Expanding the Internet domain space | Hacker News Reader

Expanding the Internet domain space

googleblog.blogspot.com

41 pointscleverjake36 comments

I don't like the introduction of new gTLDs for a number of reasons:

1) It seems like a very clever way to milk rightsholders for hundreds of thousands of dollars to protect their names

2) The root zone file will get pretty big

3) It's very expensive. Big companies will be able to afford their own TLDs, but smaller businesses, organisations and individuals won't. We might see .microsoft, but we might not see .linux

4) The G in gTLD loses its meaning. Top-level domains are no longer generic

5) The root names are now no longer neutral, they are corporate-influenced - and hence the root nameserves are also no longer neutral, they're storing the names of potentially hundreds of companies

The expense factor is the essential one. But it is a smart move, after almost all of the "new" domain introductions (info,biz,pro...) failed to gain momentum, the new strategy seems to try to harness the power of big corporations to push their own extensions into the market.

It's my understanding that .info didn't take off because all the internet marketers and SEO people pounced on it as a way to pick up cheap meaningful names, thus creating a swarm of appalling 'informational' sites. I don't know of many if any .info sites I use regularly or ever.

OTOH, .biz and .pro didn't gain traction because they were shit.

I'd say .pro didn't gain traction because of the lengthy and restrictive application process

How on earth could it ever be a good thing -- much less non-evil -- for a single company (say, one with the "Google Docs" trademark) to exclusively control a broad, generic TLD (say, ".docs")? Given the $185,000 application fee, this is just another way the big players can tilt the playing field against disruptive competitors aiming for their core products. (Think .apps, .search, .mail, .social, etc.)

Let's hope consumers ignore these new TLDs and this dies a horrible, expensive death for everyone involved.

A cynical person might think it would be in Google's benefit to explode the number of top-level domains, to reduce the (already) small chance that people visit company.com directly, rather than going to google and searching for 'google'.

Personally, I approve of this. It is getting increasingly difficult to find a 'nice' domain name, and with this latest change I think most companies will stop trying to buy companyname.

with all due respect, I say bananas.
"good" domain names are not terribly difficult to come by. Good branding, can be though. Hulu, Google, Yahoo, Comcast are all fairly meaningless words, until they were branded as such. It may be true that for someone that can't afford the buy a ~$100-$5000 domain from a broker may have to look/think harder to find a suitable domain, it is not THAT hard.
Country codes showed us that average users don't want other TLDs, unless they are domain hacks and can be spoken easily (.ly, .it, etc). They almost always prefer the .com, unless they can get a translated version using their own country code (google.tld, etc).
This is purely to raise money for ICANN. I understand they need money, and I understand they can do this, it just feels...bleh.

and if the good ones are taken in the current TLDs, adding new TLDs to register them is only going to cause someone heart ache.

Yeah I agree. Its not that hard and with tools like http://domai.nr its easy!

If additional good domain names, even if it's few in number, become available at a lower cost, it will only help innovation, startups, and experimental projects.
Apart from aesthetics, what's your reason for feeling 'bleh'?

But it is not "additional" domain names... it is the same domain names with a different TLD. How does making facebook.lol, ycombinator.doc or whateverisalreadytaken.google help anyone but the entity that controls the TLD?

To be honest Italians prefer .it to .com, and I wouldn't be surprised if other countries did the same (It seems to be the case here in the UK, too).
Also hulu.com even before meaning something would have retailed for the sum that you mentioned.

> Country codes showed us that average users don't want other TLDs, unless they are domain hacks and can be spoken easily (.ly, .it, etc). They almost always prefer the .com
Wrong and a typical US-centric view... Germany's preferred TLD is .DE and has >15 mio registrations, .UK > 10 mio just to name the two largest ones. Generally speaking the easier (and cheaper) to register a ccTLD the more wide-spread it is in a country.

"They almost always prefer the .com, unless they can get a translated version using their own country code (google.tld, etc)."
ccTLDs are never easier to register the gTLDs. Ever. Every single one of them require more than a .com/.net.
Also, registrations != user preference.

I find it sort of amusing that Google is interested in the ".lol" TLD, especially when the post is authored by Vint Cerf. While I have my doubts about how much of an impact the new TLDs will make in the domain market, it's nice to see things shaking up a bit. Almost like the discovery of a new continent in the real world, with only rich people being able to get to it their fancy helicopters.
Also makes me wonder if this trend continues and leads to a TLD-less type of keyword DNS system at some point, where typing "facebook" in the address/awesome bar takes me directly to Facebook (versus some intermediate search page).

The problem with TLD-less system is that we already have mismatches of site names with different TLDs. Facebook is great a example of one that would work. But let's say you have callmevlad.com and I have callmevlad.net. With the TLD-less system, who gets the traffic when someone puts "callmevlad" in the Awesome Bar? All those conflicts would need to be resolved before this would work. Maybe it should have been that way from the start but I think it is too late to make that kind of switch. You can't get poop back into a horse without making a big mess.

I'm not saying that there won't be any issues, but given that there is obvious demand for ~$200K TLDs, I wouldn't be surprised if someone started to push it.
And (currently) putting things into the Awesome Bar either a) detects a domain and goes there or b) goes to an intermediate step: the search engine. I'm pretty sure some browsers do an intermediate DNS lookup before going to the search engine. So I'm not sure if there would be a conflict - if I was first to register "callmevlad" to point to some IP that I control, typing that in always goes to my site.

I hate to disagree with the inventor of the internet, but TLDs are not necessary. Not new ones, not the old ones. (While I'm at it -- Mr. Gates, file name extensions should not be necessary either.)
A domain name should be composed of a string of characters on a first come/first serve basis. A company shouldn't have to buy multiple domains to protect their brand.

