Many of the LLCs are shell companies. In particular, basically every instance of "Adjective Noun, LLC" (e.g, "Foggy Sky, LLC", "Little Station, LLC", "Baxter Hill, LLC"...) is a shell owned by donuts.co, and "Charleston Road Registry" is a shell owned by Google!
Old news, see story on Donuts.inc [1] for example. Lots of people pooled money to create a gTLD registry, it is nominally free money. Cost of hosting 24 servers (one for each time zone) which can handle millions of DNS lookups per second is pretty small (like $100K/year all up, less if you use part time/contract systems folks) You can get 10G links with 100M commit pretty cheaply and if you get more traffic its because you've got more domains so that cost scales with profit. Vs $10/year so once you get 10,000 domains you're break even. Pretty easy math.
It's expensive to squat though, isn't it? I read somewhere that just the application fee is 150,000 USD. Wonder if they will really recover that kind of spend.
Interesting to see a few TLD's in Chinese, Japanese, even Arabic and Hindi.
Winners of the auctions compensate the losers, so it may be possible to game the bidding and lose several auctions, then buy some domains for almost nothing out of pocket. But I'm not sure if payouts from lost auctions can be used to reduce the entry fees... it's probably still a pretty controlled game.
$150k isn't really that expensive. I know it is simple math but I think it would be pretty easy to find 1,500 companies from around the world that would pay $100/year for a domain.
Change that 1,500 one order of magnitude and there's a lot of profit to be made. 15k registrations wouldn't be that hard.
"I know it is simple math but I think it would be pretty easy to find 1,500 companies"
Not really true (I'm in this business for a long long time). First you'd have to market to a much larger pool of companies to end up with 1500 buyers (I'll take your math to be correct for the purpose of my comment by the way..) To market to those companies will cost big dollars. How are you going to do it? Direct mail? Web ads? Pay per click?
In order to sell TLD's you have to be in the path of existing registrars that control the market. One of those of course is godaddy for example. Not easy to get shelf space there.
You got me thinking.. what about Kickstarter? For example, let's say we wanted .hacker. Someone with some rep in our community could start a Kickstarter to do this, no?
Ah, that sucks. I thought I read elsewhere on this thread about losers being "compensated."
That said, if it was just $10-20, I'd be up for contributing to such a Kickstarter even with the proviso it might not work out. Getting 15,000+ people to feel the same might well be difficult though..
I saw the business plan for one of these companies, registered in Gibralter. Not sure if it got the ones it wanted. They were looking for investors on hugely optimistic takeup figures.
That Asociación puntoGAL are from Spain. It will be for sites with content in galician, a lenguage with common roots with portuguese. It is usually funded with public funds and at the end it is used for the politic photo/propaganda.
Here in Spain we have .cat for catalonian too. There were some blogs on .cat that moved to .com because, you know, they wanted to be found and read.
"LLC" is still associated with small, unreliable companies... For what it's worth, Chrysler and GM are LLCs, as are many other large companies. It's just easier to set up and manage.
Their business plan is to rake it in on all the high-value domains before the squatters get to it. Won't matter how stupid your TLD is, you know "coke.stupidtld" and "ford.stupidtld" and a thousand others are a guaranteed sell.
>Over 1,300 new names or "strings" could become available in the next few years.
I'm the only one that doesn't like this? Having more domains it's nice, but having so many just feels overwhelming. I'm also sure that some/many of those will be completely ignored by everyone, and thus making me wonder why introduce them in the first place.
The way they've chosen which TLDs to issue is kind of lame. The entire concept of some company name as a TLD is ridiculous. It's just namespace pollution. Using just the TLD without any subdomain is going to invoke bugs in old software or be confused with a search term in the address bar, and using 'www.chase' instead of 'chase.com' is pointless and confusing.
What they should have done instead is created a bunch of TLDs for various different industries. Having 'chase.bank' and 'ford.cars' would have made a lot more sense.
I would love to take the sting out of someone getting the one or two "primary" domains for an IP, even something generic a concept as "grow.com" or something along those lines, and splitting it up so that just about anybody can get a specific flavor in. "No, we're not grow.com, but we're also not grow.xxx or grow.medical, we're grow.coffee!"
