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blhack

I seriously hate GTLD so very, very much.

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.

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I want to run an online bookstore. Dare I say I want to start an amazon competitor.

Then ".book" is the least of your problems.

True, but it's still an unfair advantage afforded only to the incumbent.

I think you didn't even need to quote the second sentence. Is there another successful online bookstore? It's the rare brick-and-mortar bookstore that's financially sustainable.

No, they don't, domains are essentially a meaningless string. Nobody cares about your domain; I mean, people search for "google" in Google!

It's no different than Barnes&Noble owning books.com. Meaningless.

I'm sure instead of going to google.com you go to http://74.125.225.68/ because domain names are meaningless.

I think he's trying to say that a domain name means little in comparison to one's site.

I go to whatever address Firefox has configured for "Google Search". Couldn't care less if it's google.com or 2a00:1450:4003:800::1008

But in any case, my point is that any domain is fine, not that domains as a whole are useless.

This is weird: a Google search for that "2a00:..." string [1] results in a link to what looks like this page, but hosted on 13l.blork.ly. What's up with that?

1. https://www.google.com/search?q=2a00%3A1450%3A4003%3A800%3A%...

Probably someone used the "Blork.ly" service to share a link to this story, I don't know.

I just did a dig -t AAAA google.com to find out their IPv6.

Products matter, not domains.

Google didn't become worth $200 billion because of their stupid name.

That's just one example. There have been plenty of startups, particularly in the consumer internet space, in which the names were generally accepted to be critical to the startups' successes. Mint vs. Wesabe is the most obvious example.

If http://74.125.225.68/ ranks before a .book domain when you type whatever in your browser edit box. Then that's where most people will be going to. Doesn't mean domains are meaningless, but they mean very little, and the better google gets, the less they'll mean in the future.

He means un savy users will literally type "google" into the URL bar (not understanding that typing a string there will google it) and click on the first result to get to google. Then they perform the query they originally intended

All it takes is for Amazon to do a big marketing campaign and teach users that typing "horror.books" or "action.movies" to cause real problems to other retailers. People search google in google because they don't understand how the internet works, if an advert from Amazon explained how "action.movies" was a way to find action movies and "anything.movies" works too then you can guarantee behaviour will change.

Domain names are a useful abstraction away from IP addresses for some people.

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?

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