I'd go a step further and suggest that all of the new gTLDs are pointless and idiotic:
- .aero: if IATA airport codes were all registered domains here, it might be useful, but they aren't, so it isn't.
- .asia: asia is definitely a country </sarcasm>
- .biz: sufficiently stupid that SpamAssassin has a rule for it
- .cat: meow? seriously, I've only seen this used for vanity joke domains
- .coop: there isn't a .llc, why is this any different?
- .info: happy fun SEO land
- .jobs: pity they won't take my registration for Blow, Inc.
- .mobi: as noted
- .museum: 1138 registered domains in 10 years is a sign of true irrelevance
- .name: personal names are hardly unique identifiers
- .pro: stupid hierarchy makes this one even more useless than you'd think
- .tel: as noted
- .travel: because .aero just wasn't enough
- .xxx: as noted
Perhaps I'm just not seeing the possibilities, but I suspect that there's no future for any of the gTLDs beyond com/net/org, and possibly a few of the up-and-coming IDN gTLDs. The future of domain names is really in better unique names, not a more complex hierarchy.
I agree that pretty much all of those are dumb, but I still think there should be a .app TLD, if only because there are so many perfectly good .com names just sitting on parking pages (and I would totally use .app domains).
Plus it just rolls off the tongue and there's no weird confusion on the spelling.
I'm really, seriously considering the idea of raising some money to cover the registration fee ($50,000). Trying to figure out now if there are more fees involved. I'm confident I can build a complete registrar and global DNS setup in 5 years (or however long it takes to get through their process).
They are operationally useless, yes. However, they are not meant to be operationally useful. They are meant to be vehicles for extracting money from domainers.
So yeah, something useless is getting sold to "investors" - what else is new? and in this case, it takes money from those "investors" that would otherwise be used squatting on useful .com and .net domains, causing those of us who actually want to /use/ a domain to use longer and less-memorable names. So, as far as I'm concerned, this is a net win.
Most of them aren't even accomplishing that, though. Many of the new gTLDs (like .cat, .aero, and .jobs) have restrictions on ownership and usage which make them worthless to speculators; the rest just don't have the name recognition that the Big Three do.
I'm all for .cat, but I can see the arguments against. People are already campaigning for .cym for Wales, so where do we stop? Do all the regional communities on Spain get one (Basque country, Asturias, Galicia, the list goes on). Do the Saami in Scandinavia get one? (They have their own parliaments, so why not TLDs?) What about Native Americans / First Nations? At least being a country is a criterion that works 95+ percent of the time
Um, actually the constitutional status of Wales is a murky topic, and even if that were to be cleared up unambiguously, how do you compare statuses across constitutions?
They don't have their own seat at the UN for instance. They don't field their own team at the Olympics.
If Wales needs a tld, what about Texas? Texas has a distinct culture and was once an independent republic. I'm sure people from Wales think they are independent in some way that Texas is not, but people from Texas think those thoughts too.
It is actually extremely murky, because there is no single document which states what the constitutional status is, there is a patchwork of legislation which refers to England and Wales, then there are the Wales-specific acts such as the Welsh Language Acts, and then there's the devolution and the devolved legislation (which establishes that Wales is to some degree independent within the UK). The constitutional problem, in a nutshell, is that Henry VIII introduced the Laws in Wales Acts to create the legal entity "England and Wales", but there had been no legal entity "Wales" before he did.
Also, if Wales is already a country, why is independence the stated aim of Plaid Cymru :)?
Wales is a constituent country of the United Kingdom and has some devolved power. However, it is the United Kingdom which is internationally recognised.
I'd think .cym for Welsh language sites would be a good thing. I'd see a lot more point in that than .net, a general-purpose namespace which is used generally by people too slow off the mark to register the .com (yes, I know it wasn't intended to be that way).
Wales isn't a country!? I would have thought of all people, someone with a handle like "anghyflawn" might be a bit more compassionate to the plight of the cymry...
I think you misunderstand me :). I don't think .cym is a bad idea at all, but I can understand those who might think it is not. Wales is not a country in the way that Russia, Tuvalu, Kenya or even Jersey are (and even in the latter sense there are fringe cases such as Western Sahara, Kosovo and South Ossetia). If Catalonia and Wales are OK, is Sápmi? What about culturally distinct minorities with no political recognition such as the Roma? It's just too messy.
Tuvalu is an actual country (which is why it gets a cctld). Catalonia is an administrative division of Spain.
