Notice how 70 were applied for by "Top Level Domain Holdings Limited". Go to their website, and click management. http://www.tldh.org/management/
The exe's bio says, "Prior to joining TLDH, Peter Dengate Thrush was Chairman of the Board of Directors of ICANN, and in that role led the process that resulted in the historic decision to launch the new gTLD program in June 2011."
1) Get on ICANN board of directors
2) Convince ICANN to create gTLDs
3) Quit ICANN and create a company to squat and resell gTLDs
This whole process is a scam designed to extort more money from trademark holders and well-known names through ever-growing defensive registrations.
In the real world this would be construed as protection money.
No further semantic information is conveyed by another domain registration; there is no improvement whatsoever in resource discoverability.
The only winners are the name squatters, with Google and Amazon and every other applicant greedily lining up to be the slum landlords of their own worthless little namespace.
ICANN should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves for presiding over this farce.
How do they extort money, if you can stop other from registering a TLD with your trademark by just filling a Legal Right Objection[1], which if valid costs you essentially nothing ($2000)?
So after all these years we continue to support the middle-man idea (Google) instead of trying to figure out a way to move away from that.
If you want people to move away from middle-man, domains are certainly not the solutions, and the new TLDs will not change that for better nor for worse.
We had domains before Google. People switched because they suck as an human interface.
It's not OK for people to not know how to use the internet.
It's not only about that. I know perfectly well how it works, but I still use Google all the time for finding company websites, because it'd be incredibly stupid to spend 10m guessing the domain instead of making a 300ms request to a search engine.
Domains are great for decoupling URLs, configuration files, etc. from IP changes. They're certainly not a good mechanism for website discovery.
I'm not saying that domain names solve the problem of people typing "facebook" on google [1] or that typing "XYZ company" on google is a problem to be solved by XYZcompany.com. In other words, domains and search engines have distinct use cases and the problem is that people don't know how to use either.
[1] It is a problem because it allows people not to understand the basics of how the internet works. I don't expect people to understand protocols and stuff like that. People don't want to understand technology, they only want to benefit from it. I don't know 80% of the features my TV provides but I don't care - I can still watch TV. People feel the same about the Internet - they know they don't understand it but they don't care because they can still log in to facebook and watch videos on youtube. But using a middle man (call it Google, Yahoo, or even Facebook) to do these things undermines the nature of the internet as we know it and allowing this trend to continue will most likely lead to problems that we will have to resolve. (Not exactly similar, but when MS decided that browsers don't matter it was our job to tell people to stop using IE6 and switch to Firefox. I wouldn't want to be the guy that tells people don't use Google for this, use ____ instead).
This is why Chrome should be viewed with skepticism. It's great for people who know how to use the internet, but what about those who don't? Type something ridiculous in the Address Bar (Google is trying to rename it the "everything bar" or whatever silly name they've come up with). Put a dot where it does do not belong. Mistype or mispell something. Runwordstogetherinalongstring. What happens? You get a Google controlled result. This is not insignificant. (Sorry for the double negative.)
As a knowledgeable programmer, your internet experience with DNS and browsers is very different from others, because you know what you're doing. Many people do not.
Should we teach them? Or should we try to control them by controlling "default behavior"?
Many people reading HN are probably too young to remember the browser wars and the battle over the "default browser" setting. This is why IE triumphed over Mozilla. And as any web developer knows, the web has suffered for it. Users who knew what they were doing could change the default settings. But that did not make the difference. Chrome is highly configurable. But that will not make the difference. Default settings are what matter the most.
The success of ICANN relies on a default setting. It's called "root.hints" or something similar. If a person running a DNS server (that could be anyone, including the end user) changes this setting, they can bypass ICANN and these landgrab gtlds.
In the distant past, "alternate roots", an early reaction ICANN's abuse of power, failed because they were trying to do what ICANN is now doing: make money by selling registrations in additional, redundant gtlds. Perhaps the "alternate roots" of the future will be noncommercial ones that subtract gtld's, not add them. For example, maybe we as smart users will choose to use a "pre-landgrab" root that does not have all these silly redundant gltd's that try to capture whatever unorthodox string a novice user might type in a browser.
Domain names are important, but always remember that those who seek to control the browser can easily subvert DNS. Given this decision from ICANN to sell out (which others, not just Google and Amazon, are following: e.g., the founder of BlackHat is running the newgtld program for ICANN; the author of BIND is partnering with a domainer to run a registry), we're going to see some aggressive moves from commercial authors of browsers to control type-in navigation. Of that you can be sure.
Again, the question is whether we want to teach users how things work, or whether we want to let them remain ignorant so we can control them. In the big picture, ignorance does not help the web. Though it may benefit certain vendors.
Or should we try to control them by controlling "default behavior"?
Who's "we"? I'm not a browser programmer and I have no ability to do that. Frankly, I dislike this common idea that we all part of this common team just because we happen to know something more about computers than the average schmoe. I certainly don't have the power to control any important defaults and therefore people, do you?
And while I can understand the goal, frankly I'm rather skeptical of our ability to teach most people, or of their willingness to be taught, which comes to much about the same. And I'm not sure if they're wrong in not wanting to waste valuable hours of life learning about a bunch of technical stuff that they don't really have much control over.
If a person running a DNS server (that could be anyone, including the end user) changes this setting, they can bypass ICANN and these landgrab gtlds.
But why should we do that? Why do you care? So some companies get shorter domains, so what? We don't even know if those generic TLDs will be accepted. Much ado about nothing, really.
You mean, a demand for $2,000 of protection money for a piece of virtual real estate you didn't want and has no value, otherwise the other guy gets your spot? If there was another guy at all.
And if you lose because the other guy had better lawyers, costs you $10,000? Plus the lawyers.
Scammy McScam of Scamsville called, he wants his cut.
