
Google, Our Patron Saint of the Closed Web - yoklov
http://sealedabstract.com/rants/google-our-patron-saint-of-the-closed-web/
======
bhauer
I am no fan of the search engine company named after a misspelling of a very
large number. But nevertheless, in reading this article I immediately felt
that I had missed something fundamental in my understanding of gTLDs: I had
_never_ previously assumed that _any_ of the owners of these gTLDs were under
any obligation whatsoever to open them for widespread public domain
registrations.

Last year, when I argued the gTLD plan was a nefarious money-making scam
cooked up by ICANN and large Internet corporations, a central premise of my
rant was that Google and the rest of the usual suspects would snatch all of
the best gTLDs for their own sites. I suggested that Facebook would probably
buy .fb, allowing you to navigate to their site by just typing in something
like "w.fb" or maybe just "fb" (I'm not sure if TLDs can resolve directly to a
host as second level domains can).

I never once thought that Facebook as the owner of .fb would permit you or I
to register a subdomain within .fb. My understanding was that all gTLD buyers
were left to their own prerogative, be it exclusive use of the gTLD for their
properties or leasing of subdomains in the traditional sense ala .com, .net,
et al. In all the press coverage I consumed about the gTLD matter last year, I
never assimilated a requirement for leasing of subdomains to the public.

Google's behavior with .dev is just a sideshow to the main attraction of
silliness that is gTLDs.

~~~
wmf
_I had never previously assumed that the any of the owners of these gTLDs were
under any obligation whatsoever to open them for widespread public domain
registrations._

OK, but many people (including myself) had the opposite yet equally obvious
intuition that ICANN wouldn't allow closed generic TLDs. It was so obvious to
me that I didn't bother to check the rules, so now we're in this situation.

~~~
bhauer
Be that as it may, I am not sure what to do at this point. Had I controlled
the Internet at large last year, I would have shut down the gTLD concept
straight away as an unfair practice favoring well-healed corporations allowing
them to achieve unprecedentedly short domain names while the plebs continued
to suffer with second-level domains.

I remember hearing that Canon Corporation was going to buy .canon [1]. And to
my mind it was clear: they have no intent of selling .canon subdomains. Canon
Corporation has no interest in being a domain registrar. They just didn't want
other corporations buying and squatting on .canon. It is a land-grab where the
price per plot is $185,000.

Now that it has come to pass, I figure we'll all just adapt to it. I still
don't like gTLDs, but so be it. You and I won't be able to get domains in
.dev. So be it. I still have my domains in .com like some crazy old-timer.

[1]
[http://www.canon.com/news/2010/mar16e.html](http://www.canon.com/news/2010/mar16e.html)

~~~
pmontra
Canon buying it's own .canon gTLD and closing it down is a way to allow
[http://canon](http://canon) in the address bar of a browser. This is fair
IMHO because nobody else is expected to use a .canon domain, no more than a
.canon.com one.

Buying a generic word and closing it down is a different matter. Tying .blog
to only one service is very different than doing it with .blogger. It's a way
of saying you won't have any other blog platform than mine, no matter if
you're using your self hosted WordPress or one of the many services that
compete with Blogger. This would be bad no matter who's going to win the bid
for .blog or any other generic word.

~~~
function_seven
> Canon buying it's own .canon gTLD and closing it down is a way to allow
> [http://canon](http://canon) in the address bar of a browser.

It just occurred to me that—for advertising purposes—that would be _longer_
than canon.com. They can't just plop the word "canon" at the bottom of their
advertisements. Nobody would understand that to be a URL. So they would have
to add the protocol to it:

    
    
        http://canon
    

which is 3 characters longer than what they could do now:

    
    
        canon.com
    

Not saying you're wrong about their intended use, it just struck me as ironic
that having your own TLD would increase the size of your printed URL.

~~~
pmontra
I think you're right for now but in future we could get used to those naming
conventions. Think about the evolution of web urls in print:

[http://www.company.com](http://www.company.com)

www.company.com

company.com

company will be the next natural step. Maybe the step afert that will be
naming the company after the domain name (some domains have hyphens in place
of spaces in the name of the company now).

If it were not for the huge cost everybody could have its own gTLD. We could
end up being surprised that a given company still has the .com suffix. "It's a
small one, they don't have money", we'll think.

