Mixed views on new DNS top level domains

https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/tech/NewTLDsMyMixedViews

by goranmoomin • 5 years ago

60 41 5 years ago

utcc.utoronto.ca

chana_masala• 5 years ago

There is barely any viewpoint argued in the article. So vanity tlds may be bad, why??

flemhans• 5 years ago

Yes I was surprised that the article ended after what I thought could be the introduction to the topic

j56no2• 5 years ago

JUR just another rant, surprisingly made to the homepage

j56no2• 5 years ago

is there a list of the new ones?

karmakaze• 5 years ago

There's a wikipedia entry--can't speak for its accuracy[0]. There's likely more official/accurate lists elsewhere that shouldn't be too hard to find if needed.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_dom...

CydeWeys6• 5 years ago

This is the list of all currently existing TLDs: https://data.iana.org/TLD/tlds-alpha-by-domain.txt

Note that IDN TLDs are presented in punycode in that list (the XN-- ones), so you'd want to convert them to Unicode to see what they actually look like (e.g. many are Chinese characters).

robert_tweed2• 5 years ago

I registered my own name under one of the new gTLDs because it was $10 for a year and I thought, "why not?". I didn't do anything with it, partly because I remained sceptical of the new gTLDs so didn't want to switch anything critical over to it, like my email address.

That is probably just as well, because a year later, it had been reclassified as a "premium" name. The renewal fee was over $400,000.

The fact that the owners of gTLDs can set pricing arbitrarily is the biggest problem in all this. A given domain name usually has no intrinsic value. What gives it value is the effort someone puts into marketing it.

With the new gTLDs, the domain operators are free to offer useful names that aren't trademarks, but are unavailable as .com or similar. Then should anyone build a successful business on that name, they are free to seek arbitrarily high rents.

There is no sense in which you can buy a domain name outright. Nor do the new gTLDs have any form of rent control. That is a fundamental problem with the system as it stands.

iomcr4• 5 years ago

Was it {firstname}{lastname}.gtld or only one of those?

robert_tweed2• 5 years ago

It was just my last name. So in a way surprising it wasn't classified as premium to begin with. But the fact such a concept exists at all, and the goalposts can move at any time, is the troubling part.

ziml773• 5 years ago

I was looking at gTLDs when getting my own domain. I think I got lucky with the timing because all the desirable ones had already classified the name I wanted as being premium. Around the same price you're saying your renewal would have been. I ended up going with firstnamelastname.net.

I don't thing it's a good idea for anyone to use a gTLD for anything serious. Even without the prices being uncapped, there's no guarantee that a gTLD will stick around. Would be crappy to lose a domain because the company who owns the gTLD went out of business or just didn't want to deal with handling domains anymore.

CydeWeys6• 5 years ago

Even without the prices being uncapped, there's no guarantee that a gTLD will stick around.

Actually, there is a guarantee that a gTLD will stick around. ICANN correctly determined that this would be ruinous to the health of the Internet as a whole if entire TLD's worth of domains could simply disappear, hence they set up procedures to guard against it, including a required daily data escrow deposit from all TLD operators that can be used to spin up the TLD by another registry operator if the worst catastrophe were to happen (which, it should be pointed out, has never happened). For more info see:

https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/ebero-2013-04-02-en https://newgtlds.icann.org/en/applicants/data-escrow

The only TLDs that have ever ceased operation entirely, like .xperia in the linked articles, are closed brand TLDs that were never used for anything, were never available for external registration, and that the company in question (Sony here) simply got tired of paying the annual fees on given their lack of use of it. These TLD discontinuations don't threaten anything.

devwastaken• 5 years ago

.coms are cheaper now anyways with cloudflare. 8 years pre-purchased for $60.

throw0101a2• 5 years ago

That is probably just as well, because a year later, it had been reclassified as a "premium" name. The renewal fee was over $400,000.

At that price it may be cheaper to simply create your own TLD.

moonchild• 5 years ago

Indeed; registration fees are about $100k, and infrastructure costs a similar amount.

CydeWeys6• 5 years ago

What was the TLD with the huge price hike?

cpach• 5 years ago

Yikes. That’s very lousy behaviour of them.

Thanks for the warning.

ryan29• 5 years ago

Which TLD was it? I’ve been trying to find an example of a domain being reclassified as premium while registered for almost two years. Are you sure you didn’t let it expire?

