

An Appeal to Google: Make ".io" a gccTLD - austinhallock
http://clay.io/blog/an-appeal-to-google-make-io-a-gcctld/

======
fosap
In defense of the current status: You are all misusing (or absuing) the DNS.
Do you live in (or target) the British Indian Ocean Territory? No? Then this
domain is not meant for you. This is a hack, and I don't like it. (For the
same reason i don't like the new gTLDs) This sound a bit like a complain that
reading Shakespeare in hexspeak is not very pleasant.

/Edit: Sorry for beating a dead horse. I know TLDs are not used the way I
think they should be used. But I think it was important to point out once
again that this is a dirty hack. It works, but when working outside of the
spec you should be aware of it a accept shortcomings. Not saying you should
not ask google to route around it. But it has it limits. ".at" are meant for
Austria and not for email providers, that's something they just should deal
with.

~~~
mattmanser
It turns out that we've got massive domain squatting, America somehow snagged
.com instead of .us, England decided to use .co.uk for no apparent reason,
there's seemingly some sort of massive corruption going on in ICANN 'selling'
tlds, etc., etc.

i.e. the whole thing turned into a complete and utter farce long ago.

In the end it's not a perfect world and it's a hack because the very tld
domain system itself was woefully broken even in conception.

~~~
thomasahle
England has chosen to split up their tld into .ac.uk, .co.uk, .gov.uk etc.:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.uk>

Because the Americans owned ICANN, they got away with first-level domains for
everything, .com, .gov, ... Other countries had to either put everything under
one domain, or split it up like the brits.

~~~
kijeda
That is some terrible revisionist history.

.com, .net, .gov etc. were the first TLDs created in the early 1980s (when the
DNS was invented, before ICANN existed). Only later in the mid 1980s were
country codes added to the repertoire, and each country was given one based on
the ISO 3166 standard — including the US (.us).

The only domains with geographic prohibitions were .gov and .mil, being run by
the US Government. People of all countries have always been able to register
domains in .com, .net etc., not just Americans.

~~~
takluyver
Anyone can register a .com, .net, .org address, but the registries are subject
to US law. So, for instance, US courts can order a .com domain taken down,
even if it points to servers in another country.

------
mwally
This topic is especially sensitive to me, so please enjoy the enraged rant
below.

\-----

I have a better proposal:

STOP DOMAIN ABUSE!

Remember, back in the day, when .net meant you were a network services
provider, or when .org was only used by non-profit organizations. Wasn't that
confusing as hell?

What the hell happened?

The network had a beautiful, well planned design, and PEOPLE LIKE YOU threw it
away.

YOU ARE THE PROBLEM, NOT GOOGLE.

I recently had a conversation, with someone I respect greatly, about creating
a series of informational sites very specific to US audiences, and he had a
fit when I insisted on using the .us TLD. (Blasphemy, right?) He demanded I
use .io, for a site that contained exclusively United States related
information... Seriously?

I will not participate in this madness, and the HN audience should know
better.

It's really simple, you see: your new project has lots of video content?
Considering .TV? Is your company based in Tuvalu? THEN DON'T USE IT.

.AM? That's Armenia .FM? Federated States of Micronesia .ME? Montenegro.

The list goes on and on. Wikipedia has a complete list of them, along with
their intended uses and common abuses.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-
level_doma...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-
level_domains)

What makes this whole thing even more insane is that there are still tons of
quality .us domain names, completely open for registration, and people insist
on using TLDs of other random places! The Indian Ocean? Really?

I want some of whatever everyone is smoking.

"Only you can prevent domain abuse."

~~~
lifeformed
But why? Just because it was an unintended use 20 years ago? "People like us"
didn't throw away the beautiful design. Squatters did. There are literally
zero remaining good .com names that are available.

ccTLDs stopped being used exclusively for their original purpose a long time
ago. People are already used to them. The market has already adapted, and it
opens up a lot of good branding opportunities. If you want to stay pure to the
ideal of the spec, you're just holding yourself back.

It's kind of like a language - the original meaning of a word may be different
than how it's used now, but the only meaning that matters is what people
intend it to mean.

------
Uchikoma
Flame me down, but this is what you get when you "misuse" .io.