~~~
bhauer
> _If it were not for the huge cost everybody could have its own gTLD. We
> could end up being surprised that a given company still has the .com suffix.
> "It's a small one, they don't have money", we'll think._

Precisely, and one of the many reasons gTLDs are so distasteful. It
marginalizes smaller businesses that cannot (yet) afford to play with the big-
boys who throw around $185,000 as if it's nothing. Prior to this, domain
registration was _mostly_ a level playing field of first-come-first-served.

In a world where we often decry regulation that may benefit big business over
small business, ICANN pulled this stunt which is egregiously and by design
biased toward big business and it was more or less ignored by everyone.

Above, you pointed out that .canon is distinct from .dev because Canon is a
trademarked name. Although I understand trademarks have been used to dislodge
domain squatters, I believe that's extremely rare. Making a distinction
between trademarks and generic terms creates ambiguity. The gray area of
deciding between a company named "DEV" wanting to (or more likely feeling they
_need to_ ) spend $185,000 to protect their identity and a domain registrar
wanting to spend $185,000 to sell subdomains in "dev" is yet another reason
gTLDs were a bad idea.

~~~
pmontra
I can see another problem. I explain it with an example.

We know there are two Apple, the music company and the electronics one. The
relationship has not been easy
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Corps_v_Apple_Computer but they have a trademark
in their own business space and that's a case contemplated by trademark law.
However there can be only .apple gTLD. I'd like to see what's happen has soon
as one of the two Apples tries to get it.

This won't be the only case.

------
magicalist
> _The answer of course is to petition the Internet Darling Google..._

> _Why? Who knows. Maybe because Android is “open”, whatever the hell that
> means. Maybe it is because Google is strongly pro-net-neutrality, and Apple
> has made their customary “no comment”. Maybe because Google employees have
> blogs. The world may never know._

What? Did this person even read PPK's rant? He was saying the group that could
force Apple's hand on Pointer Events is Google, _and then proceeds to give
explicit reasoning for this_. No need to speculate on invent a convenient
strawman for the rest of your post. It has nothing to do with hand-wavey
openness, it's that they are the developers of the other browser that makes up
a huge chunk of the mobile web. If they supported PE, over time it would
certainly put some pressure on Apple (though situations like WebSQL/IndexedDB
indicate that the pressure might not be that effective).

The rest of this is nonsense. A closed TLD is not an attack on the open
internet. Honestly, who on earth cares. You couldn't get a .dev address
before, you won't be able to get one now. Personally I don't think they should
have opened up TLDs in the first place, but, whatever.

Meanwhile, quotes like

> _This is a methodical, coordinated, long-running and well-planned attack on
> the open web that comes from the highest levels of Google leadership_

make this article more than a little bit of a joke.

~~~
bsimpson
I can't help but wonder if they registered `.dev` because they have it
internally routed on their corporate network now, and they don't want to all
of a sudden have to deal with an employee not being able to read an article on
a new blog help.dev because they also have a product called Help being tested
at the internal URL help.dev.

If that's the case, them registering `.dev` might help everybody. It will give
you a TLD that you can use for internal projects, knowing it will never
conflict with a real site. Considering Apple's asinine handling of .local
domains on iOS, a known-good alternative TLD could be a good thing.

~~~
geofft
Yeah, that was my first thought -- if Google registers .dev and keeps it in-
house, this is good for the open web _everywhere_ because we can _all_ use it
internally. Probably they can't say that to ICANN's face, but that sounds like
it could have been a plausible intention all along.

In fact, if Google registers .dev and promises to keep it in-house, they can
then tell the Chrome team that it's okay to trust self-signed certs for .dev,
or something, thereby letting us all use HTTPS for development.

~~~
emmelaich
You won't be able to use it internally unless you get split DNS and mangle
your dns lookup configuration. _Everything_ .dev resolves to 127.0.53.53 now.
That ip address is a shot across the bow to warn you of the impending TLD
registration.

