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Comment by bluejekyll | Hacker News Reader

This really makes me wonder about the value of TLDs in general. Let’s say that “gmail” is a well known enough name that “gmail.com”, “gmail.org”, …, “gmail.top” should be reserved by default. If that’s the case, then the value of separate TLDs becomes interesting because two companies “abc.com” and “abc.top” would now have competing concerns. It seems like only small companies would then be open to phishing, and large ones would possibly be able to use trademark law across all TLDs. In fact large companies tend to try and reserve their name in all major TLDs.

I’m not really arguing for or against greater or fewer TLDs, but it does seem like an awkward situation.

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If I could go back in time and change how domain names work, I would probably do 2 things:

1. Flip the order of parts, ex. com.ycombinator.news - this makes the whole URL big-endian, instead of the absurd middle-endian system we have now.

2. Either

a. drop the requirement to have TLDs at all - gmail would just be "https://google.mail/inbox" (including my first suggestion; "google" is the root domain), or perhaps just "https://gmail/inbox"

b. actually commit to a small number of strictly-enforced TLDs - com is not the default, it requires a corporate entity to register, we probably push on having a single TLD for individual humans so ex. blogs tend to live under... actually the "name" TLD wasn't a terrible idea but I'm flexible on exact details of that TLD, just so there's only one of them. Second-levels like us or eu are fine but should again actually enforce having an entity in that country so almost nobody ends up using io or such.

I like reordering of the named components to big-endian, but just for reference, the current system dates back to the idea of “search domains”, which allows you to do things like “www” and that takes you to “www.example.com” because that is in your search or domain list in your stub resolver config. (This behavior can be skipped by using the fqdn with a dot at the end, “www.example.com.”)

I think moving to a new ordering of the name would then imply that we’d either need a different DNS or a new separator for specifying the reverse name ordering (that’s compatible with existing URL syntax).

Well, that's why this is purely a time-travel fantasy - I don't think we'll ever get a do-over:) And I can see the appeal to search domains, but I think in hindsight they pretty much failed, and what utility they have can be replaced with local or internal or something - "internal.www" can still be your intranet site, but now it's explicit. Or if we go with the other suggestion to force country TLDs then maybe it's fine for local DNS resolvers to do nonstandard TLDs, though I'm not super fond of that.

If we’re going to do some time travel, I’d also like to make the DNS packets easily versionable and add some space for additional version codes, the current extension mechanism with eDNS is quite cumbersome.

Oh yeah, I don't usually work at that layer so didn't think about it, but I'd probably also make it TCP only so we could skip it being a DDoS vector.

That's such a big latency bottleneck though.

If we're looking at simple solutions with only short-term state, then pad the request packets and truncate responses that are much bigger.

It would make it noticeably slower on the early Internet, though.

I like #1, but won't domain squatting become even more severe with #2.a?

Maybe there should be a regional prefix, e.g. us.gov, nz.gov, cn.gov.. and even this still comes with obvious issues and possible confusion. No silver bullets to be had, only tradeoffs.

That's a good point - I would be very much on board with mandating per-country TLDs, which is extra helpful because then you can deal with domain squatter through the legal system.

Not sure on what grounds nic.gov would then issue domains to disputed govts, coup d'états, ... But it wouldn't seem to hard for each govt to claim .gov.tld (.gov.us - would also be easier to pass down e.g. .az.gov.us) Fun fact, Switzerland's govt went for admin.ch (even pre .com boom times)

The .name tld probably is a bad idea, just think about the 80000 Bob Smiths in the US. I don’t think there is any good scheme for that.

Yeah I like knowing that .us.gov is always a government site, and .edu is always an educational site, and there are governing bodies enforcing that policy - but for the rest, biz and net and com and io are cute, but completely unnecessary. I’d love to just go to https://gmail .

This "trust aspect" implied (or assured?) by certain TLDs, or for the non-US world by second-level domains under ccTLDs, has been, interestingly, completely missed by several countries in the early Internet days, including fairly large ones like e.g. Germany: Annoyingly, you cannot identify a federal agency or otherwise "official" website by its domain--no trailing .gov.de or the likes, it will alway be "just" ending in .de, which makes things like phishing but also deception (by implying a certain level of authority but in fact selling services from a private entity) unnecessarily easy. This is contrary to other countries' .gov.uk, .gv.at, .edu.au, etc. Although created for different reasons, I think, the Public Suffix List gives some indication of which countries enforce such namespaces (or did), see https://publicsuffix.org/list/

There is bund.de for the federal government, with e.g. the interior ministry (Bundesministerium des Innern) at bmi.bund.de. But personenstandsrecht.de has nothing in the domain name or even the whois to indicate that it really is part of the interior ministry as it claims. There are links to it from bmi.bund.de so presumably...

