Tech press misses Google/Amazon name grab
scripting.com
scripting.com
Look at the full list here: http://newgtlds.icann.org/en/program-status/application-resu....
Notice how 70 were applied for by "Top Level Domain Holdings Limited". Go to their website, and click management. http://www.tldh.org/management/
The exe's bio says, "Prior to joining TLDH, Peter Dengate Thrush was Chairman of the Board of Directors of ICANN, and in that role led the process that resulted in the historic decision to launch the new gTLD program in June 2011."
1) Get on ICANN board of directors
2) Convince ICANN to create gTLDs
3) Quit ICANN and create a company to squat and resell gTLDs
4) Profit!
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/icann-departures-draw...
there won't be that much profit, because of inflation. don't worry, just wait by the sidelines and watch the new bubble.
In the real world this would be construed as protection money.
No further semantic information is conveyed by another domain registration; there is no improvement whatsoever in resource discoverability.
The only winners are the name squatters, with Google and Amazon and every other applicant greedily lining up to be the slum landlords of their own worthless little namespace.
ICANN should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves for presiding over this farce.
People don't care about domains. They put "facebook" and even "google" in Google and click on whatever comes up on top.
Nobody goes to books.com to buy books, nobody goes to albums.com to buy music albums, it's all irrelevant.
It's not OK for people to not know how to use the internet.
If you want people to move away from middle-man, domains are certainly not the solutions, and the new TLDs will not change that for better nor for worse.
We had domains before Google. People switched because they suck as an human interface.
It's not OK for people to not know how to use the internet.
It's not only about that. I know perfectly well how it works, but I still use Google all the time for finding company websites, because it'd be incredibly stupid to spend 10m guessing the domain instead of making a 300ms request to a search engine.
Domains are great for decoupling URLs, configuration files, etc. from IP changes. They're certainly not a good mechanism for website discovery.
[1] It is a problem because it allows people not to understand the basics of how the internet works. I don't expect people to understand protocols and stuff like that. People don't want to understand technology, they only want to benefit from it. I don't know 80% of the features my TV provides but I don't care - I can still watch TV. People feel the same about the Internet - they know they don't understand it but they don't care because they can still log in to facebook and watch videos on youtube. But using a middle man (call it Google, Yahoo, or even Facebook) to do these things undermines the nature of the internet as we know it and allowing this trend to continue will most likely lead to problems that we will have to resolve. (Not exactly similar, but when MS decided that browsers don't matter it was our job to tell people to stop using IE6 and switch to Firefox. I wouldn't want to be the guy that tells people don't use Google for this, use ____ instead).
As a knowledgeable programmer, your internet experience with DNS and browsers is very different from others, because you know what you're doing. Many people do not.
Should we teach them? Or should we try to control them by controlling "default behavior"?
Many people reading HN are probably too young to remember the browser wars and the battle over the "default browser" setting. This is why IE triumphed over Mozilla. And as any web developer knows, the web has suffered for it. Users who knew what they were doing could change the default settings. But that did not make the difference. Chrome is highly configurable. But that will not make the difference. Default settings are what matter the most.
The success of ICANN relies on a default setting. It's called "root.hints" or something similar. If a person running a DNS server (that could be anyone, including the end user) changes this setting, they can bypass ICANN and these landgrab gtlds.
In the distant past, "alternate roots", an early reaction ICANN's abuse of power, failed because they were trying to do what ICANN is now doing: make money by selling registrations in additional, redundant gtlds. Perhaps the "alternate roots" of the future will be noncommercial ones that subtract gtld's, not add them. For example, maybe we as smart users will choose to use a "pre-landgrab" root that does not have all these silly redundant gltd's that try to capture whatever unorthodox string a novice user might type in a browser.
Domain names are important, but always remember that those who seek to control the browser can easily subvert DNS. Given this decision from ICANN to sell out (which others, not just Google and Amazon, are following: e.g., the founder of BlackHat is running the newgtld program for ICANN; the author of BIND is partnering with a domainer to run a registry), we're going to see some aggressive moves from commercial authors of browsers to control type-in navigation. Of that you can be sure.