    
    
        $ host blahflurgle.dev
        blahflurgle.dev has address 127.0.53.53
        blahflurgle.dev mail is handled by 10 your-dns-needs-immediate-attention.dev.

~~~
geofft
You're going to have to set up split-DNS anyway if you want the records to
resolve, right? Otherwise they would all NXDOMAIN.

------
secalex
A bunch of us who were "open" applicants for new TLDs (my company applied for
.secure) tried our best to fight this in ICANN. The "closed generic" was not
something properly anticipated by ICANN when they created the nTLD process
(it's an insult to Byzantium to call the rules byzantine) and several large
companies, Google and Amazon most brazenly, shoved themselves through some
loopholes and created a category that was never supposed to exist.

The unfortunate fact is that the ICANN board is pretty spineless, and had no
desire to restate the rules to prevent the private domination of generic terms
(for example, Amazon wants to control the Chinese word for book, which is
pretty aggressive for a company from Seattle when the Chinese invented
moveable type). The board was so completely dedicated to moving forward that
they endorsed the idea of the winner takes all auction and punted all of their
responsibility for choosing which applicants would actually provide the most
value to the world. Open small applicants have to win the auction using funds
drawn from a business model of selling domains. These closed generic
applicants can throw tens of millions of dollars at the auctions based upon
the value of having a monopoly on a term like .app, .search or .secure.

In the end a bunch of us made pretty speeches and got a bit of traction with
the EU government representatives in the ICANN GAC (but not the US,
critically) but in the end we were steamrolled by the dozens of lobbyists and
lawyers these companies send to every ICANN meeting.

Too late for outrage now. The whole process made me highly cynical towards the
future of the name system as overseen by ICANN. At least I'm done getting food
poisoning in exotic locations three times a year at ICANN meetings.

~~~
dragonwriter
> The "closed generic" was not something properly anticipated by ICANN when
> they created the nTLD process

Really? Because its been in their FAQ on the gTLD process since before the
application period opened (see questions 9.3 and 9.4) [0] Its kind of hard to
argue that _X_ wasn't "properly anticipated" by ICANN when their _FAQ_ on the
process said, approximately, "Can I do _X_? Sure!"

I also remember lots of discussion at the time that the process was announced
and before applications were open pointing to the likelihood that many of the
new gTLDs would be purchased for closed use.

[0] current: [http://newgtlds.icann.org/en/applicants/customer-
service/faq...](http://newgtlds.icann.org/en/applicants/customer-
service/faqs/faqs-en) ; 10 Jan 2012 version:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20120110192958/http://newgtlds.i...](https://web.archive.org/web/20120110192958/http://newgtlds.icann.org/en/applicants/customer-
service/faqs/faqs-en)

~~~
kalleboo
I don't see how those FAQ entries prove that they anticipated registrations of
generic terms for closed use. Before this I'd have read them more as "go ahead
and register .google for your own use or .fifa for the use of only the teams
associated with you!"

------
wamatt
The article comes across quite ranty. This is rather unfortunate because it
may distract, from an otherwise important message:

Why should corporations be granted permission to carve off valuable and
_generic_ domain mindshare for their own agendas?

One could argue _" You couldn't register .blog or .dev before, and now you
can't either, so whats the problem?"_

Well, the issue would seem to be that it's reducing the possibility space for
everyone. Indeed, there are other competing applications that _would_ in the
future be open to all, but will not come to pass, if this closed corporate
capture goes ahead.

One last point to consider, why can't Google apply for .googdev or .googblog?

~~~
username223
> One last point to consider, why can't Google apply for .googdev or
> .googblog?

Or just give them ".goog", and every corp gets its stock symbol as a TLD.

------
slg
It is hard for me to get riled up over a TLD. Haven't they been decreasing in
relevancy for years, first with the growth of search engines and then again
with the growth of social networks? No one really searches for sites anymore
by typing random words with a .com at the end. At this point, I just don't see
that much difference between controlling a specific domain or a top level
domain. I would have no problem if Google bought app.com, so why should I care
if they buy .app? There are countless other TLDs to use anyway.

~~~
strgrd
Well perhaps then you can get riled up about a nonprofit regulatory
organization bending its own rules to serve the interests of The Biggest
Fucking Company Ever? Downplaying this because _you don 't care_ isn't what
the comment section is for.

"I would have no problem if Google bought app.com, so why should I care if
they buy .app?"

I'm not even sure you understand what TLDs are. Perhaps you should Google it?

~~~
narrowrail
>to serve the interests of The Biggest Fucking Company Ever

Going by market cap, I thought that was Apple, no? Not that it really matters.

Also, I doubt the parent commenter doesn't know what a TLD is, and it is kind
of rude (and snarky) to write such things.

------
zanny
Wow, that is vile. They seriously want exclusive control of TLD's like .dev
and .blog? What the shit? I mean I know Google is a publicly traded company
and thus has no real ethics or morals to speak of, but trying to strongarm
ICANN into giving them TLDs that should be generic ones is pretty damn evil.