I like the gTLD opening up but the pricing bothers me for 2 reasons;
It's closed off access for ordinary people and businesses at $180k+ setup pricing & $30k+ per year maintenance. Common access for anyone is a brilliant feature of the internet where anyone can hang out their shingle on equal terms. Making parts of domain ownership inaccessible goes against the spirit of the internet in my view.
These prices seem to have no reflection to cost, so really are a money grab, and holding anyone with a brand to hostage. Companies will feel pressured to grab brand names while they see how their usage plays out over coming years. It feels a bit extortionate.
Common people can't afford the required infrastructure to host a gTLD, getting requests from all over the world. Especially if it gets popular, it'll be pretty expensive to get into.
True, but that's a reason not to be so free with them in the first place. I see a lot of wannabe-monopolists in this list, eg getting a .actor domain is easily going to be a must-have for anyone who works in film/TV/theater so issuing a TLD for that is basically granting a license to tax that entire profession.
I originally thought this was a good idea when I thought these new TLDs were going to be trickled out in an orderly fashion. As it is, it looks very much like a land grab that only rich participants can take part in. I predict the resulting balkanization of the namespace is going to lead to a collapse of the web within a decade, in the same way that Archie and Veronica eventually fell victim to their own complexity and were replaced by something more accessible.
getting a .actor domain is easily going to be a must-have for anyone who works in film/TV/theater
I'm sure the applicants think the same, but I'm completely unconvinced of that. People have trouble using .info and such already. My guess is that most such TLDs will be dead on arrival; most people don't even type domains nowadays, they search and use links.
Having a good Facebook path is probably more important for most people than any domain will ever be.
Many of these gTLDs sound exotic today, but I bet 10 years from now they will be nothing special. I for one welcome it, if only to dethrone the dot com. It doesn't make sense for us all to try and squeeze into the same limited gTLD space. Perhaps this will be the most efficient way of killing off domain squatters, by flooding the market with viable domains.
It's just a matter of time before half of all links submitted to HN end with ".js".
Two-letter TLDs are reserved for ccTLDs - they're assigned based on the ISO country code (ISO 3166-1) of the country. As there is currently no country with the country code "JS", the TLD cannot be assigned.
Sounds like it's time to found a new nation-state. National exports will include whatever I happen to sell on Ebay that year, and millions of dollars worth of domain names :-)
So far a whole buttload of TLDs have failed to dethrone .com. I suspect adding a huge collection of new TLDs might actually make .com _more_ valuable. After all, if you hear about some company or product, are you going to guess foobarbiz.randomstring? Heck, most browsers will guess foobarbiz.com for you.
No wonder Google wants in: (a) they can profit off their worldwide infrastructure and (b) everyone will have to use Google to figure out which .foo or .bar they need! /cue maniacal laugh
Nope, we're with you on this one. It's a flat-out money grab. From an institution that we expect to keep the internet running. Great idea, right?
You know, instead, they could fix the damn email and content spamming rampantly going on the internet. But no, those things don't give ICANN yearly profits. I guess they fail to realize that spam-detection is one of the main things behind Gmail's phenomenal success since its inception.
First they could start by revoking domain ownership if spam comes from there. If it keeps persisting and from multiple different IP addresses from the same block, start taking IP blocks away until it stops.
Spam email doesn't just appear out of the ether. It comes from an email, a domain, and finally IP addresses. Now I know the technical details are lacking, and they obviously need to account for offenders that fix their stuff, but I'm just trying to illustrate that it is do-able.
The above is for email spam. Content spam is a little bit different, and would step on quite a few toes. I view content spam as websites that mirror Wikipedia/SO/GoogleGroups for example. Or sites that simply fill their pages with garbage, referral links, URL's to game search-engine rankings, etc. Again, start by revoking the worst offende's domain ownership. Eventually, you'll be able to get rid of domain-squatters as well because it invariably means that they have to put meaningful content on their site and not useless junk. So it's a use it properly, or lose it sort of situation.