If Catalonia has its own TLD, why not California or Maine? If it's a català tld, why doesn't brezhoneg get one? Or cymraeg? Or võru, saami, euskara, söl'ring, cemhuî or ajië?
Catalan is spoken in these regions:
(spain) Catalonia, Valencia, Mallorca, some of Aragon
in South-Eastern France
a town in Sardinia (Alguer / Alghero)
Andorra (a small country)
For the rest of cultural/linguistic TLDs... have they asked for one?
It might have made a bit of sense at that level when the TLD was created in 2001, but the wide availability of excellent web directories and search engines has long since made that a moot point.
There should be no restrictions on the domain names at all. We only have the arbitrary segmentation into m.n form (where n is a limited set of (org, com etc.)) for technical reasons.
Preferably, there should be no such restrictions at all. Or the n part should be an infinite set. But I don't see why people are partisan about restricting the available namespace.
We already had a de-facto infinite set... it was the m part. We could either buy up common variations of, or ignore the n part. Now it is becoming obvious that ICANN views n as the new m for one of two reasons: money or stupidity. I'm still not sure it can't be both.
If I'm a major corporation, do I now have to buy up my .n tld? Cannon did. Will IBM have to buy .ibm? Will apple have to buy .apple?
I believe that would be fine if everyone was as tech savvy as you and I. Unfortunately I still know of people who go to a site in the following way:
1) Type www.gooogle.com (not google, google.com or the browser search)
2)Type facebook.com in google search bar at google.com
3) go to facebook.com
Now add to it facebook.mobi, fb.me, facebook.xxx (that is a nice idea thought :P) and how can we expect the average user to understand that all these point to the same DNS?
DNS? What the hell is a DNS?I just want to see last night's party pics on Facebook
> But I don't see why people are partisan about restricting the available namespace.
Duplication of data.
Go to any major site and you'll see it has been registered as the same site in almost all of the other tlds or the rest of the domains are run by domain squatters.
There is one theoretical advantage to having multiple TLDs: bad policies on the part of one registry don't affect all domains.
Of course, since this only gives you effectively two choices right now (Verisign = com/net and Afilias = org/info), it's not a particularly good reason.
> Politically, we should push for an actual democratic version of ICANN, and get a bunch of wise Unix neckbeard types to join and require all TLDs to get a supermajority vote of ICANN or a future counterpart to ICANN.
Karl Auerbach was the wise Unix neckbeard type who was on ICANN's board for a while. You can read about his efforts to create ICANN transparency: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Auerbach
It gets really confusing, though. For example, "The Jets is doing really well this season," "The Monkees was awesome if somewhat cheesy." One organization is one thing, logically speaking, and teams and bands are just as much organizations as are corporations.
Yes, I'm well aware of that. The point is that "The Jets" names an organization just as much as "ICANN" does. Americans do not apply the "groups are singular" rule evenly. British usage is actually more logical and consistent IMO.
Americans go by what makes sense linguistically rather than the blanket usage of 'have' and 'are'. British usage is more consistent (usage-wise) but half the time it sounds wrong because "Google have employees" doesn't make sense by other rules of English.
Sounds wrong to you. Just as the American usage sounds wrong to me. It's utterly subjective and completely meaningless. Might as well be arguing that people in Scotland talk wrong.
I'm not sure that many British people would use that phrasing either (a search for "Google have employees" returns 21 results including several duplicates involving a phrase which is correct in American English too. A search for "Google has employees" returns >15000 results)
Metonymic pluralisation in British English isn't "blanket" but done with the specific intent of implying the importance of collective input. Google the corporate entity has many employees but Google's engineering team have won the search engine wars. Microsoft is still a corporate behemoth but they are often accused of being ineffective at interdepartmental communication these days.
Even then, it's still not nearly consistent. For example, I suspect most would say that Doctors Without Borders is a very widely respected organization.
Not really: One organization is one thing, logically speaking.
Then why say "people love this" instead of "people loves this" (as in Spanish or French)? Saying "my people love this" while you say "my family loves this" is highly inconsistent.
None of it is idiotic. It is just different than before.
This creates greater competition in the registrar market which will keep domain prices down. It also dilutes the value of any particular domain name, which is a Good Thing (tm). I would be very happy to see the whole domaining business model disappear.
The proliferation of new domains is one of the issues I'm grappling with in my work on delineal.com.
It doesn't do this at all. It just shifts the crowded .com space into the root space, causes more confusion for everyone, and eliminates the possibility of any future expansion. Once a name is allocated, it's gone forever - you can't just demand it back or change the rules.