Again, the question is whether we want to teach users how things work, or whether we want to let them remain ignorant so we can control them. In the big picture, ignorance does not help the web. Though it may benefit certain vendors.
Who's "we"? I'm not a browser programmer and I have no ability to do that. Frankly, I dislike this common idea that we all part of this common team just because we happen to know something more about computers than the average schmoe. I certainly don't have the power to control any important defaults and therefore people, do you?
And while I can understand the goal, frankly I'm rather skeptical of our ability to teach most people, or of their willingness to be taught, which comes to much about the same. And I'm not sure if they're wrong in not wanting to waste valuable hours of life learning about a bunch of technical stuff that they don't really have much control over.
If a person running a DNS server (that could be anyone, including the end user) changes this setting, they can bypass ICANN and these landgrab gtlds.
But why should we do that? Why do you care? So some companies get shorter domains, so what? We don't even know if those generic TLDs will be accepted. Much ado about nothing, really.
You could argue ICANN extorts money here by putting pressure on companies to apply for gtld's in order to protect their marks. Many companies do not want to apply. For example, the world's most valuable trademark is missing from this applicant pool: Coke. There's no reason ICANN has to create gtld's that match trademarks by putting them in the ICANN root zone. It is domainers that want new gtld's the most. (For the simple reason why, see below.) How hard is it to do 2000 trademark searches? Essentially ICANN is profiting (they get a small fee for every domain name registration that is later sold) by selling the rights to use someone else's trademark.
Then there is the extortion that is carried out by the registries and registrars and domainers. Companies are forced to purchase and renew registrations for direct matches and typos of their trademarks in many different gtlds. More tld's equals more money. Also companies register and renew names in the form [companyname]sucks.tld. That is why you see some applications for a .sucks gtld. These defensive registrations are the bread and butter of the domain name "business". Again, they have no right to sell use of these trademarks. But they do. And they make a handsome profit from the "protection money" that must be spent by companies as a result.
That said, you do have a point: If you are a large company, $2000 and the fees to register domain names in lots of tld's, or to file UDRP's, are essentially nothing. It's easier for companies to just pay the fees rather than try to figure out how DNS actually works and how ICANN and their followers manage to pull off this scam.
You could, except I've shown that you don't have to register the mark to protect it.
Companies are forced to purchase and renew registrations for direct matches and typos of their trademarks in many different gtlds.
No, they aren't, Amazon doesn't own amazon.net and nobody gives a fuck, because people don't write domains, they write "amazon" and click on the first result of the search engine.
Companies buy other domains for irrational fears based on outdated assumptions from when dinosaurs roamed the Earth and search engines sucked.
There's money to be made by owning a domain like amazon.net. You would be amazed at how many people type searches and erroneous strings (e.g., .net when they mean .com) into the Address Bar.
Just because we can't imagine anyone doing this does not mean they don't. They do. That's why numerous domainers are millionaires, some of them a hundred times over, and that's why they are salivating at the thought of running a registry. Zappo's had shoes.com. Now it belongs to Amazon. Amazon knows the power of domain names. Users do type in the Address Bar. We might not know who these users are, but they exist. They have made a number of domainers very wealthy. And Amazon has paid millions to acquire domain names, no matter how ridiculous we may think domain names are, e.g., they paid a premium to acquire a.co
You want to use Amazon as the example? It's a terrible example, because Amazon are savvy. And yet, it turns out, even they do own amazon.biz and amazon.info. The worthlessness of those namespaces is evident: it didn't even occur to you to check them!
Amazon didn't register those for the SEO; it's a pure defensive registration.
Feel free to write to Jeff, tell him to let those registrations lapse 'cos he doesn't need 'em.
And if you lose because the other guy had better lawyers, costs you $10,000? Plus the lawyers.
Scammy McScam of Scamsville called, he wants his cut.
