

Soon you'll be able to buy any top-level domain you want. Don't do it - vaksel
http://www.slate.com/id/2222408/

======
raquo
> According to Web traffic analysts, people type Match.com into Google and
> then click the top result. Are these people stupid? No, they're smart: It
> takes a lot of work to remember every company's exact domain name

Yeah, it takes a lot to remember the domain match.com, that's why people go to
google and type there match.com

From my experience, people do it because 1) they have no clue about the
address bar, or 2) google is their home page and when they open their browser
the focus is set automatically on the google's <input> element rather than on
the location bar.

~~~
Vivekpuri
They can also do it to avoid phishing scam. Like logging on to credit card
company site, I trust google to deliver the right domain for me.

~~~
digitallogic
I do this fairly reguarlly. I often miss type domain names, but when I do this
in google they will correct me.

------
crs
I don't know if I completely agree with why the author thinks this is
unnecessary. However, I do agree that this would be a bad thing. I think
making domain names anything under the sun would make it harder to find things
and more confusing overall. I like the defined structure of the specific tld's
that exist now and it does feel like a 10k fee for new ones is a money grab.

~~~
sho
$10k? Try $185k application fee and then $25k a year. The prices might change
but that's the current plan AFAIK.

~~~
blhack
ouuuuchhh.

That sounds prohibitively expensive for things like news.yc (does this site
produce money at all?), or my blog, or fark, or any other site that isn't
backed by some sort of multi-million-dollar corp. and generating a couple
million uniques a day (or more).

My prediction is that, especially at that cost, this will fail MISERABLY. .com
will still remain the brand-name, and anything else will be a generic.

Similar to .net, .biz, .tv, .anything other than .com

What _really_ needs to happen is for icann to have a review board that can
determine if cyber-squatting is taking place or not.

The board needs to exist because a 16 year old sitting on theirname.com
because they haven't bought hosting or anything yet, and a company that is
sitting on a few hundred THOUSAND domains hoping to sell them are drastically
different. I am perfectly fine with the former, and believe that the latter is
a cancer on the DNS.

Basically their needs to be a terms of use that prohibits cyber-squatting.

~~~
sho
What do you mean, this rules out news.yc? That already works:

    
    
      $ ping news.yc
      PING news.yc (174.132.225.106): 56 data bytes
      64 bytes from 174.132.225.106: icmp_seq=0 ttl=47 time=204.946 ms
    

In fact if I was PG I'd deny access to any other host in the request headers
.. that'll keep out the proles.

Anyway, I think the new gTLD scheme will be a (qualified) success. Just not
quite for everyone. But a lot of people will snap them up. <http://www.ibm/>
will be irresistable, and there's a lot of interest already from cities, etc
(.paris, .roma, etc).

On the subject of domain squatting - all I wish they'd do is massively raise
the prices on .coms. It is _ridiculous_ for people to be able to squat on them
for $7 a year. And if they are sold, or for sale, the owner should have to pay
property tax at the sale price for the duration of his ownership.

I don't mind people owning and trading "investment grade" .coms - what I can't
stand is people buying tens of thousands of the damn things and then just
sitting on them because they're so cheap.

~~~
blhack
have you added this to your hosts file?

pinging news.yc doesn't resolve to anything on my openbsd, gentoo linux, or
windows xp boxes.

I imagine that it won't on the default install (and using (normal DNS) of most
any computer.

~~~
sho
Yeah, I was cheating and joking : D

    
    
      $ grep news.yc /etc/hosts
      174.132.225.106   news.yc
    

Sorry for making you check! Actually I don't even use it, HN comes up even if
I just press "h" in firefox.

------
dustmop
Having names ending in ".com" is great - it says explicitly that the thing is
a web address. Just like how the hyphenation of a phone number 123-456-7890
tells you right away that it's a phone number. This is part of why ".com" is
more desirable than ".net", ".org", et al. It also shows how blatantly stupid
this idea is, since it removes all framing from a web address, making the web
harder overall to use.

~~~
trezor
I guess all those .no, .de, .it, .se, .dk and all those other national TLDs
just represent pretend-sites then. Not to belittle you, but you seem to have
an incredibly Americanized and introverted impression of how people percieve
DNS names.

I have .com's, .net's and .org's. I use different TLDs for sites I believe
represent different kinds of content, purpose and community. Having everything
as .com would seem incredibly unnuanced for me.

~~~
dustmop
This isn't meant to be my view, this is how the internet is viewed by the
average non-techie. Yes, I realize how West-centric the point of view is, and
that's unfortunate. But it's exactly why we have "dot-com businesses" and the
"dot-com bubble", as opposed to the "dot-com-and-net-and-org-and-co-uk-...
bubble".

At least keeping the set of TLDs small and restricted to standardized names,
or countries that people using them will recognize, helps to keep the
recognition problem manageable. But allowing anything and everything for a
domain name removes all hope of recognizing one without context.