It doesn't move anything onto the root space, AFAIK. Do you have a link supporting that assertion? My understanding is that this just creates more TLDs under which domains can be registered.
There is no more confusion created. (Almost) all existing TLDs have domains in them that should not be there based on the original "purpose" of the TLDs.
The .com domain only ever made sense in the context of a single language and a single country. It's only crowded because it is one of the first ones that anyone could register in. If all the TLDs that exist today existed at the beginning, the landscape would be very different.
The notion that "once a name is allocated, it's gone forever" is no different than today. More TLDs provide more opportunities for similarly named companies or organizations to have some form of their name. It "prevents" large companies from dominating all forms of a name.
The gap is way shrinking. The mobile web originally meant browsers that barely supported HTML (does WAP ring a bell?), picture support was sketchy, and bandwidth was a major concern as connections were very slow. Now the majority of mobile use that use it more than once in a blue moon have the same rendering engines as most desktops on connections that rival (in my case surpass) what we have available through telcom ISPs. Screen sizes are really the only difference oftentimes. Indeed, even the plug-in landscape is similar as many smartphones over Flash plug-ins and so forth.
It's not about whether the technologies are supported. It's about the difference between what you get when you're identified as browsing on a mobile device versus anything else.
He's missing the point on .xxx. No person with any vague understanding of the internet thinks that they can block pornography entirely from a person interested in getting to it. It's not that hard to get around filters because porn is everywhere online, but it can still be useful to filter it, even though a determined individual can obviously bypass your block. Here's why:
1. First and foremost, filtration software isn't just about adversarial blocking. It can stop your grandma from getting tricked into going lemonparty.org. This is a big one.
2. Children looking for porn without permission are often under non-ideal constraints, like a time limit before someone else comes home. If you can get fairly good coverage, the kid will have that much less time, and many kids aren't going to invest in figuring out how to bypass it; they'd just as soon go to their room and fap there, or go to a friend's house where there is unmonitored access.
3. Filtration can be used to demonstrate a good-faith effort to keep your network and environment safe (at a library or net cafe, for instance). Same principles as number two here: if it's difficult enough and the user is under time constraints, they'll just wait until later.
There are other good reasons, but that should suffice. .xxx isn't about keeping a sophisticated, determined opponent out, and that's rarely successful no matter what measures you take. The internet is always going to have porn and there shouldn't be any enforcement forcing adult content onto xxx.
However, if xxx sees wide adoption, and the xxx sites move off of com (redirect), that's a big weight off the shoulders of blacklist and filtration vendors. To be able to block a whole huge namespace like that, where xxx is now hosting 30% or some other significant number of the new adult content that would have been on com if not for the xxx TLD, that's a big efficiency gain, even if you still have to filter com.
> However, if xxx sees wide adoption, and the xxx sites move off of com (redirect), that's a big weight off the shoulders of blacklist and filtration vendors.
So, they should move to .xxx to facilitate being blocked? Somehow I do not see it.
Yes. As I mentioned above, I think it will become the friendly thing for commercial, bona fide purveyors to do, just as it's friendly now to have a page that says "If you're under 18, click here to leave!" I think any page that currently has such an intro will move to xxx for the social goodwill, and that any page that doesn't won't.
But the "under 18" landing page doesn't actually block anyone, including those under 18 from continuing on with the site, so there's really no incentive not do it. If they move to a guaranteed to be filtered tld, they'd explicitly be asking for less traffic, which seems unlikely to me.
The author indicates that there's already a large queue of pre-orders.
I think xxx will achieve adoption by pornographers that want social acceptance. Basically, any pornographer that operates in the real world as an "adult media company", "glamor photography", etc. A xxx domain will demonstrate a willingness to allow your content to be easily filtered, which is important for porn companies because as much as adults love pornography, generally, they want some control over its introduction and availability to their children. xxx-exclusive hosted content will be seen as a good faith effort to keep parents in control.
I think that eventually any porn company that wants social tolerance will be on xxx because it will be better for their image. Topsites and other aggregators will probably stay on com as they don't really care and it doesn't effect their commissions and/or ad money.
The author indicates that there's already a large queue of pre-orders.
I would assume that's existing domain and copyright holders who want to reserve their domain/tradmark before someone else does. That doesn't imply there will be a lot of usage.
Yep, I was on the Wikipedia IRC the other day and there was a debate about whether the Wikimedia Foundation should register wikipedia.xxx, wikimedia.xxx, wikinews.xxx etc. to prevent people from squatting them and doing evil things with them.