At that, what is ICANN doing not making those TLDs available, not under some
draconian Google lordship, but the same way you get every other TLD ever? I
want a .dev and a .blog!

~~~
dragonwriter
> At that, what is ICANN doing not making those TLDs available, not under some
> draconian Google lordship, but the same way you get every other TLD ever?

Other TLDs are either proprietary for countries who can set their own policy
(ccTLDs), or assigned to organizations for either open or closed registration
based on various policies, some "open" (in that the registry that controls
them accepts registrations under generally-open terms, with perhaps some
limits) and some "closed" in that they belong exclusively to one organization
(closed TLDs include, e.g., .gov, and .mil; restrictive, but not exclusive,
TLDs include .cat and .edu, fairly open ones include, among others, the
ubiquitous .com)

The new "pay money to ICANN and get a gTLD" thing is different than the past
in that you've got a large number produced on application and going to the
highest bidder, rather than a small number each (other than the ccTLDs)
created with their own fairly unique justification. But Google bidding on them
is doing what _lots_ of other people are doing since ICANN announced this
process.

Is the process good? I think not. Is Google's use of it especially
problematic? I don't see how.

~~~
WillPostForFood
It may not be especially problematic, but it is more problematic than if they
were grabbing .google. It shows that the gTLD plan wasn't well considered. The
more generic the TLD, the more there is going to be an expectation that it is
open.

~~~
dragonwriter
> It shows that the gTLD plan wasn't well considered.

That ICANN's gTLD rollout, is, from concept to execution, a complete disaster
is not a point I'm going to argue against.

The question I'm asking is that _given_ that the ICANN gTLD rollout _is_
happening, what is the basis for complaining about the way Google is behaving?

------
blfr
I'm ambivalent on closed tlds and against closing generic-sounding ones but
what does this have to do with the open web? It's no different from owning a
regular domain, just one level up.

How did OP go from owning a tld to North Korea? And what's with the excessive
use of quotes? In particular, it's pretty clear what "open" means when applied
to Android:
[https://source.android.com/source/downloading.html](https://source.android.com/source/downloading.html)

~~~
scott_karana
While Android is technically open (AOSP), phones don't run _just_ AOSP. Not
even the Nexus ones.

Good luck selling a phone running "Android" if it doesn't support the Google
Play Store and their other proprietary apps.

"Runs on Android" in an advert does not mean "Runs on AOSP".

More open than iOS? Sure. As open as Linux? HTTP? Don't make me laugh.

~~~
nileshtrivedi
> Good luck selling a phone running "Android" if it doesn't support the Google
> Play Store and their other proprietary apps.

This is exactly what Amazon does though.

~~~
happycube
... more like "offering" than "selling", given the massive writedown on Fire
Phones.

------
notatoad
trying to equate arbitrary strings with web browser interoperability is
confusing at best and malicious at worst. one of these issues is important,
the other is not.

.dev is three arbitrary letters. sure, i'd like a .dev domain too, but that's
purely vanity. if google wants to spend millions buying up vanity domains,
good for them, it doesn't really hurt anybody, and certainly has nothing to do
with the open web.

look how important potentially cool domains like .biz and .info turned out to
be. domains are purely fashion. .io is popular right now for no reason other
than fashion, if .dev gets locked up by google for their internal use, then it
will never become fashionable and nothing of value has been lost. When the
world needs more domain names, a new gTLD will come into fashion.

------
meesterdude
This is disgusting behavior on google's part. I'm down with a .google or a
.coke - thats fine. but to claim a .dev, or a .music or whatever is something
else entirely. I really wish such behavior wasn't allowed.

fuck google

~~~
narrowrail
So, who was going to spend the $175k to make these generally available? A
registrar who would probably decide they would let you have one for $100/yr?
Did you know that there was a process where you could object to the proposals
for these TLDs _before_ they were allocated?

~~~
dragonwriter
> So, who was going to spend the $175k to make these generally available?

Nitpick, but it was $185,000 minimum "evaluation fee" (on top of the cost to
actually have, and demonstrate that you have, the "operational, technical and
financial capability to run a registry"). [0]

[0] [http://newgtlds.icann.org/en/applicants/customer-
service/faq...](http://newgtlds.icann.org/en/applicants/customer-
service/faqs/faqs-en)

~~~
narrowrail
Ok, thanks. I was going by memory and didn't think it worth the effort to be
exact. Being a pedant myself, I do appreciate the correction.

------
zeekay
Personally I'd prefer .dev for local development ala
[http://passingcuriosity.com/2013/dnsmasq-dev-
osx/](http://passingcuriosity.com/2013/dnsmasq-dev-osx/).

Let's petition Apple to make this default in OSX. Game, set match.