The way I see it, ICANN is selling google and amazon something that is worth about as much as a custom licence plate. (Until I sold it, the nameplate on my motorcycle read 'prgmr' - but I don't think I paid more than $40 a year for that.)
I mean, if amazon and google want to pay that much for something that useless... who am I to say what they should do with their money? I mean, this is certainly better for the company than pissing the money away on corporate jets. (That said, if I were a shareholder, I'd be kinda cheesed.)
ICANN is simultaneously conjuring an artificially scarce property and taking their cut of the proceeds of defensive registration, up front. These additional TLDs add little to zero actual value to the end-user, so any registrations therein are by definition a waste of money.
Being charged by someone to protect something and receiving nothing of value in return sounds like extortion to me. Many will register their names under these gTLDs, solely out of fear of SEO issues later. It's protection money, pure and simple.
Most of all this farce demonstrates that ICANN have abandoned even the pretence of good governance and conservative stewardship of a widely misunderstood technical resource.
How will increasing the namespace help? My hope is that it will divert the resources of people that buy a gazillion names into, you know, buying names in these new namespaces that nobody gives a shit about, leaving more of the dot-com for legitimate use.
I mean, I could be wrong, but I don't think it will decrease the dot-com namespace available for legitimate use.
Personally, I think that if they can take money away from the squatters (or the people that engage in "defensive registrations" or whatever they are calling squatting this week) without taking money from legitimate users, that is a net positive by itself. Squatters are not as bad as spammers; I'm not advocating public executions or anything, but I'm not going to cry that someone else has figured out a way to extract more money from them.
It isn't. It is when an existing holder, e.g. mystartup.com, additionally registers mystartup.biz and mystartup.co and other useless TLDs so that no-one else can have it, without having any intention of using it.
Your "hope" that people might use these other new TLDs instead of .com et al is entirely undermined by the evidence of .biz and .info.
Sorry, but fantasy land doesn't apply here, just economics.
NB: if you have some peculiar impression that defensive registration is a form of squatting, then, y'know, call it whatever you like, the outcome is the same.
If everyone registers their name in all namespaces, there aren't any more names to go around, just more fees for every name owner to pay.
The thing is, it's completely legitimate for prgmr.com, prgmr.net, and prgmr.org to be unrelated entities. It's also legitimate for prgmr.sux or whatever (assuming that top level domain is created) to be owned by someone that wants to say bad things about me. The only illegitimate use is attempting to deceive users in to thinking that you are me.
Though, I think I understand your point better now; You are saying that we really only have one namespace, and the "buy every variation of your name on all top level domains" ship has sailed.
If you hold that position, (and while I disagree, I see how you could hold that position) then yes, adding another top level domain does not expand the namespace, but it does mean that all name owners need to buy another name.
While I do agree that people have a strong preference for .com names, I think this means people are less likely to confuse a .com with a .biz or a .ly or what have you. In fact, almost the only uses I've seen of other than com/net/org and government sites have been for companies that integrated the top level domain into the name, like del.icio.us or what have you. I don't think the existence of prgmr.ly would cause any confusion.
This got me wondering what prgmr.net was (I mean, I am kinda a network, so prgmr.net is arguably more appropriate) - it looks like a Korean programmer's blog. I approve.
From the "Journal of I told you so" I had posted info on that over 4 months ago on HN and had the only comment. It got exactly 1 point:
This week, we've run a number of stories discussing the current phase of the situation, but to be honest, the general audience response has been 'meh.' CNN wanted me to do a spot on Tuesday or Wednesday about it, but it was a scheduling conflict.
The reality is, the story isn't substanatively different than it was a year ago. We're now at the application phase. For certain generic TLDs, communities can appeal against the use by one party. For many of the most contentious TLDs, there have been groups fighting for control for years. See .music.
The reality is that at this point, Google and Amazon applied for the use of certain TLDs. Some are likely to receive pushback -- cloud and search seem ripe for appeal. Google could argue that "blog" is synonymous with "blogger" -- they might win that (tumblr and WordPres could register tumblr and wp if they wanted). The reality is these won't be issued over night.