I'm sure plenty of businesses, non-profits and governments are thinking the same thing in order to prevent whitehouse.com/whitehouse.gov mixups.
My guess is that the bulk of the pre-orders are organisations who want .xxx as well as .com, the same way you've kinda got to have .com/.net/.org. I don't see that there's any reason for them to drop one for the other.
It was an argument for filtration, not specifically for xxx. There will still be trick site in the com space; fortunately, lemonparty and goatse, at least at their canonical domains, are easily and quickly blocked.
I have a .tel. It's almost useless--you get to publish DNS records through the registrar's mickey-mouse PHP thing, and you can only really push TXT and NAPTR and MX records.
The only reason I bought it is because I am a member of an informal organization whose name is "Shadytel", so an @shady.tel address looked real spiffy at the time.
When there's an effective way to take the domains of squatters away from them, I'll be fine with just .com, .net, .org. Or screw the dots and just have "google". (I think that may be where it's going, considering Chrome tries to hide the http and www isn't needed in many cases.)
There are lots of stupid startups. Why would the ones behind these top-level domains be any different? ICANN's role isn't to pick the winners, its to manage the overall framework. Perhaps .sex will succeed where .xx fails. Or not. But you can't blame ICANN for failed .tld business models anymore than you can blame YC for funding failed startup business models. Its just part of the landscape. Now stop ranting about it and go do something productive. ;-)
I'm not blaming ICANN for failed business models. I'm blaming ICANN for turning what ought to be a matter of public interest (i.e. the governance of the Internet) and turning it into a situation where you can turn up with a half-baked idea and a big pile of cash and be able to start churning out new domain names.
No matter how many are added you will still have to assume that people who are after a site and actually type in a domain name will pick the .com, so no matter how many alternatives you own you won't get that traffic.
The exception of course is when you can build it into your website name like .io and .ly. Also browsers are moving away from domain names so being first on Google (just as hard if someone prominent is already on the .com you want) will be more important.
If I'm after a UK or Australian company I'm as likely to try .co.uk or .com.au first - but only because I've lived in both of those places so I'm familiar with the extensions.
"little Johnny can't visit
any website where the domain component of the URL ends in the string “.xxx”, in which case all little Johnny has to do is go to a web-based nslookup tool, type in the domain he wants to look at, and then replace the domain with that IP address."
Sounds like a good opportunity for nslookup tools to justify requiring a credit-card payment for certain types of lookup.
The joke was fine till .me, .co and .tv but .cat, .tel and .xxx? That sure is bound to be of use to nobody but the ones selling the domain.
The point where he questions if he is desktop or mobile, is actually very critical. The web is one. Especially with new ways of designing and developing a site including things like media queries make the entire point of a .mobi appear like a joke to me.
I actually know that! I own two .me domains and was about to buy .tv domain. Also the .tv domain was launched with high hopes of TV Networks buying enough and paying enough to support the country's economy. Of course that did not happen.
Looks like they were made with the purpose of being abused.
Searching for 'site:cat' in Google yields over 81M results, 11M more than 'site:me'. As a sample of real use, check out the site of the Catalan Government: http://www.gencat.cat/.
Honestly, I think the current format used by most m.website.tld makes the most sense. It immediately tells you you're going to a mobile site in the case that your screen cuts off the full URL.
Too, it's pretty consistent when a lot of sites use subdomains to indicate you're going to a different portion of the same domain, i.e. a blog (blog.site.tld) or an estore (shop.site.tld) or even a 404 page (404.site.tld). 'm' should tell you then that you're on the mobile page of the same site, especially when we're now seeing so many domains that a .com can be a completely different, totally nonaffiliated group from the .net
What's the valid use? It isn't as if all the porn sites are going to give up their current domains and move into .xxx right? So what is the point? You can't force them to move. Who would be the judge on what needs to move into .xxx even if they could force it? No, it was stupid.
All I can see is a major hook on which some damn do-gooder will attempt to hang yet another censorship scheme by trying to force all 'pornographic' websites to only have .xxx domains, and by 'pornographic' I mean 'everything the do-gooder disagrees with'.
We fought the CDA to the Supreme Court and won with the mix of justices we had then. I hope that if something similar happens again, that case is used as precedent and not toilet paper.
Just to extend the logic for which you are arguing against .xxx - do you then agree that security through obscurity is valid?
I agree that there is risk in regulating 'distasteful' domains to .xxx which then results in blanket blocking is a bad thing, but doesnt that just mean that the core issue we have here is not .xxx or anything other than the fundamental issues that we already have?