You could argue ICANN extorts money here by putting pressure on companies to apply for gtld's in order to protect their marks. Many companies do not want to apply. For example, the world's most valuable trademark is missing from this applicant pool: Coke. There's no reason ICANN has to create gtld's that match trademarks by putting them in the ICANN root zone. It is domainers that want new gtld's the most. (For the simple reason why, see below.) How hard is it to do 2000 trademark searches? Essentially ICANN is profiting (they get a small fee for every domain name registration that is later sold) by selling the rights to use someone else's trademark.
Then there is the extortion that is carried out by the registries and registrars and domainers. Companies are forced to purchase and renew registrations for direct matches and typos of their trademarks in many different gtlds. More tld's equals more money. Also companies register and renew names in the form [companyname]sucks.tld. That is why you see some applications for a .sucks gtld. These defensive registrations are the bread and butter of the domain name "business". Again, they have no right to sell use of these trademarks. But they do. And they make a handsome profit from the "protection money" that must be spent by companies as a result.
That said, you do have a point: If you are a large company, $2000 and the fees to register domain names in lots of tld's, or to file UDRP's, are essentially nothing. It's easier for companies to just pay the fees rather than try to figure out how DNS actually works and how ICANN and their followers manage to pull off this scam.
You could argue ICANN extorts money here by putting pressure on companies to apply for gtld's in order to protect their marks.
You could, except I've shown that you don't have to register the mark to protect it.
Companies are forced to purchase and renew registrations for direct matches and typos of their trademarks in many different gtlds.
No, they aren't, Amazon doesn't own amazon.net and nobody gives a fuck, because people don't write domains, they write "amazon" and click on the first result of the search engine.
Companies buy other domains for irrational fears based on outdated assumptions from when dinosaurs roamed the Earth and search engines sucked.
Nonetheless, those outdated assumptions linger and the irrational fears are widespread and easy to exploit. And that is exactly what is happening, every time a new gtld is opened.
You want to use Amazon as the example? It's a terrible example, because Amazon are savvy. And yet, it turns out, even they do own amazon.biz and amazon.info. The worthlessness of those namespaces is evident: it didn't even occur to you to check them!
Amazon didn't register those for the SEO; it's a pure defensive registration.
Feel free to write to Jeff, tell him to let those registrations lapse 'cos he doesn't need 'em.
There's money to be made by owning a domain like amazon.net. You would be amazed at how many people type searches and erroneous strings (e.g., .net when they mean .com) into the Address Bar.
Just because we can't imagine anyone doing this does not mean they don't. They do. That's why numerous domainers are millionaires, some of them a hundred times over, and that's why they are salivating at the thought of running a registry.
Zappo's had shoes.com. Now it belongs to Amazon. Amazon knows the power of domain names. Users do type in the Address Bar. We might not know who these users are, but they exist. They have made a number of domainers very wealthy. And Amazon has paid millions to acquire domain names, no matter how ridiculous we may think domain names are, e.g., they paid a premium to acquire a.co
Eh, I agree that this adds zero value for users (unless ICANN does something useful with the resulting cash) but I wouldn't call it extortion. I don't think typeo domains are that important (as evidenced by the fact that I haven't bought any of the typo domains close to prgmr.com)
The way I see it, ICANN is selling google and amazon something that is worth about as much as a custom licence plate. (Until I sold it, the nameplate on my motorcycle read 'prgmr' - but I don't think I paid more than $40 a year for that.)
I mean, if amazon and google want to pay that much for something that useless... who am I to say what they should do with their money? I mean, this is certainly better for the company than pissing the money away on corporate jets. (That said, if I were a shareholder, I'd be kinda cheesed.)
The cost to Google & Amazon is irrelevant. The domain squatting and defensive registration under the resulting proliferation of gTLDs is the problem.
ICANN is simultaneously conjuring an artificially scarce property and taking their cut of the proceeds of defensive registration, up front. These additional TLDs add little to zero actual value to the end-user, so any registrations therein are by definition a waste of money.
Being charged by someone to protect something and receiving nothing of value in return sounds like extortion to me. Many will register their names under these gTLDs, solely out of fear of SEO issues later. It's protection money, pure and simple.
Most of all this farce demonstrates that ICANN have abandoned even the pretence of good governance and conservative stewardship of a widely misunderstood technical resource.
but, how does the squatting and "defensive registration" (obviously, I don't feel the difference is as clear cut as you seem to.) effect legitimate users of domains? It makes it harder for us to get meaningful names.
How will increasing the namespace help? My hope is that it will divert the resources of people that buy a gazillion names into, you know, buying names in these new namespaces that nobody gives a shit about, leaving more of the dot-com for legitimate use.
I mean, I could be wrong, but I don't think it will decrease the dot-com namespace available for legitimate use.
Personally, I think that if they can take money away from the squatters (or the people that engage in "defensive registrations" or whatever they are calling squatting this week) without taking money from legitimate users, that is a net positive by itself. Squatters are not as bad as spammers; I'm not advocating public executions or anything, but I'm not going to cry that someone else has figured out a way to extract more money from them.
I'm afraid you've misconstrued the meaning of "defensive registrations" to mean holding a domain without a legitimate entity name to justify it.
It isn't. It is when an existing holder, e.g. mystartup.com, additionally registers mystartup.biz and mystartup.co and other useless TLDs so that no-one else can have it, without having any intention of using it.
Your "hope" that people might use these other new TLDs instead of .com et al is entirely undermined by the evidence of .biz and .info.
Sorry, but fantasy land doesn't apply here, just economics.
NB: if you have some peculiar impression that defensive registration is a form of squatting, then, y'know, call it whatever you like, the outcome is the same.
The whole point of having multiple namespaces is to have, well, multiple namespaces.