With some, Google might even have plans to act as an exclusive registrar for some of them.
The situation is this. Despite ICANN's claims that this process would be designed to prevent abuse and land grabs, what's happening is what we all expected: land grabs and abuse, but just from the people rich enough to file the application and pay for the ensuing infrastructure. It is what it is.
I don't see this phase as a huge story, only because it's the expected next step. The story will be what gets approved and what are the implications of those approvals. It's too early in the bureaucratic process to start trying to get people up in arms about a process the was designed to be as cumbersome and difficult to navigate as possible.
Publicizing (again) the way the process works won't change the process.
Yes - it matters greatly! Domains are used to define a number of critical Internet policies. Cookie policies are one example where subdomain interactions can confuse even seasoned veterans.
Winer is right, and I'm surprised nobody is writing about this or calling much attention to it. There's enormous potential marketing value behind domains like "beatles.music" or "harrypotter.books" or "superman.movies".
With the advertising and reach of companies like Amazon and Google (or even Warner and Sony), I think these new domains have the power to split the web, and potentially turn .com, .net, and .org into something of a ghetto (sorta similar to how .biz and .name might be viewed by Joe Consumer now).
On the other hand, it may well be meaningless. I'm continually surprised to see big companies use facebook.com/[companyname] in their advertising too.
I would say TLDs are very influential.
The Page Rank is high with nissan.com due to its lawsuit with Nissan Motors. They even have a link at the top of their page with information about the lawsuit.
Many tech articles have been written about www.nissan.com. This is more a study about Page Rank, Public Relations and the Streisand Effect than anything.
Their ad [1] says it explicitly: "webmasters rank better in Google with backlinks on Nissan.com". That seem to be against the webmaster guidelines, no?
0. http://www.nissan.com/backlinks.php 1. http://www.nissan.com/images/Backlink.jpg
people search for [nissan.com], so that domain has navigational search demand, which is very likely a factor for google.
people link to nissan.com (yes, they do https://www.google.com/search?q=link%3Awww.nissan.com&pw...) without even checking if it's the right domain (and sometimes out of other reasons than we think, i.e. lawsuits
(CMS also tend to convert every .com pseudo urls into an link, so this is also a factor)
people tend to click on official looking search results, .com looks official.
google prefers what people search, link, click on. so (sadly) .com matters.
But doesn't the current perception of those domains today indicate what we can expect from yet more gratuitous TLDs?
I had almost forgotten about those two TLDs, and can just imagine how a more casual Web user might think of them: not at all.
On the other hand, it may well be meaningless. I'm continually surprised to see big companies use facebook.com/[companyname] in their advertising too.
I find that to be a more disturbing trend.
I want to run an online bookstore. Dare I say I want to start an amazon competitor.
Well now amazon owns .books -- Amazon owns books on the internet.
That is bullshit.
It's no different than Barnes&Noble owning books.com. Meaningless.
But in any case, my point is that any domain is fine, not that domains as a whole are useless.
1. https://www.google.com/search?q=2a00%3A1450%3A4003%3A800%3A%...
I just did a dig -t AAAA google.com to find out their IPv6.
Google didn't become worth $200 billion because of their stupid name.
I agree with you that many people are not sure about domain names (they don't know what the http:// is, or what the www (or whatever) before the domain name means, or what the TLD represents) - and this is supported by some of the measures that have gone to protecting users from bad actors. Bind updates to protect against unicode exploits; highlighting the address bar to emphasise https connections; and so on.
Gently scummy efforts by other people have benefited from the mistakes people make; redirecting to ad-laden search pages by ISPs is one pretty bad example.
So, do domain names need another level of abstraction? Or is it broken and does it need a redesign? What could you do?
Then ".book" is the least of your problems.