.xxx just makes it easier for regulators/high-horse 'do-gooders' to target whole swathes of content... that does not entirely negate the usefulness of the TLD though.
Why not have TLDs at all? Why not just have global content tags?
> do you then agree that security through obscurity is valid?
Not if obscurity is your only defense. I think obscurity of some forms, like using unusual port numbers, can be part of a defense-in-depth strategy to foil purely scripted attacks and save your resources a bit.
> .xxx just makes it easier for regulators/high-horse 'do-gooders' to target whole swathes of content...
And here we have it. It's a temptation I doubt they will be able to resist. Giving it to them that easily is just removing one more element of a defense-in-depth against censorship attempts.
> Why not have TLDs at all? Why not just have global content tags?
This is more of a technical issue, but my first reaction to doing everything via tagging is that spammers are going to spam: If you give them the opportunity to add tags to addresses you end up with the same scenario that lead Google to ignore keywords on websites.
Depends how you constrain the tags. I mean, I hear this "people lie" thing, but when was the last time a brick-and-mortar business website you saw lied about where they are? What benefit does one have in saying your business is actually located in New York City rather than Miami.
I don't see why the same wouldn't apply for porn. If I'm running a pay-for porno site offering premium woman-on-horse action, I'm not interested in, I dunno, gay guys turning up. The people you want turning up are the target audience because those guys are going to pay you money. If the cost for lying in the tag is sufficient (i.e. Google won't rank you as high), then you've got a motivation for telling the truth.
> I mean, I hear this "people lie" thing, but when was the last time a brick-and-mortar business website you saw lied about where they are? What benefit does one have in saying your business is actually located in New York City rather than Miami.
All I know is, I remember the web before Google and I remember how much spam every single search pulled in on the engines that were susceptible to keyword spam. I think that's a pretty solid piece of empirical evidence that if you give people the ability to do it again they will. It doesn't matter why.
> The people you want turning up are the target audience because those guys are going to pay you money.
Spammers simply don't seem to think like this.
> If the cost for lying in the tag is sufficient (i.e. Google won't rank you as high), then you've got a motivation for telling the truth.
This might work. I know, however, it would be yet another arms race.
I also think TLD's have jumped the shark. Let's abolish .com/.org/etc and force everybody to live in a more unified domain name space, so we're left with (at best), addresses like: www.google, graph.facebook, api.cnn, etc. The suffixes have been abused so much they are no longer reliable (see bit.ly that wildly popular Libyan website -- wait, what?), and even if there are people camping on foo.com's, we also have the problem where say foo.com and foo.net and foo.ly are all unrelated to one another and run by different people. Yes, legacy code, I understand, pain, etc. More of an idealistic rant. The increasing inelegance and hypocrisy and over-complexity of TLD's are getting to me just like the OA's author.
This makes it impossible to trust certain namespaces. If I go to a .gov or .gov.uk, for example, I know it's the official site. Where the hierarchical system is used (eg. .ac.uk and presumably .edu) it is still very useful.
Getting rid of the suffixes eliminates this and brings us down to the free-for-all level of the .com for all sites.
The same effect [as abolishing all TLDs] could be achieved in a backward compatible way by allowing arbitrary TLDs i.e., google, facebook, cnn would be TLDs in www.google, graph.facebook, api.cnn addresses.
Doesn't this reduce our available address space? What about all the sites that currently have three different entities at their .com, .net and .org addresses? What happens to ubuntu.com and ubuntu.org, two different groups? Where we are now, getting rid of TLDs would cause immense unnecessary conflict.
- .aero: if IATA airport codes were all registered domains here, it might be useful, but they aren't, so it isn't.
- .asia: asia is definitely a country </sarcasm>
- .biz: sufficiently stupid that SpamAssassin has a rule for it
- .cat: meow? seriously, I've only seen this used for vanity joke domains
- .coop: there isn't a .llc, why is this any different?
- .info: happy fun SEO land
- .jobs: pity they won't take my registration for Blow, Inc.
- .mobi: as noted
- .museum: 1138 registered domains in 10 years is a sign of true irrelevance
- .name: personal names are hardly unique identifiers
- .pro: stupid hierarchy makes this one even more useless than you'd think
- .tel: as noted
- .travel: because .aero just wasn't enough
- .xxx: as noted
Perhaps I'm just not seeing the possibilities, but I suspect that there's no future for any of the gTLDs beyond com/net/org, and possibly a few of the up-and-coming IDN gTLDs. The future of domain names is really in better unique names, not a more complex hierarchy.