If everyone registers their name in all namespaces, there aren't any more names to go around, just more fees for every name owner to pay.
The thing is, it's completely legitimate for prgmr.com, prgmr.net, and prgmr.org to be unrelated entities. It's also legitimate for prgmr.sux or whatever (assuming that top level domain is created) to be owned by someone that wants to say bad things about me. The only illegitimate use is attempting to deceive users in to thinking that you are me.
Though, I think I understand your point better now; You are saying that we really only have one namespace, and the "buy every variation of your name on all top level domains" ship has sailed.
If you hold that position, (and while I disagree, I see how you could hold that position) then yes, adding another top level domain does not expand the namespace, but it does mean that all name owners need to buy another name.
While I do agree that people have a strong preference for .com names, I think this means people are less likely to confuse a .com with a .biz or a .ly or what have you. In fact, almost the only uses I've seen of other than com/net/org and government sites have been for companies that integrated the top level domain into the name, like del.icio.us or what have you. I don't think the existence of prgmr.ly would cause any confusion.
This got me wondering what prgmr.net was (I mean, I am kinda a network, so prgmr.net is arguably more appropriate) - it looks like a Korean programmer's blog. I approve.
Going by the count of strings in the CSV attached to that page, and the $185,000 price tag quoted on Wikipedia for applying, that's already around $357M raised before the process has even got in full swing.
I think you are probably right. Large companies will take these for vanity/defense of brand, but I won't hold my breath for mainstream adoption. What was the uptake like on info, name, pro, biz? Not much. If a large corp wants to use these to brand an area of "mindspace" like ".book" or w/e, they could have already done so through traditional branding avenues. - this will just be a 25k/yr adjunct to existing projects/products, but I doubt it will be anything of itself.
It wouldn't have been a big deal if the TLDs were at least more restrictive (maximum character length, protections for rights-holders), but as it stands, it's hard to see how this wasn't at best horribly conceived, or at worst, truly a corrupt way to wrangle money out of brand-holders.
TLDH existed without Peter Dengate-Thrush's input for several years. Antony van Couvering was/is the driving force behind the formation of TLDH / Minds & Machines and its commercialisation.
So a year ago, when the new ICANN TLD expansion was announced, I wrote up an FAQ for normal people explaining the process. I actually read the entire 352 page document and took the time to call ICANN (and ICANN does not like me because I've been critical of their policies in the past, so that was no small feat) and get confirmation on how the process works.
This week, we've run a number of stories discussing the current phase of the situation, but to be honest, the general audience response has been 'meh.' CNN wanted me to do a spot on Tuesday or Wednesday about it, but it was a scheduling conflict.
The reality is, the story isn't substanatively different than it was a year ago. We're now at the application phase. For certain generic TLDs, communities can appeal against the use by one party. For many of the most contentious TLDs, there have been groups fighting for control for years. See .music.
The reality is that at this point, Google and Amazon applied for the use of certain TLDs. Some are likely to receive pushback -- cloud and search seem ripe for appeal. Google could argue that "blog" is synonymous with "blogger" -- they might win that (tumblr and WordPres could register tumblr and wp if they wanted). The reality is these won't be issued over night.
With some, Google might even have plans to act as an exclusive registrar for some of them.
The situation is this. Despite ICANN's claims that this process would be designed to prevent abuse and land grabs, what's happening is what we all expected: land grabs and abuse, but just from the people rich enough to file the application and pay for the ensuing infrastructure. It is what it is.
I don't see this phase as a huge story, only because it's the expected next step. The story will be what gets approved and what are the implications of those approvals. It's too early in the bureaucratic process to start trying to get people up in arms about a process the was designed to be as cumbersome and difficult to navigate as possible.
Publicizing (again) the way the process works won't change the process.
Meh...if this is how it ends up working, doesn't this mean that gtld's will basically end up being equivalent to subdomains, but on the other end of the URL? Does it matter if some crappy blog is at unicorns.blog instead of unicorns.blogspot.com? I just see this landgrab as guaranteeing that those gLTD's won't end up being that valuable or prestigious in the long run...
It's more likely that some of these are defensive applications, to lock competitors from getting them (eg: blog, tunes).
Winer is right, and I'm surprised nobody is writing about this or calling much attention to it. There's enormous potential marketing value behind domains like "beatles.music" or "harrypotter.books" or "superman.movies".
With the advertising and reach of companies like Amazon and Google (or even Warner and Sony), I think these new domains have the power to split the web, and potentially turn .com, .net, and .org into something of a ghetto (sorta similar to how .biz and .name might be viewed by Joe Consumer now).
On the other hand, it may well be meaningless. I'm continually surprised to see big companies use facebook.com/[companyname] in their advertising too.
Consider when searching "nissan" in Google, http://www.nissan.com/ is the fourth result despite being essentially a parked page that no one would ever really want when making that search.
No, www.nissan.com is popular because of Page Rank. It really is little (if anything) to do with the domain name.
The Page Rank is high with nissan.com due to its lawsuit with Nissan Motors. They even have a link at the top of their page with information about the lawsuit.
Many tech articles have been written about www.nissan.com. This is more a study about Page Rank, Public Relations and the Streisand Effect than anything.
Interesting domain! But can't they be removed from Google for selling backlinks [0]?
Their ad [1] says it explicitly: "webmasters rank better in Google with backlinks on Nissan.com". That seem to be against the webmaster guidelines, no?
Less a parked page than a flaming middle finger at nissan motor corp. No love lost. Read the dude's time line of judgements and court dates. Sort of interesting IMHO
It's easy enough to demonstrate that Google gives significant weight to domain names that match the search query. It's not entirely clear how that might be influenced by the TLD, though, whether they'd explicitly favor nissan.com over nissan.biz for example.
no, they don't (unless your site is hosted on a spammy pseudo TLD like co.cc), but in general google does not prefer one TLD over the other (they stated this a thousand time, you just have to trust them, if we annoy matt enough he will probalby even stated this here once again) - google does not prefer one TLD over the other - but people are.
people search for [nissan.com], so that domain has navigational search demand, which is very likely a factor for google.