The above is just not very easy, and it'll cost ICANN registration fees with seemingly no ROI. But that's a problem with ICANN. Registration fees started off as a way to prevent spamming and everyone snatching up all domains, but it's quickly turned in to a revenue cow for ICANN. They're trying to have their cake and eat it at the same time. Either they're a non-profit government/UN organization and function for the public good. Or they're a for-profit entity and they need to have their MONOPOLY status/powers revoked.
First they could start by revoking domain ownership if spam comes from there.
How does email spam come from a domain? You can just set whatever domain you want in the headers. For a long time, I had spammers using my personal domain in their From: headers, sent from their servers (I knew because I received automated replies on my catch-all box). What exactly would be accomplished by taking away my domain?
As for IP blocks, that's like throwing napalm to kill a few weeds. You'd affect hundreds or thousands of users of an ISP just to kill a spammer, who will just move to the next connection.
I view content spam as websites that mirror Wikipedia/SO/GoogleGroups for example. Or sites that simply fill their pages with garbage, referral links, URL's to game search-engine rankings, etc. Again, start by revoking the worst offende's domain ownership. Eventually, you'll be able to get rid of domain-squatters as well because it invariably means that they have to put meaningful content on their site and not useless junk.
So instead of issuing TLDs, they could start performing censorship. I'm seriously glad they don't share your views.
Having a website sitting somewhere is not spam. It's not being pushed on anyone; if search engines are indexing content that their users don't want to see, that's their problem. It shouldn't require to pass some bureaucrat's consideration to what is "proper content" to be accessible. Many of us around the world already find the US' TV censorship quite ridiculous, we don't need any more of that.
"How does email spam come from a domain? You can just set whatever domain you want in the headers. For a long time, I had spammers using my personal domain in their From: headers, sent from their servers (I knew because I received automated replies on my catch-all box). What exactly would be accomplished by taking away my domain?"
Solutions to prevent/combat email header spoofing have been gaining quite a bit of traction and are quite prevalant. And yes, if that means taking the domain away from people that don't implement said solutions, then poof you've lost the domain. It would accomplish getting rid of domain owners that enable spammers.
"As for IP blocks, that's like throwing napalm to kill a few weeds. You'd affect hundreds or thousands of users of an ISP just to kill a spammer, who will just move to the next connection."
If you lease out IPs that have been assigned to you to a spammer, then you better get him off your network. Otherwise you'll lose your entire block. It's not rocket science, nor is it overkill. You mention that spammers will move on to the next connection if they get kicked off. Yeah, well that's not really ICANN's problem is it, that's up to the IP block lessee's to solve if they want to start sub-leasing out to unknown/untrusted individuals in the public.
"So instead of issuing TLDs, they could start performing censorship. I'm seriously glad they don't share your views."
There is a big difference between censorship and removing junk from your network. Perhaps it is something we should worry about, but we should have thought of censorship BEFORE we allowed the US to maintain control of ICANN, don't you think?
"Having a website sitting somewhere is not spam"
Probably not the common definition, but if it pollutes the domain/tld namespace with useless/junk domains then yes you can call it spam.
"It's not being pushed on anyone; if search engines are indexing content that their users don't want to see, that's their problem"
I agree with you. However, my point was more along the lines of "use it for something useful, or lose it" in order to both prevent useless domain squatting AND content spam.
"Many of us around the world already find the US' TV censorship quite ridiculous, we don't need any more of that."
Nope, we don't, I agree with you. Hence why I suggested we either treat ICANN like a for-profit private enterprise with NO government monopoly or privilege of licensing, OR we damn well make sure it behaves like non-profit acting for the public good. I.e. no lucrative money grabs such as the one in this article. Assuming that's even possible with an entity controlled by the US government.
Look. These are just some ideas we can implement to combat spam and other malicious behavior on the internet. But sticking our heads in the sand by ignoring some of these solutions just because they aren't perfect is definitely not going to fix them. At the very least they're better than what we have now.
Solutions to prevent/combat email header spoofing have been gaining quite a bit of traction and are quite prevalant. And yes, if that means taking the domain away from people that don't implement said solutions, then poof you've lost the domain. It would accomplish getting rid of domain owners that enable spammers.
So if I don't even use my domain for email, I'm liable to lose it because I don't have the knowledge or even awareness to set up the proper SPF records or whatever solution du jour? That's a terrible tax on people who just want to have their own small website.