Now that's going to be fun for people who already own .com domains targeted to those audiences, because I could see people reverting to .com in their native script very easily, and unless you buy the right domains from Verisign, they won't necessarily get to the same domain.
I imagine Verisign will be the only place in the future where when you buy the .com, they'll upsell you on the equivalent .com in various other scripts.
The way it's going seems like a money grab by ICANN.
The entire process is a money grabbing farce.
I've worked at many places where http://search/ was the Intranet search facility. Not now though, nope. Now your IT department will be under pressure to accept Big Search's latest site-integrated intranet search which they conveniently started marketing around the time they broke all your local URLs.
People in NY were asked what their browser was and the most common reply was "Google" - and this was before Chrome had any kind of share. People are completely ignorant when it comes to technology.
But you're wrong. When people go to buy a computer, most know what RAM is, i.e., they've heard of it. It's because advertisements always mention it.
Put another way, if I'm Microsoft, can I put my website at http://microsoft? Or do I have to use http://www.microsoft?
I've looked to see if there is a policy from ICANN on this, but I can't find one. Historically, TLDs did not themselves point to hosts (or have other things like MX or TXT records).
i just tried to submit
http://ac/
In fact I just checked that typing "ac" in the Chrome omnibox makes a Google search for "ac" as I would expect. So the value of having an A record on a TLD is limited.
Edit: Somehow I missed the bar on top of the search results that says "Did you mean to go to http://ac " so there's some value after all.
Ideally I would've liked to see it evolve into a more clean/friendly structure all together... web//companyname, yourname@companyname, etc.
Yes we'd get the clashes of people that currently have different TLDs of the same name, but maybe solve that by making the new structure an optional extra, so people buy the "new" domains from scratch (and if you currently own all major TLDs for your name, eg Microsoft/Google/Apple/etc, noone else can register your "new" domain). First to buy the new one, gets it. Person who had the differing TLD finds a slightly different one.
These new .whatever really piss me off. It's making the web a messier place, and confusing the average users even more, all for the sake for some greedy fatcats to charge stupid amounts to companies that can afford to throw money at it.
You send it to auction and let them bid to see who gets it.
Or you send things to a dispute resolution provider, e.g., WIPO. Not sure how much revenue they make from these disputes, but it is no doubt growing.
Could this problem be fixed with a technical solution? Maybe. But for ICANN, there's little incentive to fix it because lots of money is made in their system if there are disputes and an illusion of scarcity.
What is true for company names is also true for trademarks. Like company names, trademarks are both restricted to a particular business sector and they are regional.
But ICANN's system keeps things so that there can be only one xyz.com even though there may be many XYZ Corporations around the world, in different business sectors. They do not compete with each other in the real world. But in ICANN's world, they are forced to compete. And this brings in lots of money for ICANN/Registries/Registrars.
ICANN itself has no vested interest in this other than executing its policies, and if the consensus policy had ended up being "no new gTLDs, there are enough" then it wouldn't have embarked on this program.
https://gtldcomment.icann.org/comments-feedback/programfeedb...
Personally I think the new gTLDs are an incredible abuse of power. They were cooked up only so ICANN could cash in on being the authority. Having new gTLDs are going to cause a lot of problems and they are prohibitively expensive.
What problems do you see this creating?
Not that I think that this would work very well in the long run.
That way "test1" is a local name (relative to the default search path), and "test1." is a TLD.
In theory, that's already the way it works, except that most software treats the trailing period as optional.
I think it raises usability issues. .com (and it's ilk) identify a particular string as being a website address. With .anything how do you know if this string even refers to a website?
I think it will create bugs in some programs that assume that URLs have only a certain small set of TLDs.
What problems does it solve?
But if amazon owns "books" and hosts something at http://books/, should browsers navigate to Amazon whenever someone attempts to search for "books"?
[Actually, is it even allowed to host A records directly on a TLD? I've been reading through RFCs and haven't seen it explicitly disallowed, but nobody seems to have done it with a currently-available TLD.]
However, it hasn't been available for a long time now.
