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Comment by finnn | Hacker News Reader

https://com.google - Google showing off their new gTLD in a silly manner.

For or against gTLDs Google should not be able to squat .dev is too generic to give to one company. Infact any one company squatting any gtld that isn't their registered trademark leaves a sour taste in my mouth.

It's just a game of "we have money therefor shut up." combined with "The world revolves around the USA"

How is "squatting" .dev meaningfully different from having .dev.com?

People here give way too much importance to TLDs.

I know a lot of folks using .dev for locally running "development" instances of websites/apps. Maybe .local is now a better choice.

.local was already the standard: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.local

.local reserved for special mDNS functionality http://files.multicastdns.org/draft-cheshire-dnsext-multicas...

.local is reserved for mDNS. I'm not sure why you can't just use the host's real FQDN.

Because you might want to have multiple vhosts running on localhost, separated by hostname.

If you host is, say "zeus.barrera.io" you can use:

test-service-1.zeus.barrera.io dummy-server.zeus.barrera.i

Etc. No need to create new (possible conflicting, definitely not future proof) TLDs.

It's not about shared hosts (at least if I'm understanding the topic correctly) but about /etc/hosts entries on your local machine for your local machine. As in:

    my-test-thing-a.dev 127.0.0.1
    my-test-thing-b.dev 127.0.0.1
    my-test-thing-c.dev 127.0.0.1

Buying an actual registered domain for that sounds like it would be even more confusing than using an unregistered TLD because it makes it hard to tell which hostnames are expected to work across machines and which are strictly "works on my machine".

or .test http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.test

I used to use .foo, Google acquired that one last year:

http://icannwiki.com/.foo

Microsoft documents even dictate using .local, but if you have mDNS on your network you immediately start to run into problems.

I use .lan

Thought ICANN auctioned all the gTLDs.

Also, The USA invented the Internet.

I hope you're joking about that second part....

He's right though. You may be too young.

Except he's not right. ARPANET was one aspect of what would become the Internet. The public Internet as we know it is an amalgamation of technologies which were developed by the U.S., Great Britain, and France. You really can't claim that the U.S. invented the Internet.

Hasnt' Louis Pouzin invented the Internet?

I had already set up our computer to mirror-reverse all websites for today, so ironically com.google looks normal.

I always thought "do a barrel roll" was kind of stupid, but it's cool that it still works on com.google.

That actually reminded me of a bug I submitted a while ago. It appears to be fixed now, but I was pretty surprised at the answer they provided at the time. When instant search first came out, anything that auto-completed to "do a barrel roll" would initiate the animation. It's such a popular term that simply typing "Do a" was enough to trigger it as it was the first result.

https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/websearch/R5A...

Strangely "tilt" sets it back to normal but keeps the domain, then when you change the search query it flicks back to backwards mode.

tilt css probably overrides the mirror css

Zerg Rush is broken though; Zerglings attack the air, dealing damage to DOM elements on the other side of the screen.

Makes sense, it's an old animation, probably a gif or something. It even uses the old 'o'.

It's not an animation, you can kill Zerglings by clicking on them.

moc.elgoog would have been much better social commentary on the gTLD explosion.

It would have been pretty impressive if they created a whole gTLD just for an April Fools joke.

indeed because "The evaluation fee is US$185,000."

http://newgtlds.icann.org/en/applicants/customer-service/faq...

I wouldn't be so sure they wouldn't do that, after all:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/07/02/us-dealtalk-nortel...

"At the auction for Nortel Networks' wireless patents this week, Google's bids were mystifying, such as $1,902,160,540 and $2,614,972,128.

Math whizzes might recognize these numbers as Brun's constant and Meissel-Mertens constant, but it puzzled many of the people involved in the auction, according to three people with direct knowledge of the situation on Friday.

...

'It became clear that they were bidding with the distance between the earth and the sun. One was the sum of a famous mathematical constant, and then when it got to $3 billion, they bid pi,' the source said, adding the bid was $3.14159 billion.

'Either they were supremely confident or they were bored.'"

> 'Either they were supremely confident or they were bored.'

Those usually go hand in hand.