And what for? If the receivers can check for the existence and SPF records of the domain, they can also just block email from domains without any valid SPF records. There's no reason to create such draconian policies.
There is a big difference between censorship and removing junk from your network. Perhaps it is something we should worry about, but we should have thought of censorship BEFORE we allowed the US to maintain control of ICANN, don't you think?
Not really, because they don't usually censor. It should be something we should worry about if we gave you the control of ICANN.
Probably not the common definition, but if it pollutes the domain/tld namespace with useless/junk domains then yes you can call it spam.
No, because "useless" is subjective.
Hence why I suggested we either treat ICANN like a for-profit private enterprise with NO government monopoly or privilege of licensing, OR we damn well make sure it behaves like non-profit acting for the public good. I.e. no lucrative money grabs such as the one in this article.
I don't see why is this TLD scheme against the public good in any way. Transferring money from big companies to an organization which provides such a core service seems great to me, and all the downsides I've been hearing about are mostly people's aesthetically sensibilities being hurt.
At the very least they're better than what we have now.
So if I don't even use my domain for email, I'm liable to lose it because I don't have the knowledge or even awareness to set up the proper SPF records or whatever solution du jour? That's a terrible tax on people who just want to have their own small website.
I never said that. Are you even trying to have a discussion, or just disagreeing for its own sake?
Not really, because they don't usually censor. It should be something we should worry about if we gave you the control of ICANN.
Didn't you just complain about US government censorship in your previous post? Either way, you're blatantly clumping together censorship with other things, so it's pointless to discuss this point with you.
No, because "useless" is subjective.
Doesn't matter if the majority of people agree with the subjective opinion. And currently we have the subjective opinion of the few managers of the ICANN calling all the shots.
I don't see why is this TLD scheme against the public good in any way. Transferring money from big companies to an organization which provides such a core service seems great to me, and all the downsides I've been hearing about are mostly people's aesthetically sensibilities being hurt.
Wow, you didn't actually read anything I wrote about this point, did you? Guess that wouldn't fit your narrative or suit your argument.
Adding censorship is never better.
That's your opinion, really. Again, loaded with a biased and opinionated definition of "censorship", rendering discussion of this point with you pretty useless.
Navigation has evolved from the address bar to the search bar. DNS is a core component for transport of most content on the Internet, but for consumers, it's no longer the prima facie form of navigation.
This is non-additive, imho. And a poor use of ICANN resources.
mental calories, not dollars. ICANN is spending all their resources on it and not focusing elsewhere in their operations. Yes, it's making money. But budgets were already high. Good people (mehmet, etc.) have left.
So is the schema for these branded tlds supposed to change from our current name.tld/page/subpage.html to page.name/subpage.html? That strikes me as a huge waste of time setting up subdomains for what are effectively just pages.
As an example of how it can be handled, Monash has https://my.monash.edu.au/ which is already known by the name my.monash; I expect that they will shift it to https://my.monash/ in the fairly near future.
What it ends up boiling down to for Monash University is that you can drop the .edu, .edu.au or .edu.my part. Oh, and you get to cough up a decent amount of dough for the endeavour (for the TLD application, for TLD maintenance and for software systems and such).
While I think this whole thing is a useless namespace land grab, I was pleasantly surprised to hear that there is one slightly useful new TLD: http://www.atgron.wed
They're selling .wed domains cheap for the first couple of registered years, but then charging tens of thousands of dollars per year after 2 years. This is a smart way to create a short-term use namespace.
Are you required to sell out domains under a gTLD? It'd be interesting to create some sort of must-be-a-sub-entity TLDs like ".bank" which requires it members to be banks (similar to .edu and .gov). But I can't imagine any entity but ICANN itself managing that in a 'fair' manor.
The registration limitations can be arbitrary. For example, I was excited to see that my city had signed up for a domain, but in the application they say the domain will be closed from public use and that they will delegate names only to official departments of the city.
But I guess if you are planning to make a commercial operation around a gTLD, its best to let anyone register.
It's like a job application filter. Start working for a .int company, only pay 10% income tax (but still get all benefits everyone else gets, sometimes more).