EDIT: As pointed out below, http://ac/ points to a real website
I can 'dig' the domain names though and at least visit http://ac/ through it's IP-address in the A-record (http://193.223.78.210/).
https://lists.dns-oarc.net/pipermail/dns-operations/2009-Jul...
It is like the NXDOMAIN problem.
Is it the web? Or is it some company's interpretation of the web? "In this situation, when the user types ______ the user should be directed to ______."
Remember AOL keywords?
The gtld idea only produces significant value when the tld's are used for public registration and diverse use. At least that's my claim/prediction. Otherwise it becomes just a sideshow. Heck, even with open registration it might. Look at .tv or .mobi or .me or any other "valuable" tlds that current exist. They really don't seem to be as disruptive as some may have expected.
That said, it still reflects horribly on ICANN. Particularly with a former director flipping over to shameless gTLD profiteer.
And it still reflects poorly on the tech press for not having at least pointed any of this out.
Google and Amazon should be ashamed of themselves for trying to buy .blog, .book (etc) and just want them for their own interest when those gTLDs, used wisely, can be really useful.
We should write a public letter to ICANN about this issue and email them through here https://gtldcomment.icann.org/comments-feedback/applicationc...
Any end users who think this will benefit them are clueless. As this blog post says most people have not a clue what the above parties are up to.
There are basically two main camps among the applicants: domainers looking to capitalize on type-in navigation and overpriced sales of key terms, and companies looking to protect their trademarks. They are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
ICANN is a non-profit organization. They are tax-free. But they treat themselves to perks many for-profit companies only dream about; they live a lavish lifestyle (they just raised 300 million for essentially nothing!) for an organization that is supposed to be acting in the public interest.
It is one heck of a racket.
There will be non-ICANN DNS with some new features emerging out of this fiasco. You can bet on that. ICANN has gotten far too greedy. The conflicts of interest are blatent and insulting.
Was there something you read that indicated that what they did wasn't allowed?
"Another angle on this, the ICANN people must have known about these applications long before they were made public. How could they continue this process, knowing that is how Google and Amazon interpreted the idea of new TLDs?"
Everything including the entire process and requirements were public and anyone could have read and determined the specifics prior to any submissions (and voiced objections). From my reading there was nothing to prevent this anymore than if you filed for .winer you could determine only your family could use it. (Same as you get to decide who uses scripting.com, right?)
At this point anyone can file objections to granting a particular TLD (the fact that you are the only applicant doesn't guarantee getting granted the TLD).
So I would suggest to the OP (Dave Winer) that he writes an objection if this bothers him which will also serve to alert the tech press.
No kidding, private entities bid on, to buy, new gTLDs. Did the author assume that they would pay for them and then have to offer them up as a public good?
I didn't write an objection, I wrote a blog post.
Also, what makes you think one excludes the other? Why berate the one guy who at least a.) paid attention and b.) wrote about it, for not also doing c.) and d.)?
Everybody is still free to file an objection, including the author, and now actually MORE people who would be inclined to do so, are in a position to do it (i.e. they heard of it, instead of this going down in silence).
Maybe Dave's planning on filing an objection, I don't know. If he is, great. But it is easy to come off as someone whining on the internet even if you have a respectable position if the only thing you're doing is complaining.
Did you really think companies were going to pony up almost $200,000 for a TLD application, and then "share" it with the world?
When Nike gets .nike, or Pepsi gets .pepsi, do you expect them to "share"? (Actually, Pepsi has said they're not going to apply for .pepsi)
But if you read and go through the application process (as well as the process leading up to this where everything was discussed and layed out) what those companies are doing is allowed. So the fact that they saw that companies did this has no effect.
What happens about .books.uk &c? Should be fun.
http://icannwiki.com/index.php/Kieren_McCarthy
McCarthy worked for ICANN for a bit, and now he appears to be running some conferences and a web site
Technically speaking, of course.
In the UK some smaller private colleges that are not eligible for .ac.uk register web sites with the .ac country code.