~~~
robotmay
Because there are so many legitimate uses in the British Indian Ocean
Territory.

(as a note, nic.io actively want the domain used as people are indeed using
it)

~~~
Uchikoma
So? Someone chose clay.io instead of claycorp.com or somethingelse.com,
doesn't get found by Google and now wants Google to change the TLD to a gccTLD
disregarding the locals.

------
StavrosK
This is a complicated solution that will produce many false positives. The
simpler solution would be to just give each customer a box in Webmaster Tools
where they could select whether they wanted their domain (wherever that is) to
be targeted generically.

~~~
eli
False positives? Please correct me if I'm wrong but I can't find a single .io
site that is actually intended just for residents of the British Indian Ocean
Territories.

Edit: Checking the NIC rules, actual IO residents with servers in the
territory can use the reserved third level domains like foo.com.io. I still
can't find any that actually exist.

~~~
RBerenguel
That's a problem with users of .io domains, not with the system. Every time I
see a .is domain that is just from some ego-driven developer (mygreatname.is
or similar) I cringe, just like when I saw nyan.cat (cat is the top-level
domain for Catalan and Catalonia and supposedly has stringent conditions for
granting its use)

~~~
quarterto
Nyan.cat at least used to have an information page explaining their use of
.cat; having a version of your content in Catalan (which they still do) is
apparently sufficient.

~~~
RBerenguel
Last time I checked in addition to having your content in Catalan, you had to
do business or have some kind of "grounded" relation with Catalonia or the
Catalan language.

Was one of the reasons I didn't buy Fatou.cat as a domain for my cat's blog
(left it at tumblr), or thefancypuffin.cat for our handmade shoemaking
business (in addition to the larger exposure of .com domains, of course)

------
sp8
Personally I've been against the 'abuse' of the domain name system in this way
(using ccTLDs as if they were gTLDs) for years, but the world disagrees with
me. So at this point there seems little point in hanging on to geo-targeting
by ccTLD, might as well flatten the playing field.

But we do need some country-targeting and while we do have the Webmaster Tools
thing (but that is only Google-specific, you'd end up having to do this for
any and all search engines, if they offered it) I'd like to see control put
back into the hands of the sites themselves, and have some way of tagging
available in the HTML of the page.

It'd also get rid of the ridiculous assumption that search engines make that
if your site is hosted at an IP in a country, then that's the country that
should be targeted in their results (if there are no other signals, ie ccTLD).
Here in the UK there are many web hosts which are based in Ireland or Europe,
and at the moment I worry that using them would hurt the site's reach into a
UK search result.

~~~
ScottWhigham
> I'd like to see control put back into the hands of the sites themselves, and
> have some way of tagging available in the HTML of the page.

I'd like to think that, as a web dev/master/admin/whatever, I wouldn't have to
tag each one of my thousands and thousands of pages with the exact same tag.
This is just a tough approach - it would work for super small sites only IMO.

~~~
sp8
Point taken (though presumably you do tag other things about each page -
language, direction of reading, cache length etc). Tagging each page would
give you the ability to nominate that different sections of a site target
different countries though?

An alternative then might be something akin to robots.txt - place a geo.txt
(or whatever) file in the root of a site to indicate its relevance to
particular country or countries?

~~~
ScottWhigham
Yeah, something like that would be more ideal than the tags. That way you
could do it at the folder/subdir level.

------
elliottcarlson
Why are people arguing over the misuse of the .io TLD?

No one is saying not to use it - but if you misuse it, then you should
understand the consequences. If you buy a domain in the .ly TLD and it gets
removed for whatever reason, it's your fault. If you brick your iPhone while
jailbreaking it, it is your fault. Go ahead and hack away, as is the spirit of
everyone on this site - but don't think that it means everything will behave
the way you expect it to.

------
nodata
gccTLD = Generic Country Code Top Level Domains

[https://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en...](https://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1347922)

------
jvzr
I'd argue many TLDs present the same issue. I myself use the .es TLD (Spain)
as a "novelty" domain name (geekeri.es), but Google won't treat its content as
targeted towards international, and mainly english-speaking audience.