Mostly I'm curious how Google is going to handle this. Specifically will they automatically favor, over time, results for eg .paris, if that tld acquires enough quality rankings for paris related keywords. And how will Google decide what's a local vs global tld (again, eg .paris).
I heard icann charges-- something like $6.50 a domain. Icann seems to have more money than they can spend. Maybe
they should lower the price they demand for each domain?
I understand they need to regulate this industry, but they
appear to be making a bit to much money? I never blamed
Godaddy for gouging customers. I knew icann demanded their
cut before any profit to godaddy. (I'm no fan of Godaddy, but forced to use them because they seem cheaper--if you
know how to cancel their money making tatics, like constantly changing renewals to 2 years at full price. And
his stupid commercials. If you do get his .99 cent domains,
I think you are allowed two. If you use a different ip
address sometimes you can get more.)
Whenever I see new top-level domains I can't help but think that the internet would probably be nicer without any top-level domains at all. You can still always buy a sub-domain from someone.
Failing that, does anyone know if any of these top-level domains are to be sold cheaper? ".cheap" is actually not any cheaper than normal but a ".end" or something which cost only $2 a year might be pretty cool. Of course it'd be even easier to swat but you shouldn't have any problems if you use a long domain name.
Oh so squatters are bad, but the people that enable them aren't?
What they have now is a devious double-standard system. It starts off with "first-come, first-serve" and then when money is involved and some large/well-established entity cries foul, they then change the rules to be "more-money, first-serve".
Now don't get me wrong, I think domain squatting is a horrible, horrible practice. But we really need to solve the root of the problem, and that is a greedy ICANN that enables domain-registrars, and itself, to double-dip the cake for profit!
NPR's Planet Money podcast recently had an episode on this titled "The Wild West Of The Internet". They take a pretty neutral view, but I found the interviews with people who own some of these TLDs now interesting.
At this point, doesn't it make more sense to have fully arbitrary strings as domain names, and use something like the last 2 characters to map to the appropriate top level entity ?
The explosion of top-level domains doesn't seem to serve any real practical purpose except moving money around, and moving to a better system altogether would be the logical step.
I'd like to see a lot more two character or short non-specific domain names. Personally, I need ".op" but just for general use I feel everyone would benefit from "theirna.me" style domains. In place of "theirname.food" or similar.
Is this just a stylistic choice on my part? Or possibly it would be too difficult to manage on the part of the registrars.
Two character ones are for countries, though. What would you do if a private entity owns ".op" and a hypothetical country of Opzerkistan declares independence?
As for domain hacks, I think many laypeople just enter "something.com" without thinking too much. Remember whitehouse.com[1], in the 90's?
I suppose the same thing that would happen if there were two independent countries that start with "Op"... right now there is no ".op" domain and that makes me sad.
True, but they would simply assign them different two letter TLDs. For example, compare Montenegro (.me), Macao (.mo), Mongolia (.mn), Malta (.mt), Madagascar (.mg), Mauritania (.mr), etc.
I can understand how it would be frustrating, though. For a long time, the TLD for my last name (two letter last name) wouldn't allow second level registration.
The list feels to me at the first look very similar to the patent system -- everybody is just pitching "their" claims. First come, first money, first served. The others will stay with the "pack": <longname>.com or <evenlongername>.de.
If anything this might discourage picking up a lot of domain names. Instead of the somewhat standard practise of buying your name under say 5 top level domains with all these inclusions most companies will probably decide it isn't worth it to buy their name on every available top level.
I feel this is kind of pointless though. As of now, most people will first do a search on parts of the domain to go to the right site; having more TLD around won't reduce this behavior.
It's been a while since I've read anything about this. Are new applications still being accepted, or are these simply approvals of applications that were submitted some time ago, through a process that is now closed?
What part of speech is "онлайн" then? I'll give you that "сайт" is a technical loan-word, though I still can't come up with a situation where something.сайт would make sense. Of course it's a goddamn site, it's the Internet after all.
Saw it used as adjective and noun, with multiple meanings, akin to usage in english language. And I don't see much sense in '.сайт' too, but I don't see much of it in most new gTLDs.
Something like this will happen and then something will happen to finally eliminate top level domains in the first place or at least remove them from display.
My guess would be that they want to be able to share cookies across their sub-domains.