~~~
trezor
_This isn't meant to be my view, this is how the internet is viewed by the
average non-techie._

That would be a non-techie in the US. Outside the US, people have to deal with
more TLDs, more people are multilingual and hence exposed to more information
from more countries, in more languages.

If non-techies in the rest of the world have one common trait, it is that they
recognize the www-prefix as "Internet", not the com-suffix.

------
bhousel
> We all should follow Shaq's example—don't ever pay for a screen name or a
> domain name again.

The author doesn't really understand how trademark law works -- companies need
to actively defend their trademarks in order to keep them. So when you see a
company taking legal action against someone using a name similar to theirs, it
doesn't always mean that they expect or even care to win the case, but legally
they need to prove that they care about the trademark.

In short, what works for THE_REAL_SHAQ wouldn't work for an actual business.

------
TrevorJ
I can see a lot of potential for phishing abuse with this new system. Slight
misspellings of longer TLD's especially. I know that ICANN is claiming that
they are going to keep a tight hold on this sort of thing but the reality is
it is tough to keep on top of.

~~~
costan
It also looks like misaligned incentives to me. If ICANN is getting $25k /
year per TLD... do they really want to notice? Won't they decide that they're
better off waiting until there's a lawsuit? (that way they won't have to
refund the 25k)

------
eli
Hey, know what's exactly the same functionality as <http://slate.illinois> for
1/4000 the cost? <http://slateillinois.com>

------
Gibbon
It seems like random tlds would produce some seriously confusing site
architecture.

If you were to pick .companyname as your tld.. then what would your homepage
be? home.companyname? Where do you go from there? home.companyname/contact or
contact.companyname? what about a sub-page of that page? What do you put in an
ad? just go to .companyname? or go.companyname? the possibilities are endless.

Every site would likely use their own rules. The simple tlds we have now are
confusing enough for consumers.

~~~
bhousel
If you owned "companyname" as a tld, your homepage would just be
<http://companyname>

------
ars
Instead of selling tld's, why not allow registering any combination of _two_
names? e.g. foo.bar

So you could have person.slate, microsoft.slate and roof.slate all by
different people.

~~~
dan_the_welder
Because that would break the internet. Third and lower level domains as they
are known are resolved at the hosting server not in the DNS system.

~~~
ars
I think you need to learn more about the DNS system.

When you say lower I don't know which direction you mean, but it doesn't
matter: there is no difference at all between any of the levels in DNS. None.
They all get resolved in exactly the same way, just at different servers.

Eg: www.en.google.com

You start at the root sever and ask it about www.en.google.com and it says "I
don't know, but I know that .com can be found at foo".

You ask foo: and it says I don't know, but google.com can be found at bar.

You ask bar and it says: I know this one, and it gives you the answer despite
it being more than one level.

~~~
dan_the_welder
Well perhaps I phrased it poorly.

They get resolved in order as you explained, but en from en.google.com will
only be resolved at Google's host DNS.

I defacto own any weird combo of third, forth, etc order domains that live
under my registered second level domain.

So there is no way to do as you suggest in your original post with out
substantially altering the DNS system by inserting one more layer into the
public side.

I could rent ars.danthewelder.com to you, but I don't think that's what you
really meant in your original post.

~~~
ars
That isn't so. You don't have to change anything, you just add some more names
for the root level servers to resolve.

Everything will work just fine, with no changes at all on the client end, and
no changes in the servers, except maybe you need a bit more hardware in the
root servers.

I told you - there is nothing at all special about any of the levels.
danthewelder is just a name for the .com server to resolve, it could resolve
any names, and .com is just a name for the root server to resolve - it could
resolve any names.

For example there is no reason at all you could not have email at ars@com -
just com, with no other part to the name and <http://com/> could work just
fine. There is no address set up for com, but there could be - those layers
are not specially singled out.

~~~
dan_the_welder
You keep saying it's no big deal, but it is.

I am the danthewelder server. Me personally, or my hosting service. You cannot
resolve on my turf.

[http://itsmyturfand.youwouldbreaktheinterenet.danthewelder.c...](http://itsmyturfand.youwouldbreaktheinterenet.danthewelder.com/)

~~~
ars
I had a whole reply typed up, but I removed it.

I give up. You simply don't understand what I'm saying, and I can't keep
trying.

~~~
dan_the_welder
Well then you are not explaining it very well.

If you sell person.slate.com to someone when slate.com is already sold to
someone else, that means who ever owns slate.com cannot have their own
person.slate.com subdomain.

Tell me how DNS is gonna figure that out from a string of text URL?

What you propose cannot be done with out taking something from the people who
already own a particular domain.