It's a shame and I would have prefered Google had chosen to look at the
language of the content instead of merely the TLD. Anyway, I like my domain
name and wouldn't change it for a gold bullion.

~~~
neya
Ditto, same situation! Had I known this, I would have gone with an acceptably
weird dot com..

------
Dirlewanger
Why was this even originally selected by tech companies? Trendiness? Because
they saw the .io standing for input/output?

~~~
thegrossman
We chose it for forecast.io because of the input/output connotation. It is a
concise way to imply "data service".

.io also allows us to use a short descriptive domain name. If we went with a
.com, we'd be stuck with either something like forecastweatherapp.com, or a
made up nonsense domain -- in which case we'd be basing the name of our app on
the specific domain we were able to acquire.

~~~
coin
But I/O is the communications between devices. forecast.io is mostly about
using vast amounts of weather data and then processing it to forecast weather.
What does that have to do with I/O? I'd take your company more seriously if
you had a .com name. Your current name makes me envision a junky spam site.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input/output>

~~~
glitchdout
The current name makes me envision an edgy, cool site.

------
spindritf
.de is also used in many hacks, maybe even more popular than .io, and Google
does not allow to change the geographic target for those domains in Webmaster
Tools.

Any idea why? Do they fear that this setting will be abused? Hope to hold the
floodgate and have people use geographically "appropriate" TLDs?

~~~
Svip
Maybe because .de is still pretty well used in Germany? And .de is still
marketed as a German TLD, not a generic one (like, for instance, .io is). To
get a .de domain, you must have an address in Germany, so it makes sense to
consider it a German ccTLD.

~~~
maaku
So? You should still be able to tell Google: “Hey this .de domain? I'm using
it market to an international audience, so don't hide me from the world.
Kthx.”

~~~
Svip
Then shouldn't that be the case for _every_ TLD? Then surely we shouldn't go
on a TLD by TLD basis, when we should 'petition' Google for revising their
country bias per TLD.

Although, doesn't .de domains appear on Google.com given the right search
(e.g. 'Der Spiegel')?

------
Terretta
Had the same issue. Got a couple nice .io names for APIs, found they didn't
cooperate with tools and ranked poorly, shelved them.

Thanks for bringing this up.

~~~
larsmak
"found they didn't cooperate with tools" ..interesting, care to elaborate?

------
andyhmltn
Kind of off topic, but I went to change my password for the IO NIC after
reading this. Apparently they store it in plain text...

------
dcc1
Did you have to spam my .io mailbox?

------
kevinburke
Most of the ten gccTLD's he mentions as being unpopular have, in the past,
been associated with giant penalties in Google's rankings, especially .cc, .ws
and .tk which hosted large amounts of spammy content for a really long time.

~~~
eli
I've heard the same thing about .info but I have no idea if it's true.

------
shenanigoat
Use .co

There are plenty available. Google treats it as a GTLD and co is meaningful if
you are using it for a company. It's also only around $15 for a registration.
Some of those country codes have ridiculous prices.

------
ronaldx
So you've bought something deliberately because it's the cheap option that
comes with a downside.

And now you want to drop the downside. Maybe you'll even be successful, at
least a little... good luck.

------
dkulchenko
.io is now in the list. See
[http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...](http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1347922).

~~~
pyvek
Whoa. Didn't really expect Google to respond to this and that too so quickly!

------
dClauzel
.io has a normalized meaning. Accept it, or simply don't use it :)

------
jakelazaroff
I don't see how .io is different from .fm or .ly or
.amillionothercountryTLDsthatpeopleusefortechnicallyinappropriatereasons in
this regard.

------
macarthy12
Looks like it has been added :

.fm .gg .io .la .me

------
Siecje
Why does it matter which country a site is located?

Seems like it would only be used for prejudice against certain countries.

------
gesman
We need .js !!!

------
drdaeman
Why appeal to Google? Appeal to ICANN and IANA.

~~~
niggler
What does gccTLD stand for?

~~~
arscan
Generic Country Code Top Level Domains