Here they do have such domains: .gc.ca for the Government of Canada, and .gouv.qc.ca for the Québec government. But annoyingly they both seem to be moving towards canada.ca and quebec.ca, respectively. There's even a whole .quebec TLD now that they could use, but no.

> biz and net and com and io are cute, but completely unnecessary

You don't like country TLDs? The USA should be the highest authority over every domain on the internet?

...and the rest of the world goes out empty. IMHO better: .gov.us, .edu.us

If you want trust having a corporate entity is not it, you can make them with no actual humans in the chain of trust, and you can easily register the same company name in multiple countries and cause havoc (as demonstrated with the EV certs)

It's not really about "trust" per se, more about forcing domains to be in the right TLD. Today my personal blog lives on a .com domain, which is absurd except that .com is de-facto the default. I aspire to a world where that doesn't happen, because all domains that aren't literally for a business are on something else, so com can't be a default.

(Corollary: If you create legal entities in multiple countries, I don't care if you have domains to match. I just want to avoid the current sillyness where people use the io TLD even they have zero association, even on paper, with the British Indian Ocean Territory (or whoever you believe should control that TLD))

#1 sounds like something hacky web browsers should introduce as an option for the address bar, as it's just aesthetics (I know it's not _just_ aesthetics, but close enough). Either to flip it, or perhaps even a regexp of some sort?

You could, but IMHO it's a terrible idea to add after the fact. Like, yeah if I had a time machine I would want to change it, but trying to change it today, even and perhaps especially in a cosmetic way, would just lead to confusion, ambiguity, and security problems.

Could go the other way. Make TLDs trivial to set up for anyone, so “gmail” becomes the TLD. Without changing how DNS resolution works I don’t think the root domain would be happy to handle that kind of traffic however.

In theory, Google could pay for the TLD ".google" so that... anything .google is reserved by default for google domains.

But this isn't going to work in practice; people don't read URLs so it doesn't matter. Second, for years there was this idea that all porn sites should be forced to go to a .xxx TLD so that it's easy to block, but that's impossible to legislate and / or enforce.

Not sure if this is your point, but Google does have the .google TLD which it reserves for google domains.

I think mean the .goog TLD:

https://icannwiki.org/.goog

I did mean .google, but .goog fits as well.

https://icannwiki.org/.google

See also .apple, .microsoft, .amazon, .aws, and many more.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.google

Though Google still doesn't use .google for much of anything a decade after establishing it, because it's confusing for normal users.

Their best known gimmick URL is the goo.gl shortener, which is actually the ccTLD for (not) Greece (actually Greenland) rather than a Google-specific one.

I've seen blog.google a few times.

Things like "google.com" and "gmail.com" are established brands; switching that to "search.google" or "gmail.google" isn't really going to improve anything for anyone. I guess it's kinda cute for blog.google, but other than that it's pretty useless.

A bunch of companies bought these brand TLDs only to never use it and then abandon them a few years later. Probably a "zomg this is a new internets thing and if we don't do all the new internets things it we'll be left behind on the internets, and we can't be left behind on in the internets!!!11"-type affair.

Here's a list: https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/gtld-registry-agreemen...

gmail.google also doesn't make sense "Google mail dot Google"

mail.google would be better.

And then people would be confused at how it's not an incomplete URL, because mail.google.com exists.

> Their best known gimmick URL is the goo.gl shortener, which is actually the ccTLD for (not) Greece (actually Greenland) rather than a Google-specific one.

Not for long https://developers.googleblog.com/en/google-url-shortener-li...

So odd, it must cost them approximately nothing to serve redirects for the static set of links they still had. Now they'll break links all over the web again.

They've got .gle and .goog too. .gle for goo.gle

That's so pointless, unless I'm missing something?

Why don't they just register ogle TLD so they can have Go.Ogle too?

gl is greenland

Oops, so it is. Not sure how I got that mixed up.

Stupidly enough, they did, and then didn't glue things to it.

One could almost wonder if the explosion of gTLDs in the 2010s has been pushed by registrars as they were seeing Big Money. In (my personal) retrospective, the value for Internet users and their actual usage is vanishingly small--compared to the downsides of massively increased phishing risks and, as you mentioned, the need for companies/brands to nowadays having to register (and pay for) a gazillion of irrelevant TLDs, merely for brand protection and abuse prevention.

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