> Does it matter if some crappy blog is at unicorns.blog instead of unicorns.blogspot.com?
Yes - it matters greatly! Domains are used to define a number of critical Internet policies. Cookie policies are one example where subdomain interactions can confuse even seasoned veterans.
I think you didn't even need to quote the second sentence. Is there another successful online bookstore? It's the rare brick-and-mortar bookstore that's financially sustainable.
All it takes is for Amazon to do a big marketing campaign and teach users that typing "horror.books" or "action.movies" to cause real problems to other retailers. People search google in google because they don't understand how the internet works, if an advert from Amazon explained how "action.movies" was a way to find action movies and "anything.movies" works too then you can guarantee behaviour will change.
If http://74.125.225.68/ ranks before a .book domain when you type whatever in your browser edit box. Then that's where most people will be going to. Doesn't mean domains are meaningless, but they mean very little, and the better google gets, the less they'll mean in the future.
This is weird: a Google search for that "2a00:..." string [1] results in a link to what looks like this page, but hosted on 13l.blork.ly. What's up with that?
He means un savy users will literally type "google" into the URL bar (not understanding that typing a string there will google it) and click on the first result to get to google. Then they perform the query they originally intended
That's just one example. There have been plenty of startups, particularly in the consumer internet space, in which the names were generally accepted to be critical to the startups' successes. Mint vs. Wesabe is the most obvious example.
Domain names are a useful abstraction away from IP addresses for some people.
I agree with you that many people are not sure about domain names (they don't know what the http:// is, or what the www (or whatever) before the domain name means, or what the TLD represents) - and this is supported by some of the measures that have gone to protecting users from bad actors. Bind updates to protect against unicode exploits; highlighting the address bar to emphasise https connections; and so on.
Gently scummy efforts by other people have benefited from the mistakes people make; redirecting to ad-laden search pages by ISPs is one pretty bad example.
So, do domain names need another level of abstraction? Or is it broken and does it need a redesign? What could you do?
Verisign's name grab is more interesting - the most natural spelling of the '.com' TLD in scripts other than Latin. Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic, etc.
Now that's going to be fun for people who already own .com domains targeted to those audiences, because I could see people reverting to .com in their native script very easily, and unless you buy the right domains from Verisign, they won't necessarily get to the same domain.
I imagine Verisign will be the only place in the future where when you buy the .com, they'll upsell you on the equivalent .com in various other scripts.
The concept of top level domains seems a bit outdated. I can only guess that under the new system "store.apple.com" will become "store.apple", "myname.blogger.com" will become "myname.blog", etc. So why not go the other way and just drop TLDs altogether? I know there are a few cases where a ".net" domain would clash with a ".com", but the people in those cases are already used to the conflict, so let them work it out which one keeps the TLD in their name and which one becomes TLD-less.
The way it's going seems like a money grab by ICANN.
Namespaces exist for a reason. For example, what do you call your network printer after http://canon gets reserved by the printer manufacturer? Same with http://epson, whatever. And is http://printer1/ safe? Only until someone writes a paragraph justification and shows up with $1m.
I've looked to see if there is a policy from ICANN on this, but I can't find one. Historically, TLDs did not themselves point to hosts (or have other things like MX or TXT records).
Yeah, it's common to have bad url or email address validation. Many sites do not accept short email addresses at all. As example a @bc.de (space is there intentionally). When it becomes a @ bc then it's interesting to see how many sites will fail with that.
I believe that TLDs with A records should resolve correctly if you add a period to the end, as in "http://ac.. As I recall, this came up when the "http://to. link shortener [no longer available] was discussed a while ago.
With the current trend of combining the address and search bar I doubt browsers will let you go to e.g. http://lol when you type "lol" in the bar.
In fact I just checked that typing "ac" in the Chrome omnibox makes a Google search for "ac" as I would expect. So the value of having an A record on a TLD is limited.
Edit: Somehow I missed the bar on top of the search results that says "Did you mean to go to http://ac " so there's some value after all.
Why should I have to type "canon.local" for my printer name, just in order to avoid an advert to buy a new printer? This destroys any sense of user preference in favor of large corporations pushing their shit further into your face even when you explicitly don't want it.
I've worked at many places where http://search/ was the Intranet search facility. Not now though, nope. Now your IT department will be under pressure to accept Big Search's latest site-integrated intranet search which they conveniently started marketing around the time they broke all your local URLs.
The good thing about DNS is that the user controls it. You can set it to whatever you want. Enough people set it one way and it becomes a standard that no board can decide against.
The problem is the concept of hijacking DNS in order to show ads or beg for money on a wireless network. It's like saying that you don't want hands because when you hit them with a hammer, they start bleeding all over the place. The solution is to not hit your hand with a hammer, not to not have hands. Because they're pretty useful except for the whole bleeding thing.
Exactly. What's needed is more public education. DNS is a basic thing all users should know about. You can stop someone on the street and they will know what "RAM" is. They might not be able to explain how it works or what it stands for, but they know what it is and they know they need it for applications to run smoothly. Same should be true of DNS. Mozilla, not to mention Adobe, can coordinate millions of people to all download the same program (Firefox, Flash plugin). People can be taught how to control their own DNS, e.g. how to choose a DNS server. But ICANN likes users to remain ignorant. They want everyone to use their root server without ever thinking about it. Well, that server is about to become overrun with needless tld's.
You can stop someone on the street and they will know what "RAM" is.
People in NY were asked what their browser was and the most common reply was "Google" - and this was before Chrome had any kind of share. People are completely ignorant when it comes to technology.
