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Comment by jitl | Hacker News Reader

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.

Who are you to call millions of pokemon fans silly?

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.

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.

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

Wow. Such nostalgia.

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.

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