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Comment by jlarocco | Hacker News Reader

The concept of top level domains seems a bit outdated. I can only guess that under the new system "store.apple.com" will become "store.apple", "myname.blogger.com" will become "myname.blog", etc. So why not go the other way and just drop TLDs altogether? I know there are a few cases where a ".net" domain would clash with a ".com", but the people in those cases are already used to the conflict, so let them work it out which one keeps the TLD in their name and which one becomes TLD-less.

The way it's going seems like a money grab by ICANN.

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Namespaces exist for a reason. For example, what do you call your network printer after http://canon gets reserved by the printer manufacturer? Same with http://epson, whatever. And is http://printer1/ safe? Only until someone writes a paragraph justification and shows up with $1m.

The entire process is a money grabbing farce.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.local

.local causes chaos if you're running Bonjour/Avahi on the same network

You just need to configure them as static mappings in /etc/avahi/hosts.

http://linux.die.net/man/5/avahi.hosts

Why should I have to type "canon.local" for my printer name, just in order to avoid an advert to buy a new printer? This destroys any sense of user preference in favor of large corporations pushing their shit further into your face even when you explicitly don't want it.

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.

The good thing about DNS is that the user controls it. You can set it to whatever you want. Enough people set it one way and it becomes a standard that no board can decide against.

Exactly. What's needed is more public education. DNS is a basic thing all users should know about. You can stop someone on the street and they will know what "RAM" is. They might not be able to explain how it works or what it stands for, but they know what it is and they know they need it for applications to run smoothly. Same should be true of DNS. Mozilla, not to mention Adobe, can coordinate millions of people to all download the same program (Firefox, Flash plugin). People can be taught how to control their own DNS, e.g. how to choose a DNS server. But ICANN likes users to remain ignorant. They want everyone to use their root server without ever thinking about it. Well, that server is about to become overrun with needless tld's.

You can stop someone on the street and they will know what "RAM" is.

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.

I saw that video. Hilarious!

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.

Sometimes changing DNS servers causes biiiig (and confusing) problems with captive networks.

The problem is the concept of hijacking DNS in order to show ads or beg for money on a wireless network. It's like saying that you don't want hands because when you hit them with a hammer, they start bleeding all over the place. The solution is to not hit your hand with a hammer, not to not have hands. Because they're pretty useful except for the whole bleeding thing.

I was merely suggesting that changing DNS servers does not always work well in real life, most unfortunately.

They won't break your local URLs. Locally defined domains take priority over remote ones, you don't rely on them return NXDOMAIN for yours to work. It's a complete non-issue.

Does owning a gTLD entitle you to use the top of your namespace for anything other than NS/SOA records?

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).

Some ccTLDs do have A records, though, like http://ac

great example!!!

i just tried to submit

  http://ac/

to hackernews. guess what? it didn't work.

Yeah, it's common to have bad url or email address validation. Many sites do not accept short email addresses at all. As example a @bc.de (space is there intentionally). When it becomes a @ bc then it's interesting to see how many sites will fail with that.

What browser are you using? This worked in my browser.

I believe that TLDs with A records should resolve correctly if you add a period to the end, as in "http://ac.. As I recall, this came up when the "http://to. link shortener [no longer available] was discussed a while ago.

With the current trend of combining the address and search bar I doubt browsers will let you go to e.g. http://lol when you type "lol" in the bar.

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.

I've been preaching for years that we need to get rid of TLDs. If we truly want the web to be a global/borderless place, get rid of the extensions and let us do http://companyname/ (I know it currently can't work like that, but I'm sure all the great minds out there can figure it out).

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.

And what do you do when multiple companies have the same name and there's no top-level country domain to distinguish between them?

The same you do know when two companies in the same country have the same name/trademark?

If you are ICANN/Registry/Registrar you make money!

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.

One of the common refrains from this is that it is a money grab by ICANN, but all ICANN is doing is implementing a multi-stakeholder consensus policy that was ratified by the various community groups 5 years ago, and doing so on a cost-recovery basis. While the costs may end up being conservatively estimated, any excess will be returned back to the community.

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.

Pretty much all the "stakeholders" are from the "domain industry", so it's pretty obvious what their "consensus" would be. You're right that it's technically not a money grab by ICANN, but somebody is planning to make money and we've seen that people who work at ICANN can also profit from the revolving door.

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