They won't break your local URLs. Locally defined domains take priority over remote ones, you don't rely on them return NXDOMAIN for yours to work. It's a complete non-issue.
I've been preaching for years that we need to get rid of TLDs. If we truly want the web to be a global/borderless place, get rid of the extensions and let us do http://companyname/ (I know it currently can't work like that, but I'm sure all the great minds out there can figure it out).
Ideally I would've liked to see it evolve into a more clean/friendly structure all together... web//companyname, yourname@companyname, etc.
Yes we'd get the clashes of people that currently have different TLDs of the same name, but maybe solve that by making the new structure an optional extra, so people buy the "new" domains from scratch (and if you currently own all major TLDs for your name, eg Microsoft/Google/Apple/etc, noone else can register your "new" domain). First to buy the new one, gets it. Person who had the differing TLD finds a slightly different one.
These new .whatever really piss me off. It's making the web a messier place, and confusing the average users even more, all for the sake for some greedy fatcats to charge stupid amounts to companies that can afford to throw money at it.
If you are ICANN/Registry/Registrar you make money!
You send it to auction and let them bid to see who gets it.
Or you send things to a dispute resolution provider, e.g., WIPO. Not sure how much revenue they make from these disputes, but it is no doubt growing.
Could this problem be fixed with a technical solution? Maybe. But for ICANN, there's little incentive to fix it because lots of money is made in their system if there are disputes and an illusion of scarcity.
What is true for company names is also true for trademarks. Like company names, trademarks are both restricted to a particular business sector and they are regional.
But ICANN's system keeps things so that there can be only one xyz.com even though there may be many XYZ Corporations around the world, in different business sectors. They do not compete with each other in the real world. But in ICANN's world, they are forced to compete. And this brings in lots of money for ICANN/Registries/Registrars.
One of the common refrains from this is that it is a money grab by ICANN, but all ICANN is doing is implementing a multi-stakeholder consensus policy that was ratified by the various community groups 5 years ago, and doing so on a cost-recovery basis. While the costs may end up being conservatively estimated, any excess will be returned back to the community.
ICANN itself has no vested interest in this other than executing its policies, and if the consensus policy had ended up being "no new gTLDs, there are enough" then it wouldn't have embarked on this program.
Pretty much all the "stakeholders" are from the "domain industry", so it's pretty obvious what their "consensus" would be. You're right that it's technically not a money grab by ICANN, but somebody is planning to make money and we've seen that people who work at ICANN can also profit from the revolving door.
Personally I think the new gTLDs are an incredible abuse of power. They were cooked up only so ICANN could cash in on being the authority. Having new gTLDs are going to cause a lot of problems and they are prohibitively expensive.
I think it will raise security issues with phishing. Imagine someone registering .con .orgs or .couk to impersonate a .com .org or .co.uk site.
I think it raises usability issues. .com (and it's ilk) identify a particular string as being a website address. With .anything how do you know if this string even refers to a website?
I think it will create bugs in some programs that assume that URLs have only a certain small set of TLDs.
TLD registration is not free-for-all like domains are. I extremely doubt ICANN will accept those. And before people claim "they will for the $200k", let me put your fears to rest: they already keep the money even if the request is denied.
You have a dev box on your network called 'test1'. You can host a dev environment there and navigate to it at http://test1 . Works great, until somebody registers 'test1' as a gTLD. Then you get namespace conflicts.
<tinfoil-hat gasMark=3>Preferential network treatment for corporate TLD's that are willing to pay would be the obvious starting point for telecoms providers. If they are popular enough you can then place heavy restrictions on standard domains and try and sell the result as a 'safe' internet.</tinfoil-hat>
Not that I think that this would work very well in the long run.
Something I haven't seen discussed: how are web browsers going to handle somebody typing a generic keyword that is also TLD into the address bar? The chrome-style omnibar that every browser has since adopted is predicated on the fact that URLs are fairly easily recognizable.
But if amazon owns "books" and hosts something at http://books/, should browsers navigate to Amazon whenever someone attempts to search for "books"?
[Actually, is it even allowed to host A records directly on a TLD? I've been reading through RFCs and haven't seen it explicitly disallowed, but nobody seems to have done it with a currently-available TLD.]
Yes. Tonga turned their TLD `.to` into a domain shortener, although because of the browser issue you mention it generally had to be accessed via http://to./
However, it hasn't been available for a long time now.
EDIT: As pointed out below, http://ac/ points to a real website
Browser can and sometimes do override DNS. The omnibar is one recent example. This is obviously very bad.
It is like the NXDOMAIN problem.
Is it the web? Or is it some company's interpretation of the web? "In this situation, when the user types ______ the user should be directed to ______."
I wonder if people are overvaluing these gtlds. Of the general public, how many people are going to see "great.books" and think "Oh that's a URL I should type."
Exactly. And, more to the point, if they're kept private, they become less novel as people very quickly learn to equate them with Amazon or Google, etc.
The gtld idea only produces significant value when the tld's are used for public registration and diverse use. At least that's my claim/prediction. Otherwise it becomes just a sideshow. Heck, even with open registration it might. Look at .tv or .mobi or .me or any other "valuable" tlds that current exist. They really don't seem to be as disruptive as some may have expected.
This is the best example I've seen. We've spent the last 20+ years training the public that ".com", ".net", etc equals "website". Now that anything could be a URL, it's going to be a lot more confusing for people.
The owners of (books|music|whatever).com are going to be happy because a good number of people are going to see "best.books" and end up thinking that means "best.books.com"
What if some people are already typing this? What if some people have been typing great.books in the Address Bar for years because they just don't how to use a search engine? Is that possible? How much money could you make by capturing all that traffic?
