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Comment by davidjgraph | Hacker News Reader

Here's how it works. The techies create something. The legals come along and say, OK, to release that in the wild it needs some T&Cs that cover our arses for everything and then some, because people keep sueing us.

In practice, would Google ever dare invoke this on a large scale? No, you know that. Yes, there should be some transparent process that is undertaken if yours were revoked, but Google only like stuff that scales, manual processes like that don't.

And really, if the ability to revoke your URL at any time wasn't in the T&Cs, do you really think it would make any difference to the revoke rate?

Sure, nobody in their right mind would depend on such a URL sticking around, but this post isn't "Why I won't get a Google+ Custom URL", it's "Why I won't use a Google+ Custom URL as the primary mechanism to link to myself online". I don't see much argument against just claiming one, if you're already a g+ user.

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Me in 1993: Yeah, but seriously, nobody is going to start charging for domain names. Writing a hundred bytes in your named.conf? What would you charge, ten cents? Doesn't make sense. And everybody swaps secondary service with everybody else, and your upstream includes it at no extra charge.

Where can I read more about this seemingly magical era? I'm so young that it sounds like a faerietale.

Google 'NSF NSI contract 1993'. Ended up being worth North of $20B in about 7 years.

It's hardly a canonical source, but very much on the 'seemingly magical' side of things -- there's a Twitter account devoted to crawling old boards and pages and tweeting interesting snippets.

https://twitter.com/wwwtxt

Incredibly wonderful -- and very surreal. It's bizarre to think that only twenty years ago, the Internet was an entirely different culture.

In 1994, someone at Wired magazine (which was only in its 2nd year of existence) registered mcdonalds.com to see what would happen: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.10/mcdonalds_pr.html

god were you wrong back then!

> ten cents

And they started charging $70, IIRC!

$100, two years.

1993. I considered registering cocacola.com, sex.com, shell.com, etc. etc. Spent the money on consumables instead.

There are few moments I remember as clearly as making that decision.

You decided to spend money instead of free domains? ;)

Now that people mostly use search engines instead of typing whatever.com, I imagine domain squatters don't get as much traffic.

As I see it, the purpose of search engines is to route around squatters and find real content, no matter where it's hosted.

The domains are still worth a lot though.

Unfortunately those same search engines are placing much importance on words that appear in a domain's name. Google at least also has a clear preference for well known TLDs, such as .com, .net and .org

The domain name is also many times your brand. So it's true that you may not type "whatever.com", but you still type "whatever". In this particular instance, "whatever.com" actually exists, but has no content on it and thus it doesn't have a high ranking. But in other cases a developer of something like "go-whatever.ly" may end up with a world of hurt.

For startups, these considerations don't even factor in the importance that investors themselves place on well picked domain names.

If you think domain names are not important anymore, you're wrong.

Unless its a sex related domain. I'm sure fuck.com, sex.com and anything similar will receive free traffic as long as domain names exist.

I recall thinking how messy web pages looked compared to gopher, which seemed more organized. I was using text browsers for both, of course.

You forgot the part where the business guys come in and ask why they aren't making money off this and decide to either cancel the service or start charging for it.

The claim-page I saw says that at some point they may charge for it. I expect they will, if they ever think people have come to rely on it.

I took my name URL but have no plans to publicize it. I don't own it.

Google Reader, never forget :-)

> In practice, would Google ever dare invoke this on a large scale?

Twitter has already done that on a number of primary usernames, rather than just vanity urls. Did you expect them to do that? Do you think Google is better?

So, we're talking Google here. IF your assessment is true, then Google is certainly reigned by lawyers, not engineers.

Point taken.

Reigned? Based on the inclusion of one cover-your-ass clause that has so far never been exercised in the terms and conditions of one product?

If this is your idea of sufficient evidence that a company is run by lawyers, I'd challenge you to find a single company that isn't. I don't believe I've ever seen an agreement that didn't say that the company could change the terms at any time and that continued usage constituted acceptance of the new terms. All of those agreements implicitly allow exactly what Google has explicitly allowed for.

Indeed. A huge corporation would never do anything unethical for money.

It's not about ethics, it would just not make very much sense to charge people for their G+ handle when:

  - They struggle to get adoption from users.
  - They offer all these other, more essential/complex,
    services for 'free'(Gmail/Search/Docs/Calendar/Android).
  - Anybody can turn around and use the long form, unless
    your G+ is part of your marketing and as such, you use
    it as part of a business.

Really, I think they only put that condition there so they can eventually monetize handles that are used by other Big Corp.

As a quick reality check, we're talking about boring old URL rewriting here. "Cool new invention mangled by legal paranoia" is a solid story, but other stories would probably fit the circumstances better.

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