settling on nTLD) so this was a “Show HN” post in my head by default.

But you’re right.

I've always found the salaries of ICANN workers a bit exorbitant; because why do they actually own the intellectual property[0] and what do they actually do.

https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/fy20-annual-repo...

Around ~1mill to the CEO in 2020

[0] - I say IP because I don't know the history or the network effects of how it all ends up under their control at the end of the day.

This isn't squatting. ICANN specifically allowed applications as a "restricted registry" for a trademarked brand where the applicant could show that such a limitation on registrations increased the overall safety for consumers. The applicant had to demonstrate that they have broad recognition of the trademarked string (i.e. cocacola or mcdonalds). They also obviously can't profit from this type of delegation by selling registrations and no company is going to sell their brand TLD.

Having every new TLD open to registration would have been a constant battle against things like real-login-page.bankofamerica and such.

https://www.name.com/blog/the-different-types-of-new-gtlds-w...

So, either ICANN could have just maintained a list a forbidden TLDs (especially for those where even the owner doesn't use it) rather than forcing these corporations to pay for them; or, the money could have been used as a kind of tax on the wealthiest to fund DNS infrastructure and lower the prices of domain names for the rest of us. That clearly didn't happen.

Yeah, just the interest on this windfall would be enough to lower the ICANN fees forever if treated as an endowment.

The list on the link is primarily unrestricted TLDs (which are supposed to be open to registration for everyone) but are not (yet). Examples are `.ads` by Google, or `.author` by Amazon.

There are a few brand TLDs in the list as well which I consider to be legitimate squatting - `.cal`, `.baseball` are considered brand TLDs by ICANN, but Google should not have a monopoly on an entire TLD because they built Google Calendar. `.bofa` for example is a legitimate brand TLD, and is not on the list.

If you think a brand TLD on this list is incorrect, corrections/additions are welcome - https://github.com/captn3m0/tld-squatting/blob/main/_data/fa...

To be fair, .amazon is on the list and under such logic (which I agree with) shouldn't be. Yes, Amazon is a word/name of a real place, but I doubt many would be registering anything actually related to the Amazon and instead it would be used almost exclusively for abuse.

But a lot of these aren't trademark-specific TLDs. They're even listed under the "unrestricted" category. There's no reason why .eat, .here or .ads have to be exclusive to Google, or why .zero, .you, .joy and many others have to be exclusive to Amazon. They just paid to "own" these TLDs and are choosing to do nothing with them.

In a much smaller company, shareholder pressure could have resulted in the TLDs being removed or publicly released (Donuts Inc, for eg - the other large gTLD owner has made all of its TLDs available).

For Google and Amazon especially - any potential revenue from these TLDs being opened up is a rounding error.

> There's no reason why .eat, .here or .ads have to be exclusive to Google

People underestimate what it takes to launch a TLD, even for someone like Google. I own a registrar and get weekly emails from smaller registries begging me to promote their latest launch on our homepage.

It is a huge financial and manpower burden, so I don't fault them for staggering the launches. Blame ICANN for restricting all applications to a specific window and forcing everyone to front-load grabbing them all. There is no reason newgTLD applications couldn't be open right now if I wanted .hackernews

Interesting that Google owns 'here', given the competing map business Here. Also that Amazon owns 'tunes'.

Many of these look like efforts to grab TLDs that would compete.

The domain business seems completely broken to me. Anything remotely useful has a squatter. I dream of a day when the entire system is obsolete.

I have been able to pick up a handleful of useful domains like firstnamelastname.net without much effort and my total spend every year on domains is probably less than 50$. Maybe a dotcom is hard to come by but other TLD are not so bad. Your milage will totally vary, but I would say things are not totally broken, you can find decent domains at good prices if you're a l bit flexible or patient.

I'm really hoping for something like namecoin (or equivalent) to take off so that finally domain owners could really be owners of their domain.

No better than this. More $ means more squatting in both cases.

I don't think there's any system which can truly prevent squating. I'm open to more options though if that's possible.

Yes genuine competition is good and all it needs is browser consensus really.

As a Scandinavian I find the squatting of .viking by a Bermuda company to be annoying.

You guys really can't complain after practically taking over .nu though. Similar story to .io.

You mean buying domains, causing money to go to an impoverished country? How dare we! :P

But it doesn't usually go to an impoverished country, but to a business in a western country.

Well then THAT is the problem isn't it?

It's nothing at all like IO, which is a British colony/territory.