Motivation for changing the low order digits is different from the high order digits.

Not to nitpick but the lower order digits in those bids are orders of magnitude higher than the US$185,000 evaluation fee.

> ICANN GTLD APPLICATION FORM

> 1. Purpose of TLD

> It would be funny.

One thing I noticed is that the search doesn't modify the URL as it does on google.com. Wondering why?

it's in an iframe

I get that. But still wondering why implement it like this?

Type "WTF?" in the search box and go to image search ;)

Correction. All images are reversed.

Is it me or does everyone and their mother have a gTLD these days? I would not take any company that uses a gTLD serious at all.

http://try.everyone/ http://and.theirmother/

I was so hoping for that to be a thing.

Yes, let's not take Google serious.

You wouldn't take Google seriously? I'm sure they didn't fork out just for today, they will be using it for their products at some point.

In a few years, it will probably the standard domain for big corps. iphone.apple, macbook.apple, etc. It looks weird now (or an intranet address at best), but once people get used to it, it will be recognisable as a domain just as any.com is now.

Not to mention, an explosion of TLDs for reselling (.futbol .enterprise etc) means people will just equate . on billboards etc with a domain.

The fact that a company needs their own gTLD is silly. Sites like google have a perfectly good domain. Why use iphone.apple if apple can already do iphone.apple.com or apple.com/iphone? At the end of the day the consumer will not start guessing what domain he/she has to use to get what they want. The average consumer uses a search engine and types in "apple iphone". They don't care about iphone.apple they just want to go to the product page.

Well, it's not about need. It's about a story that goes like this:

    ICANN: Hey, has anyone noticed that our wallets aren't
           very heavy?
    Google: We have a bucketload of money just laying around
           that will fill your wallets, and wouldn't mind
           our own gTLD. It'd be cute.
    ICANN: You had us at 'bucketload of money'

We needed more gTLDs anyway. So what if a few mega-companies get their own versions?

Because ICANN set this up, and companies have to protect their trademarks.

Google isn't going to abandon their perfectly good domains.

> Google isn't going to abandon their perfectly good domains.

Good thing icann just increased the available domain-space from "limited" to "unlimited" then. That sounds good for almost everyone, or at least icann.

Basically, "" is now a TLD, and ICANN is the registrar, so it can extract the rents.

what's wrong with having gTLD? Seeing lots of this new TLD hate, I want to understand the reasoning.

The TLD system is arguably broken, because it never turned out as hierarchical as it was supposed to. All the new TLDs do is force people to shell out more money to squat on pointless domains to avoid them being used for fraud (or, worse, by the competition).

Or it makes them finally realize how silly the "we must have them all" is.

Not happening in my experience. As long as everyone in the industry is earning their share from this madness they'll happily "suggest optimizations to the domain portfolio" of their vict^Wcustomers.

Who are you to call millions of pokemon fans silly?

Adding random things at the root of a hierarchy subverts the entire idea of having a hierarchy in the first place.

This battle was lost the second people started using .net and .org for things that wheren't related network technologies and non-profit orgranizations respectively. The nail was driven into the coffin when people started using country tld's for sites that had nothing to do with that country.

If anything this might be step back in the right direction. Whereas I cannot tell anything about the nature or origin of a site based on the fact that it has a .net or .ly tld, I will be able to tell something about nature and origin of a site if it has a .google or .apple tld.

Misusing the hierarchy is different than subverting it entirely. Also, your last statement isn't true.

Or .Sony, except there is no guarantee Sony corp actually registered that TLD.

Sony does own the .sony gTLD: https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/request-2014081-...

More generally, as part of ICANN's gTLD approval process, if the gTLD being applied for is a trademark, then it can't go to anyone else besides the trademark holder. So there's actually a lot more assurances that you are dealing with who you expect to be dealing with with gTLDs versus random domain names on .com.

Honest question, trademarked according to who? The Internet is a global thing now, so who wins if there's two entities that happen to both have valid claims to a trademark?

First one to pay icann money obviously.

Hey, I remember the .sony floppy driver bug on '90s Macs!

Wow. Such nostalgia.

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