I am unconvinced by the usefulness of those new TLDs. Am I the only one?
You still need to put a brand name or trademark in front of the TLD, so it really doesn't add anything to anybody's options for registering a domain.
Nikon will want "nikon.camera", but it has no value to anyone else, if you register it their lawyers will take it from you anyway.
Neutral names, like "dlsr.camera" may be cool to have (ie, vanity), but if someone else owns "dlsr.com" and or "dlsrcamera.com", your basically sending traffic to them if your trying to communicate it offline, so they have very little practical value.
Alternative use of existing national TLD's has proven to be a niche for techies like us (.io), and failed to gain any traction with regular users, despite some pretty obvious ones (like .tv). New style tld's we already had are also barely used for other than rare pragmatic reasons (.info), or are as good as dead (.mobi, .biz).
I see no reason why these new TLD's will be any different.
$120 non refundable fee for meet.singles, date.singles, etc... multiplied by every sucker out there... it is a considerable non-refundable fortune
But I agree that the ones on the current list look terrible. Does the world really need .holdings and .ventures? Of course not, it's just some company wanting to sell overpriced perks. And .equipment is plain ridiculous. What's next, .lawnmower and .leafblower?
.foo and .bar would be nice.
These new domains are vanity domains for politicians og my city has its own domain what value does .london or .edinburgh have.
Or ways of extorting brand holders my director at reed Elsevier told me that the c level's where getting pitches to "protect" their brand names from these new domain companies.
I say this because for some reason people feel like these strings should be vetted before they go into the root and all sorts of obstacles are thrown in the path of these nascent ideas. Most of ICANN's work in the past few years has been focused on creating and implementing these obstacles in the name of "stability", etc. I'm not advocating for a completely open root, but what we've got is a bit much.
obDisclaimer: I work for a registrar.
The gTLD space is also handy for classifications. If I see a ccTLD, I know that it's delegated to a country, and isn't some phishing attempt at gTLD level. Since I'm familiar with the .uk space, if I see a .gov.uk, I know that it's delegated to the UK Government, and that it isn't some phishing attempt at .uk level. This chain requires a "brand" presence at each level. Permitting a free-for-all at gTLD level would dilute this.
The point of [hierarchical] namespacing is that we can subdivide them.
We once had a single free-for-all area, which we called .com. People say that it's full, so we need more space. But instead of growing down the hierarchy, where there's unlimited space, they want to grow up, where there is just one namespace left.
But you can only grow up once.
If we didn't have a .com, and we just let people register in the gTLD space directly, then where would we be now?
If we want to think commercially, "like a startup", then companies should be able to register a .com and sell subdomains to third parties. They've certainly tried. Why can't they achieve notable success? Because the .com space is diluted free-for-all space where a .com name cannot achieve the level of notability needed, just as what will happen to the gTLD space if ICANN continue on this path.
The rationale for adding arbitrary gTLDs is self-deprecating. This route can only be a victim of its own success, just as the namespace problem inside .coms has already demonstrated. And then that will be it.
True in so many ways.
Also I dont see how product-name.tld is better than tld/product-name from a user point of view. What is stopping amazon from doing product-name.amazon.com right now?
That's the problem with creating .lawyer, .plumber, etc. as TLDs rather than a subdomains of an appropriate ccTLD. There's not enough local oversight to make them actually valuable. If I were in need of a California lawyer, someone who owns a .lawyer.ca.us (administered by the state) would look much more trustworthy than someone who owns a generic .lawyer domain (could be a scammer in Nigeria).
Ditto for things like .paris and .london. There's no reason they can't be administered as paris.fr and london.uk respectively, and I'm disappointed that the national registries of these countries failed to offer enough incentives for people to prefer such subdomains. Besides, I can easily imagine residents of Paris, Kentucky (paris.ky.gov) and London, Ontario (london.ca) getting pissed with those big cities who think they can get away with exceptions like that.
I don't think I agree. People don't care about URLs after they have entered the first one into their browser, and for that, the shorter the better. Nobody likes typing long URLs with subdomains, that's why almost everyone uses Google to find any website that's not shortword.com.
I'd say we need a TLD for every dictionary noun to show the finger to the domain squatters.