Niue (NU) is a former British colony "in free association with New Zealand", and whatever the situation there it's nothing to do with Scandinavia.

"Nu" means "now" in Swedish. So a lot of Swedes bought .nu domains because it works in Swedish.

Just like I bought "och.glass" which means "and.icecream" in Swedish, even though "glass" has a different meaning in English.

In the case of Niue the country is getting revenue from it at least. This is not case with .java afaik

It does not seem that way, no. If you have references to the contrary, please share.

https://icannwiki.org/.nu

> .java

Que

I live in Norway and have never seen a .nu domain.

It used to be extremely common in Denmark a few years ago, with even the official ID system NemID (like BankID in Norway I assume) using nemid.nu.

I can't remember when I last saw a .nu domain advertised recently, they seem on the way out. But it seems business domains in general are also disappearing in favor of Facebook pages or Instagram accounts.

Sweden as well used .nu a lot, because of the restrictions for .se

I don't feel we in Norway did that a lot. There were some restrictions on .no, but mainly that you needed to be an organization of some sorts, which was fairly easy to do if you just wanted (could make a dormant single person company). Those not bothering just used .com

I find squatting .java, an island with a population 7.5 times that of Scandinavia by a tech company even worse. I'd be also annoyed if Oracle had .sjælland.

One Google-owned TLD I wish others could use is .new:

- https://docs.new

- https://sheets.new

- https://slides.new

.new can be registered, but you have to use it for its stated purpose (creating a new whatever). I think they verify this after 100 days.

There was never a need for new domain names. They look cool but didn't solve any problems except money for icann.

Most of the time you search for a page and then use the auto complete or bookmark. If you own such a domain it's useless for mail .(blocked because of spam, e.g. xyz)

I prefer a butchered .com e.g. tadpolehq.com or trytadpole.com

I'm surprised .abc is owned by Disney while Alphabet had to settle for .xzy.

That being said, I believe gTLDs should be open for the public, at least the short (3 to 5 letters) ones.

Isn’t the American Broadcasting Company one of Disney’s biggest properties?

Yes, that seems to be true. I'm not from the US and wasn't aware of the fact. Makes much more sense now.

TLDs being a suffix, XYZ make more sense to me than ABC.

abc.xyz is a nice play on this.

For the avoidance of doubt, the .xyz TLD is not owned by Google.

Oh... it's only abc.xyz then. My bad, thank you.

I made a userscript to make the table sortable. Just click the table header to sort.

https://gist.github.com/nake89/da99121ef5557e99ea6ca3804e219...

Disclaimer: ChatGPT helped me because I'm lazy.

Does this profusion of frivolous TLDs have infrastructure cost?

Exorbitant vanity gTLDs more like it.

Interesting! Does someone know how much money is involved in squatting a good TLD?

ICANN charges a $185,000 evaluation fee to register a new gTLD, and they are under no obligation to approve it. They also expect you to actually run some infrastructure for your new gTLD, which has ongoing cost, and they will not approve your application if you don't have a plan for that infrastructure. There's also an ongoing fee of $6,250 per quarter per gTLD.

Thanks. Then it is about squatting by heavy hitters.

That initial fee is quite the racket. Quarterly's not as bad, but looking at some recent TLDs that have gone inactive you can tell those companies are desperate to save the cash:

Paramount let .cbs and .showtime expire in October, and Gap let .bananarepublic and .oldnavy expire this month.

Some of them are desperate, perhaps.

I'd guess more of them see that after ten years, Twitter still doesn't make a link when they post something like 'great content on whatever.cbs'. They have $6250 but run out of patience.

The cost of a legal defence to just have someone read some paperwork and say yay or ney.

In case of multiple applicants, there is an auction that can happen as well. In reality, various applicants settled among themselves so there weren't many.

1/3rd of the amount raised from the fee (60k USD or so) was earmarked for a legal fees. Some of the money is being spent on a ICANN Grant Program: https://www.icann.org/grant-program-en

s/charges/charged/. The last time you could apply for a gTLD was in 2012.

> The next application submission period for new gTLDs is expected to open in Q2 2026.

> […]

> While the application fee has not been determined, it will be set on a cost-recovery basis. The fee will ensure that the next round of the New gTLD Program is fully funded and does not require funds from ICANN's operating budget. As a point of reference, the application fee for the 2012 round of the New gTLD Program was US$185,000.

https://newgtlds.icann.org/en/announcements-and-media/announ...

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