That violates the registry agreement AFAIK. They’re not allowed to arbitrarily change the price for a registered domain. Can you give more detail?

iomcr4• 5 years ago

My first thought, while I don't know the exact rights of the parties involved, they should have filed a complaint with ICANN regardless.

billpg• 5 years ago

Which TLD is that? Because I never want to use that domain and I'm thinking about hacking my DNS to fake-NXDOMAIN it entirely.

iomcr4• 5 years ago

I do have a complaint about relatively new TLDs. Did you know .forum domains are $500 to $2000 per year?

We live in a world where everybody is complaining about censorship and nazis, but one of the best new TLDs for an independent forum is prices out 99% of the market!

Of course, there are plenty of TLDs in the $5-$20 range, which are great, but this will cause cheap TLDs to become crowded and .forum will be a ghost town.

Forums generally don't make money. Any forum making money, probably isn't making enough to budget $500 extra in another domain. Any company that would say "wow, $2000/year is acceptable" would already have something like {forum,community}.acme.com.

ziml773• 5 years ago

Is it the best TLD for in independent forum? It could be completely irrational on my part but I'd be hesitant to click a search result that would bring me to a .forum domain.

beprogrammed2• 5 years ago

Well, to be fair, censorship and fascism are worse things than extortionate domain name prices. Though both are bad.

iomcr4• 5 years ago

While true, a free and open web is generally desirable, and we'd like to keep the barriers of entry for federation to a minimum. If someone was ready to start mycool.forum, but doesn't have $500/yr to start a website, they must now wade through a garbage pile of "minimum $2,000 bid" squatted domains, weird TLDs that could declare your domain premium and charge $400,000/yr at any time, maybe even if the only thing "premium" about the name is that your website got popular, or buy a domain like themycoolforum50.com.

This might be only one managable issue, but these things add up, and the more they add up, the more facebook becomes the only website people use.

shiado• 5 years ago

TLDs are like neighborhoods or ZIP codes, you will be judged for being in a bad one even if you are a good person. That's why I suggest consulting this site before you register anything to make sure you don't accidentally get a TLD that is used mostly for abuse, which many of the newer ones are.

https://www.spamhaus.org/statistics/tlds/

7ewis• 5 years ago

I don't like the fact that the prices can wildly differ between different TLDs.

I think it was nice that it was easy to recognise website.com was a website too, whereas website.wtf is less easy to identify, but then now there are more available to makes it easier to get a shorter, better name and can make the pricing more competitive, hopefully driving it lower for everyone.

silisili• 5 years ago

My view, as someone who did a lot of work around it:

Purely a money grab by everyone involved. In what I'd consider a more normal fashion, ICANN could have slowly picked and rolled out sensible new TLDs to operators interested.

Instead, it was a free for all where you had to pay an insane fee to ICANN mafia to even apply, and get in bidding wars if multiple applications existed.

If you won, you had to go find and pay your own registry, too. So, you had registries preemptively spamming local businesses convincing them to buy a tld and use that registry.

Many thought they were gonna make a fortune. The only one who made a fortune was ICANN and to some extent, registries. That's probably why owners keep trying to jack up prices, they still want their windfall.

Don't even get me started on how terrible ICANN is organized. The whole digital archery fiasco should be enough for nobody to ever put any faith in them. Anyone with a quarter of brain function would realize how terrible that idea is.

el-salvador• 5 years ago

The .sucks TLD is one that comes to mind.

PostThisTooFast• 5 years ago

The entire canned TLD system (and ICANN't) is a scam. TLDs should be abolished (except for the ones that are still enforced, like edu, mil, and gov), and you should be able to register anything.anythingelse.

Trademark violations would be handled as they are today.

The current mess is an embarrassment.

greatgib• 5 years ago

The worse thing with generic tld is that before tld were attributed on a kind of merit or usefulness (countries, com, org), but now it is only based on money considerations.

At the beginning internet was based on a kind of democracy or gentlemen's agreements. Now, the one that has the most cash to spend, like Google or Apple or Amazon or some scammer, ça. Grave what you want. Like if it was their internet.

The example of the ".dev" is good. Google can easily unilaterally decide to take over a domain that was used largely and internationally by individuals. And they are allowed to do that because they can afford it, but you, the individual, you are considered like horse shit in this system. And so you are not allowed to complain.

Mixed views on new DNS top level domains

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