That file is saying that we should effectively treat:
education.vic.gov.au and courts.vic.gov.au as being independent entities that happen to both use the "vic.gov.au" domain, but otherwise have nothing in common (as far as same-origin policies go)
But
fairtrading.nsw.gov.au and housing.nsw.gov.au as being separate sub-domains operated by the same entity (in this case the NSW gov't)
It's certainly easier for those who operate site on that domain if they can implement single sign on, and cross-(sub)-domain resource loading without needing to jump through hoops like CORS.
However, since nsw.gov.au is also farmed out to every local council in the state as well as every government department, it's putting the security of your cookies into the hands a lot of organisations over which you have very limited control.
Public Interest Registry 4 ['\xe6\x9c\xba\xe6\x9e\x84 (xn--nqv7f) \xe2\x80\x93 Chinese for "agencies/institutions"', '\xe0\xa4\xb8\xe0\xa4\x82\xe0\xa4\x97\xe0\xa4\xa0\xe0\xa4\xa8 (xn--i1b6b1a6a2e) \xe2\x80\x93 Hindi for "organization/sangathana"', '\xe7\xbb\x84\xe7\xbb\x87\xe6\x9c\xba\xe6\x9e\x84 (xn--nqv7fs00ema) \xe2\x80\x93 Chinese for "organization"', '\xd0\xbe\xd1\x80\xd0\xb3 (xn--c1avg) \xe2\x80\x93 Russian for "organization/org"']
GMO Registry, Inc. 3 ['YOKOHAMA', 'TOKYO', 'NAGOYA']
CORE Association 3 ['\xd8\xa8\xd8\xa7\xd8\xb2\xd8\xa7\xd8\xb1 (xn--mgbab2bd) \xe2\x80\x93 Arabic for "bazaar/bazar"', '\xd0\xbe\xd0\xbd\xd0\xbb\xd0\xb0\xd0\xb9\xd0\xbd (xn--80asehdb) \xe2\x80\x93 Russian for "online"', '\xd1\x81\xd0\xb0\xd0\xb9\xd1\x82 (xn--80aswg) \xe2\x80\x93 Russian for "site"']
Top Level Design, LLC 2 ['INK', 'WIKI']
BusinessRalliart Inc. 2 ['RYUKYU', 'OKINAWA']
Punto 2012 Sociedad Anonima Promotora de Inversion de Capital Variable 2 ['REST', 'BAR']
NetCologne Gesellschaft für Telekommunikation mbH 2 ['COLOGNE', 'KOELN']
XYZ.COM, LLC 2 ['COLLEGE', 'XYZ']
China Organizational Name Administration Center 2 ['\xe5\x85\xac\xe7\x9b\x8a (xn--55qw42g) \xe2\x80\x93 Chinese for "charity"', '\xe6\x94\xbf\xe5\x8a\xa1 (xn--zfr164b) \xe2\x80\x93 Chinese for "government"']
I-REGISTRY Ltd. Niederlassung Deutschland 2 ['RICH', 'ONL']
TLD Registry Limited 2 ['\xe4\xb8\xad\xe6\x96\x87\xe7\xbd\x91 (xn--fiq228c5hs) \xe2\x80\x93 Chinese for "Chinese network"', '\xe5\x9c\xa8\xe7\xba\xbf (xn--3ds443g) \xe2\x80\x93 Chinese for "online"']
Koko Station, LLC 2 ['VISION', 'VILLAS']
Monolith Registry LLC 2 ['VOTE', 'VOTO']
Computer Network Information Center of Chinese Academy of Sciences (China Internet Information Center) 2 ['\xe7\xbd\x91\xe7\xbb\x9c (xn--io0a7i) \xe2\x80\x93 Chinese for "network"', '\xe5\x85\xac\xe5\x8f\xb8 (xn--55qx5d) \xe2\x80\x93 Chinese for "company"']
COLLEGE >> XYZ.COM, LLC
UNIVERSITY >> Little Station, LLC
VODKA >> Top Level Domain Holdings Limited (those guys have quite a few such as "COOKING" and "FISHING")
It used to be that you had to squat the web one domain name at the time, now you can just squat a whole TLD!