And if the spammers/scammers have enough money to afford the infrastructure necessary for a TLD, I think we may have a bigger problem.
Though someone COULD use books.uk like a domain, I don't see people confusing it with .books websites.
If they do they have the wrong expectations from ccTLDs
At least, that's my assumption. He might want to run ".domains".
It looks like Google only applied for 3 non-english TLDs. Amazon has closer to a dozen. Might say something about long term plans.
Microsoft has about a dozen applications, mostly for things they have trademarked. ".xbox" etc.
Apple is in there as well, but only for ".apple". ".app", ".tunes" were both applied for by Amazon.
But also one from "dot Rugby Limited" which if you look closer, is a likely brand new LLC purely created to bid on domains. They also applied for .soccer, and the emails are all "icanntas<number>@famousfourmedia.com", the number I assume corresponding to the number of applications. Rugby is at 23.
Their site basically says "we're going to buy tlds to make money off".
would be a more accurate title.
Like a public good, the dilution costs of issuing gTLDs is externalized and paid by everyone (other than ICANN).
ICANN has an exclusive license on this valuable virtual real estate, little accountability and a well demonstrated intention of making all the money they can.
Don't blame smart buyers who get in early - they're not the ones who created the situation.
Why not serve the new gTLDs through charities which operate registration and lookup at cost?
Stick with the existing ones?
We already have .xxx, .co, .cat, .ly, and so on. Why will adding .dog and .ing make a difference?
If anything, the people that win are individuals, because there are enough namespaces for them to get something nice. When .us was opened up, I was happy to snap up a 7 character (total) domain name for my email. (That would be a 4 letter .com, completely unobtainable by the time I knew how to register domains.)
I think clever people will use the vanity domains for clever things, and commercial uses will continue to use .com as always. Considering that the average user wouldn't know how to access or email a TLD directly anyway, it's not like Amazon is going to be moving amazon.com to "search". (Actually, even most of the hardcore hackers I asked didn't know how to visit a TLD directly either. The key is remembering that all domain names actually end with a .)
Maybe it's Tor, on top of the present internet. Maybe it's an entirely new non-Internet network. Maybe it will be some new P2P network.
But if the Internet's freedom and competition disappears, something must surely replace it.
But now, you have the poor man, who can afford a $5 .com, but he can't get a second-level domain on the new TLDs since they're owned by a company, and it only lets people have them for a high price or with special conditions. The poor man also can't afford the $200,000 needed to get a new gTLD.
This creates a two-tier Internet: The rich, big companies can get shiny new huge chunks of domain space, whilst the smaller companies, organisations and individuals are simply peasants, subordinates, who can only register on the second and third levels.
Furthermore, it introduces a huge level of corporate control we haven't seen before. Yes, .com is operated by VeriSign, but they have to let other people register .com names. They can't just do whatever they want with it. On the other hand, Google owns .google, and they can do whatever they want with it. It's theirs. They own that part of the internet, at the top level, and they have complete control. If they own .book, and they don't want to give you a domain, so what, they can not give you one.
Do you really think that not being able to register in a .book will hamper the sales of your new book? Or not being able to own yourname.blog reduce your readers in a significant way?
As long as .com, .net, .org and local country registrars keep working as they always have worked, I hardly see this as damaging.
Do you think Facebook would be doing as well as it is if it's URL were http://www.earthlink.net/~facebook/site/index.php ?
Once that first batch of TLD is approved a bunch of large corporations will try to get their's as well.
Initially the ICANN process will be perceived as bloated. To alleviate this competing TLD registars will take over so as to drive down the price and administrative burden.
And ultimately everybody and their dog will have a TLD.
I'm sure Sage Networks haven't registered .apple
http://trademarkem.com/sage-networks-appstore-trademark-appl...
Let's go further back in time. Software programs on NeXTSTEP have had the extension .app since the first release in 1988. There are plenty of videos around from that time in which Steve Jobs refers to software programs as 'apps'. At the time, it wasn't a common word at all with Mac and PC users. Only after Steve Jobs came back to Apple, it entered Apple vocabulary because he would refer to software programs in that way.