I really agree with Dave, private gTLDs shouldn't be allowed. One thing is to open new gTLDs as .data (interesting!), .kid, .book and another thing is to get it and use it for yourself. That's not how the gTLDs should be run. Those gTLDs have not public interest!
Google and Amazon should be ashamed of themselves for trying to buy .blog, .book (etc) and just want them for their own interest when those gTLDs, used wisely, can be really useful.
The only people who are in favor of this are those who stand to benefit: ICANN (who likes elaborate meetings in exotic places), registries, back-end providers, advisors (lawyers), and registrars (hello larrys). Did I miss anyone?
Any end users who think this will benefit them are clueless. As this blog post says most people have not a clue what the above parties are up to.
There are basically two main camps among the applicants: domainers looking to capitalize on type-in navigation and overpriced sales of key terms, and companies looking to protect their trademarks. They are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
ICANN is a non-profit organization. They are tax-free. But they treat themselves to perks many for-profit companies only dream about; they live a lavish lifestyle (they just raised 300 million for essentially nothing!) for an organization that is supposed to be acting in the public interest.
It is one heck of a racket.
There will be non-ICANN DNS with some new features emerging out of this fiasco. You can bet on that. ICANN has gotten far too greedy. The conflicts of interest are blatent and insulting.
"Did you think this is how it would work? I sure didn't."
Was there something you read that indicated that what they did wasn't allowed?
"Another angle on this, the ICANN people must have known about these applications long before they were made public. How could they continue this process, knowing that is how Google and Amazon interpreted the idea of new TLDs?"
Everything including the entire process and requirements were public and anyone could have read and determined the specifics prior to any submissions (and voiced objections). From my reading there was nothing to prevent this anymore than if you filed for .winer you could determine only your family could use it. (Same as you get to decide who uses scripting.com, right?)
At this point anyone can file objections to granting a particular TLD (the fact that you are the only applicant doesn't guarantee getting granted the TLD).
So I would suggest to the OP (Dave Winer) that he writes an objection if this bothers him which will also serve to alert the tech press.
"They saw the applications coming in, therefore had information the rest of us didn't have."
But if you read and go through the application process (as well as the process leading up to this where everything was discussed and layed out) what those companies are doing is allowed. So the fact that they saw that companies did this has no effect.
Your assertion is that the press is missing the story. Which seems accurate. But wouldn't it be better to file an objection rather than just writing a blog post about it? Isn't that more useful and practical?
But then the press still would have missed it. And I for example might never have heard of it.
Also, what makes you think one excludes the other? Why berate the one guy who at least a.) paid attention and b.) wrote about it, for not also doing c.) and d.)?
Everybody is still free to file an objection, including the author, and now actually MORE people who would be inclined to do so, are in a position to do it (i.e. they heard of it, instead of this going down in silence).
Well, first of all, I'm not berating him, which is why I made an effort to note that I largely agree with his point here-- in fact, it is because I agree with him that I thought it was worth pointing out that "raising awareness" through a blog post is only half the battle-- people are far more inclined to respond to it if the author is willing to take the effort and do something about the problem.
Maybe Dave's planning on filing an objection, I don't know. If he is, great. But it is easy to come off as someone whining on the internet even if you have a respectable position if the only thing you're doing is complaining.
Was there something you read that indicated that what they did wasn't allowed?
No kidding, private entities bid on, to buy, new gTLDs. Did the author assume that they would pay for them and then have to offer them up as a public good?
No, we assumed that whoever owned .blog would sell subdomains at a reasonable profit to anyone who wants one. But now we learn that maybe only Blogger users will be able to use .blog. I can understand why they wouldn't sell subdomains of a brand name like .google, but for generic word TLDs we were assuming it would run like .com. Turns out there's no such restriction in the process AFAIK, and now it's too late to complain about a loophole that we didn't foresee.
What's the point in having so many top-level domains? I can see the value in having country codes, because otherwise there would be an international (probably US-dominated) authority that imposed its power on the Internet, but why any beyond that?
Agreed. This will just add unnecessary confusion for a lot of people. Might look good for marketing, but I bet most of these will just redirect to the '.com' site.
I found that one individual had applied for 300 gTLDs, Google for 98 including for .lol and .foo. In reality, each company could have used just one gTLD such as .google and could have extended it having app.google domains. To Dave's point, these domains are not necessary open for the public. If google wins, .dad, they don't have to give you a domain in that gTLD.
Many TLDs already have restrictions, and are not 100% "open for the public". There's been controversy about whether .job is enforcing its restrictions correctly; .edu is strictly limited to US accredited 4-year secondary educational institutions; .gov and .mil are "owned" by the US government; many ccTLDs have restrictions, for example .cn at times has required registrants to have a business license in China, etc.
I take your point fully. Just musing on the country codes being appended to the same words as the new top level domains, just to create more confusion.
In the UK some smaller private colleges that are not eligible for .ac.uk register web sites with the .ac country code.
My understanding is that books.uk is just a second level domain. It would have to be Nominet who questioned the application, and there are countries that appear to take a liberal view of the use of their country code. Have I misunderstood?
You can can find Google's applications by looking under "Charleston Road Registry Inc.". Amazon is under their own name. Between the two of them, they have some pretty generic applications. i.e. ".lol", ".mom", ".pet" & ".soy"(?) etc...
It looks like Google only applied for 3 non-english TLDs. Amazon has closer to a dozen. Might say something about long term plans.
Microsoft has about a dozen applications, mostly for things they have trademarked. ".xbox" etc.
Apple is in there as well, but only for ".apple". ".app", ".tunes" were both applied for by Amazon.
I searched for .rugby. One is the IRB (the main governing body of rugby basically, which is understandable).
But also one from "dot Rugby Limited" which if you look closer, is a likely brand new LLC purely created to bid on domains. They also applied for .soccer, and the emails are all "icanntas<number>@famousfourmedia.com", the number I assume corresponding to the number of applications. Rugby is at 23.