My big question: Why do we have TLDs in the first place? Why are they needed?
Or are they an accident of happenstance much like "http:// ?

My understanding: arbitrary decision back in the 80s. People needed some kind of label-to-ip-address resolution protocol, and why not make it hierarchical? A top-level-domain is just the top of the hierarchy in the domain name system.
Someone correct me if there's a juicier anecdote.
Here is what I mourn: that we write subdomains from right to left, instead of right to left. We see it in programming namespaces, but I still wish we had com.foo.bar.baz instead of baz.bar.foo.com

Much of the Internet can be traced back to UNIX traditions. We like things to be organized in a hierarchy, much like a filesystem. And, since we puny humans are better at remembering names than numbers, we give our computers names.
Combine the two concepts, and we end up with a hierarchy of names. And because all of the computers in the world are connected to this global hierarchy, TLDs were introduced to add some order to the chaos. By introducing TLDs, we were able to start to categorize companies from universities from network infrastructure providers, etc... and thus everyone could find their place in the global name hierarchy. Even the TLDs are part of a single root object in the hierarchy(.).
It wasn't until things started to scale that we had issues with domains.

The addressing scheme is descriptive. But the demographics of the modern internet are such that a descriptive method is confusing to broken. Most users will assume everything ends in .com, or more likely, they'll just type in the name and expect the browser to perform correct addressing via Google.
Playing shell games with new TLDs will in no way make this less confusing for users.

"Why do we have TLDs in the first place?"
Am I misunderstanding your question? There needed to be a way to separate, say harvard the university from harvard the ISP from harvard the non-profit to harvard the commercial company. Etc.
Although now (with the exception of .edu) .com .net .org can be used by anyone for any reason at the start they were a way to differentiate different types of sites so many people could use one string. And of course there were country code domains, (say harvard.it which is owned by a Italian company) etc.
With no TLD's there would just be http://harvard - one user of the string harvard.

They're used to divide up authority. .it domain are controlled by Italy, .de domains are administered by German authorities, etc.

The original intent of the hierarchical namespace was to distribute name space authority along existing administrative boundaries.
At the top-level this was/is accomplished via the two-letter country code domains.
The support/creation of generic top-level domains (com, net, org, edu originally and .info, .biz and so on afterwards) was a mistake in that there is no way for these top-level domains to map to any real-world administrative boundary. Administration and adjudication of these domains requires a a complex web of international agreements, legal frameworks, and a fair amount of hand-waiving. It is a mess and will always be a mess as far as I can tell.
I don't see how the genie can be put back in the bottle but we would have been much better off if all names had been within the two-letter country code namespace.

I have mixed feelings about this. I can see some value in some new TLDs. But the whole .xxx debacle (aka extortion scheme) left me hesitant to support willy-nilly creation of more TLDs. When the .xxx TLD was being introduced, mark owners had first dibs at paying a totally ridiculous price to make sure they owned the .xxx version of their domain for fear it would be misused by someone else and tarnish their name. A cynical person might think this is just a way to extort money from companies that want to protect their brand.

It's simply good economics for Google to support the expansion of TLDs. When the costs of your complements go down, your market expands and/or you can charge more for the same service.
For the interests of the public, additional supply also means lower cost in general. Although desirable new TLDs may be relatively few in number, it will still help drive down the costs of doing business, esp. for new startups and experimental projects, at the expense of domain squatters. As an entrepreneur, I welcome this.

Trademarks were incorrectly ported to the domain name space.
Normally a trademark applies to an industry. For example, I know of a company called "Apple Moving" and I'm sure no one confuses it with the "Apple" of the tech world.
In my opinion a site should be required to register only in an industry or other broad category (think Usenet). For instance maybe I can say http://www.apple.computers. These industry domains should also be localized automatically, e.g. typing http://www.apple.ordinateurs should bring you to exactly the same domain; the words used for standard industry terms in all languages would be publicly available.
What should not exist is a globally-screwed-up namespace that anyone with a checkbook can warp to suit their own interests.

The proliferation of new TLDs is already, quickly reducing some interesting shibboleths of the web. In a few years, young audiences won't be expected to realize how awkward and silly mid-'90s through '00s movie and TV show dialogue seemed when the writers threw in silly TLDs to round out their jargon. That some domain name ends in .ponycorn won't seem preposterous and silly. Probably an opportunity for someone to pick up some of the more memorable fake TLDs from recent history.
I do also wonder how it impacts organizations that have used internal TLDs to manage their intranets, e.g. the FBI's .fbi. There have to be collisions at some point, right? And as the amount of fanfare with each new TLD falls, it seems likely that some of those things could get missed, and lead to some interesting vulnerabilities.

If over 50% of the domains out there are in the .com namespace, why will creating more gTLDs change that? If the 14 gTLDs created in the past 28 years haven't gained traction, what makes you think .lol or .youtube will?!

To be fair, there will be an obscene number of novelty .lol domains registered - but it still wont make a dent in the .com namespace

One of the arguments for this proposal was the protection of trademarked names; however, the registration for protection would not be needed if this change was never implemented. It seems to cause more problems than it solves. I can see what Google might be trying. Perhaps they want to offer free domain names at .google or something similar.
Back to the trademark defense, there are already solutions to protect the trademarks. I obviously would not have gotten away with registering the .google TLD even if I had $185,000 to do it.

Using an extension other than .com (at least in the US), will result in at least some traffic "leaking" to the .com version of the domain name. The question then becomes is that some number big enough to matter?

.lol ? I wonder what other TLDs they went for in this category?

.+1?
(I doubt that's a valid domain name, but I'd love to see them try)

No doubt they've applied for .plus

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