Also, Sage didn't use the name as their attempt to revive their trademark application, which in their filing they describe as "International Class 035: Operating on-line marketplaces for buying, selling and exchanging computer software and on-demand applications", was denied. In 2006.
[edit] I could buy apps for the archimedes in a store. An app store is somewhere to buy apps. Technically speaking the apple app store is a package manager with ecommerce functionality. Very much like the linux predecessor CNR, in other words. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNR_%28software%29
[edit] Wikipedia, that fount of shaky, but vaguely accurate hearsay says that RISCOS was released in 1987. Archimedes computers were widely used in the UK due to being in pretty much all state high schools. Steve was not responsible for bringing the word into the public domain, no matter how much you wish it so.
That's not to say that the separate components of Apple's App Store were particularly novel. Before its launch, there were package managers, there were online marketplaces for software, and the name 'app' had already been used by several platforms. Apple united those ideas, made it a user friendly environment, made it easy to buy apps with one click (using the credit card that was already on file in iTMS), and integrated the update process. That's often how Apple gets their successes, by combining and improving on existing ideas (see OS X, iPod, iPhone, iPad, etc.)
I never used Acorn's Archimedes, but growing up in The Netherlands, the first computers I used were Acorn Electrons, our primary school classroom had six of them. That's how I started programming, in BASIC, at the tender age of 6. I have fond memories of using those machines.
What's the difference between Google keeping .blog for itself, and some other company charging $50,000 for their normal registration fee? (Some already do that.) Not much.
I see some obvious parallels between domains and TLDs in how they become limited to singular entities. After all, it's non-trivial to obtain a scripting.com subdomain for myself, and I see no reason why someone is more entitled to such a subdomain than I am, besides being first to have registered the domain itself.
- Apartments - Autos - Boats - Cars - Forsale - Homes - Motorcycles - Rent - Yachts
I wonder what percent of US GDP sales of those products represent.
Being able to register a domain for ~$10 on a first-come-first-served basis (modulo exceptions, which have been handled reasonably well by UDRP) is wonderfully accessible to everyone. gTLDs are prohibitively expensive to most. But beyond the money matters...
The simplicity and restrictiveness of .com made it attractive. The .kitchen-sink direction -- blowing out .net and .org in the worse ways -- creates a mess.
See more on my blog(Chinese) if you interested: http://yinhm.appspot.com/2012/06/new-gtld-current-applicatio...
Am I the only one who doesn't understand why it is Amazon - and not Google - who wants to have .search?
> The .search gTLD provides Google with the opportunity to differentiate its Google Search products and services by linking them to a unique gTLD. Google will be able to quickly distinguish new products and services it develops and⁄or acquires by offering them in the proposed gTLD.
> The mission of the .SEARCH registry is to provide a unique and dedicated platform for Amazon while simultaneously protecting the integrity of its brand and reputation.
> A .SEARCH registry will:
> • Provide Amazon with additional controls over its technical architecture, offering a stable and secure foundation for online communication and interaction.
> • Provide Amazon a further platform for innovation.
> • Enable Amazon to protect its intellectual property rights.
Basically, only for their own commercial gains. The other two applicants want .search to be a place for consolidation of search related domains, which seems like an absolute pipe dream.
Anything generic should be allowed to the public. Maybe the rights to sell can be sold a company.
I'd vote for more 2-letter short extensions, such as .js
Gleb
If you have a killer product, any number of zillions of domains still available will do the trick.
Or go buy an even better one for $250 to $1,500 from SEDO.
How about a .fm or .ws domain? Or .IO and so on.
No time or effort should be directed toward worrying about this. Put your brain back on your product. Someone owning .books or .meme is no more interesting than someone owning books.com or meme.biz. Either your product is amazing or it isn't.
When you can beat Google by owning search.search (how about search.com), let me know.