Their site basically says "we're going to buy tlds to make money off".
"Tech press ignores expected next phase of ICANN's gTLD sales."
would be a more accurate title.
Like a public good, the dilution costs of issuing gTLDs is externalized and paid by everyone (other than ICANN).
ICANN has an exclusive license on this valuable virtual real estate, little accountability and a well demonstrated intention of making all the money they can.
Don't blame smart buyers who get in early - they're not the ones who created the situation.
Although I think adding more names is good (why not?), it seems like most people would be better served if the gTLDs were controlled by neutral groups rather than dollared interests or squatters.
Why not serve the new gTLDs through charities which operate registration and lookup at cost?
They shouldn't grant generic names as TLD to businesses. They should only grant their own registered marks: I wouldn't have anything to object to .google, .facebook etc.
Dave Winer likes to complain about everything, but my guess is that this is not going to be a big deal. Nobody important will use the vanity names, just like how nobody important uses the non-com/net/org TLDs now. (Even del.ico.us moved to delicious.com.)
We already have .xxx, .co, .cat, .ly, and so on. Why will adding .dog and .ing make a difference?
If anything, the people that win are individuals, because there are enough namespaces for them to get something nice. When .us was opened up, I was happy to snap up a 7 character (total) domain name for my email. (That would be a 4 letter .com, completely unobtainable by the time I knew how to register domains.)
I think clever people will use the vanity domains for clever things, and commercial uses will continue to use .com as always. Considering that the average user wouldn't know how to access or email a TLD directly anyway, it's not like Amazon is going to be moving amazon.com to "search". (Actually, even most of the hardcore hackers I asked didn't know how to visit a TLD directly either. The key is remembering that all domain names actually end with a .)
You know, gTLDs, as well as more and more draconian internet legislation, are making me want to stop using the Internet as we know it, and switch to something else.
Maybe it's Tor, on top of the present internet. Maybe it's an entirely new non-Internet network. Maybe it will be some new P2P network.
But if the Internet's freedom and competition disappears, something must surely replace it.
It's no longer a level playing field. It used to be, what, $5 secures you a .com name. Nobody could get a top-level domain, you could only get second- or third-level domain names, and anyone could get one. And importantly, TLDs were neutral. They weren't belonging to any company (although operated by one, usually)
But now, you have the poor man, who can afford a $5 .com, but he can't get a second-level domain on the new TLDs since they're owned by a company, and it only lets people have them for a high price or with special conditions. The poor man also can't afford the $200,000 needed to get a new gTLD.
This creates a two-tier Internet: The rich, big companies can get shiny new huge chunks of domain space, whilst the smaller companies, organisations and individuals are simply peasants, subordinates, who can only register on the second and third levels.
Furthermore, it introduces a huge level of corporate control we haven't seen before. Yes, .com is operated by VeriSign, but they have to let other people register .com names. They can't just do whatever they want with it. On the other hand, Google owns .google, and they can do whatever they want with it. It's theirs. They own that part of the internet, at the top level, and they have complete control. If they own .book, and they don't want to give you a domain, so what, they can not give you one.
Do you really think that not being able to register in a .book will hamper the sales of your new book? Or not being able to own yourname.blog reduce your readers in a significant way?
As long as .com, .net, .org and local country registrars keep working as they always have worked, I hardly see this as damaging.
Once that first batch of TLD is approved a bunch of large corporations will try to get their's as well.
Initially the ICANN process will be perceived as bloated. To alleviate this competing TLD registars will take over so as to drive down the price and administrative burden.
And ultimately everybody and their dog will have a TLD.
I find it most curious that a whopping 13 companies applied for the .app gTLD, including Amazon and Google, but not the company that started the original App Store and which sells the most apps. That company showed tremendous restraint by only applying for the .apple gTLD.
Both Sage and Salesforce applied for the 'Appstore' trademark, not 'App Store' as Apple uses it. Also, they describe add-ons that one can buy/rent for their web platform -- that's not what I think of as an 'app'. In any case, I've found no proof that Sage actually used the name, and Salesforce's add-ons shop is named AppExchange.
Let's go further back in time. Software programs on NeXTSTEP have had the extension .app since the first release in 1988. There are plenty of videos around from that time in which Steve Jobs refers to software programs as 'apps'. At the time, it wasn't a common word at all with Mac and PC users. Only after Steve Jobs came back to Apple, it entered Apple vocabulary because he would refer to software programs in that way.
They've always been at least "Applications" on the Mac, which is probably where the NeXTSTEP team got the file extension. On DOS/Windows it was and still is "Executable," though people are starting to casually use "App" everywhere.
Yes, Macintosh software programs were always in the 'Applications' folder. However, we never called them 'apps'. Classic MacOS didn't use file extensions, programs had a 'type code', 'APPL' (ResEdit allowed you to view those codes and edit the resources within an application). At the time, when we used a short word for software programs, we'd call them 'progs'. This changed when Apple acquired NeXT. The Yellow Box software programs in Rhapsody were the first ones I saw that had .app file extensions, and when I went to a preview of that next gen OS in 1997, Steve Jobs repeatedly called them 'apps'.
Also, Sage didn't use the name as their attempt to revive their trademark application, which in their filing they describe as "International Class 035: Operating on-line marketplaces for buying, selling and exchanging computer
software and on-demand applications", was denied. In 2006.
[edit] I could buy apps for the archimedes in a store. An app store is somewhere to buy apps. Technically speaking the apple app store is a package manager with ecommerce functionality. Very much like the linux predecessor CNR, in other words. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNR_%28software%29
[edit] Wikipedia, that fount of shaky, but vaguely accurate hearsay says that RISCOS was released in 1987. Archimedes computers were widely used in the UK due to being in pretty much all state high schools. Steve was not responsible for bringing the word into the public domain, no matter how much you wish it so.
Very interesting. However, what I was referring to was that Apple was the first company who launched a marketplace for native software programs, a marketplace carrying the name 'App Store', AND which was integrated in the OS. When we speak of 'the App Store', it's obvious whose marketplace we're referring to, even though other companies have launched similar software marketplaces for their own ecosystems (Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Canonical, etc.)
That's not to say that the separate components of Apple's App Store were particularly novel. Before its launch, there were package managers, there were online marketplaces for software, and the name 'app' had already been used by several platforms. Apple united those ideas, made it a user friendly environment, made it easy to buy apps with one click (using the credit card that was already on file in iTMS), and integrated the update process. That's often how Apple gets their successes, by combining and improving on existing ideas (see OS X, iPod, iPhone, iPad, etc.)
I never used Acorn's Archimedes, but growing up in The Netherlands, the first computers I used were Acorn Electrons, our primary school classroom had six of them. That's how I started programming, in BASIC, at the tender age of 6. I have fond memories of using those machines.
OMG I tweeted this before 8am and it's 6pm now and there's no news stories about it.
What's the difference between Google keeping .blog for itself, and some other company charging $50,000 for their normal registration fee? (Some already do that.) Not much.
Anyone who sees Google and Amazon as AI companies should know that this is the next logical step. Imagine owning and selling the authoritative meaning of Modern English and those valuations start making a little more sense.
I think the net effect of this explosion in TLDs is that the individual appeal of each will diminish, as the novelty wears off. This will simply accelerate the erosion of the address as the primary means of access of a web resource (from a consumer point of view.)
I see some obvious parallels between domains and TLDs in how they become limited to singular entities. After all, it's non-trivial to obtain a scripting.com subdomain for myself, and I see no reason why someone is more entitled to such a subdomain than I am, besides being first to have registered the domain itself.
All gTLD expansion plans are misguided, especially the recent flood.
Being able to register a domain for ~$10 on a first-come-first-served basis (modulo exceptions, which have been handled reasonably well by UDRP) is wonderfully accessible to everyone. gTLDs are prohibitively expensive to most. But beyond the money matters...
The simplicity and restrictiveness of .com made it attractive. The .kitchen-sink direction -- blowing out .net and .org in the worse ways -- creates a mess.
I'd did a little analysis for fun, found Google and Amazon both applied: APP, BOOK, BUY, CLOUD, DEV, DRIVE, FREE, GAME, MAIL, MAP, MOVIE, MUSIC, PLAY, SEARCH, SHOP, SHOW, SPOT, STORE, TALK, VIP, WOW, YOU.
So Google and Amazon are wasting their money on top-level domains that aren't going to stick… It's not like the situation is any different from being able to grab blog.com first, except you pay a lot of money for the privilege of not having to suffix it with ".com."
The fact that people still search for facebook on search engines makes this a big deal because once users get used to finding books at .book and blogs on .blog every competitor will have to fight against that mindset.
And when people are used to search on Google.com or look for books on Amazon, other search engines and book stores will have to fight that mindset too. It's very much the same.
> The .search gTLD provides Google with the opportunity to differentiate its Google Search products and services by linking them to a unique gTLD. Google will be able to quickly distinguish new products and services it develops and⁄or acquires by offering them in the proposed gTLD.
> The mission of the .SEARCH registry is to provide a unique and dedicated platform for Amazon while simultaneously protecting the integrity of its brand and reputation.
> A .SEARCH registry will:
> • Provide Amazon with additional controls over its technical architecture, offering a stable and secure foundation for online communication and interaction.
> • Provide Amazon a further platform for innovation.
> • Enable Amazon to protect its intellectual property rights.
Basically, only for their own commercial gains. The other two applicants want .search to be a place for consolidation of search related domains, which seems like an absolute pipe dream.
Who says "the press" missed it? I saw it mentioned on Slashdot, Techdirt and a few Australian sites (they seem particularly interested). Plus the few links I saw here.
USA Today published an article about it in their Tech section on Wednesday, I would think they're about as mainstream as the media gets in the US. I agree that this story doesn't really seem to have been overlooked.
I'd really like to see wildcard TLDs, and none owned by corporations. I don't know if that's technologically feasible, but I would far prefer that to this mess.
None of this matters at all. The press shouldn't be worrying about it.
If you have a killer product, any number of zillions of domains still available will do the trick.
Or go buy an even better one for $250 to $1,500 from SEDO.
How about a .fm or .ws domain? Or .IO and so on.
No time or effort should be directed toward worrying about this. Put your brain back on your product. Someone owning .books or .meme is no more interesting than someone owning books.com or meme.biz. Either your product is amazing or it isn't.
When you can beat Google by owning search.search (how about search.com), let me know.
You're right that it doesn't create any insurmountable problems, but it does matter. It defines new rules for the domain name game, and domain names are an important piece of a company's public face.
The best thing that could come out of this, is the developers and engineers that actually build the Internet, Web, and mobile Web, and make it all matter --- demonstrate that this is all bullshit by ignoring the new domain expansion and showing that it isn't valuable or necessary.
Look at the full list here: http://newgtlds.icann.org/en/program-status/application-resu....
Notice how 70 were applied for by "Top Level Domain Holdings Limited". Go to their website, and click management. http://www.tldh.org/management/
The exe's bio says, "Prior to joining TLDH, Peter Dengate Thrush was Chairman of the Board of Directors of ICANN, and in that role led the process that resulted in the historic decision to launch the new gTLD program in June 2011."
1) Get on ICANN board of directors
2) Convince ICANN to create gTLDs
3) Quit ICANN and create a company to squat and resell gTLDs
4) Profit!