~~~
WorldWideWayne
I always use .local and it's really frustrating that Chrome leaks these
addresses to Google when I forget to type a trailing slash. Instead of hitting
my local dnsmasq server, it does a search for the address that I typed in.

------
arh68
I'm a little surprised, but I don't know very much about the gTLD situation.
When I looked at buying a .coffee domain, the Corporations had a window to buy
the obvious (dunkin.coffee, starbucks.coffee), then it opened up to the
public. I (stupidly) figured most TLDs would work that way.

I think by hoarding .dev (and others), Google will just kill the popularity.
Since they'll be the only ones using it, it won't be well-known. People will
still 'reach' for the dot com first. They can't register googcar.dev and _not_
register googcar.com . I hope they just waste the whole thing in obscurity.

------
ewzimm
I'm glad to see more differentiation rather than everything being .com, as if
it were a technical requirement. If we reach a point where gTLDs become an
issue, it wouldn't be hard to replace DNS with something like Namecoin.

It would only take a browser extension or native browser behavior to toggle
alt DNSs like user profiles or VPNs. I don't have anything against anyone
buying a gTLD, but if it becomes an issue, we can easily fix it.

------
emmelaich
I think many companies use .dev internally. I would MUCH rather Google be the
registrar than almost anyone else. And you can be sure that someone would try
make it a TLD.

You can blame ICANN as much as anyone. Though if you are going to make many
ludicrous TLDs you may as well allow so many as to make .com meaningless.

------
cjensen
> Is my conclusion that Apple should get a free pass for hamstringing their
> web evangelists? No. Get your Safari team a blog, Apple. Let them give a
> talk at a fucking conference.

[https://www.webkit.org/blog/](https://www.webkit.org/blog/)

~~~
falcolas
Last post: January 27. Second to last post, June 10, 2014.

Not really a blog, more of a half-abandoned PR portal.

~~~
eddieh
[http://planet.webkit.org](http://planet.webkit.org)

~~~
mbrubeck
...where there is still only one post from an Apple or Apple employee blog in
the past 6 months.

------
ErikRogneby
I appreciate the extensive primary source quoting included. And yet
interspersed with a first rate rant. Makes me think of the Daily show.

------
jfoster
Does anyone think Google has a solid plan for what they intend to do with
these TLDs? Are they just making a land-grab without any specific plan?

~~~
dragonwriter
A number of them it plans to acts as the registry for and they will be open
for public registrations (.soy and .how, among numerous others, are examples
here.)

The ones it is keeping closed it seems to have very specific plans for --
there letter to ICANN responding to issue of closed gTLDs I think discusses
the plans for .dev and .blog (at any rate, they've been discussed in something
linked to this discussion), .youtube / .google / .plus are tied to existing
products, etc.

------
masterzora
Obligatory disclosure: I currently work at Google but I don't do anything even
remotely related to TLDs or the discussion at hand. These comments are my own
and don't necessarily reflect the company's views, etc.

I'm going to apply Hanlon's razor here and assume misunderstandings but a lot
of this post/rant is exceptionally misleading or even outright incorrect. A
full point-by-point response would be more time-consuming than I'd like and
more space-consuming than is really appropriate as a comment here. Instead,
I've got already-too-long responses to a few of the points and I leave it to
the reader to investigate further before cementing any opinions one way or the
other.

 _Nor will I bother you with the other 100 applications for the other 100
TLDs, which are probably similar but I haven’t read all of them because it’s a
Friday night and I have plans, so don’t shoot me if it turns out some of them
are more evil than others._

At least he admits he hasn't read most of them but it's disingenuous to take a
sample of 1 from 101 as representative and even more disingenuous to insinuate
that any of the applications deviating from this sample are likely to fall
into the "more evil" category.

Actually clicking through even some of the applications listed to "Charleston
Road Registry Inc." we see a number of applications--including the ones for
.zip [1], .day [2], and .inc [3] among others--proposing SLD registration be
publicly available rather than strictly internally. And some of this--like
.zip and .day--are proposed to be completely open while others--like .inc--are
proposed to be restricted to relevant entities. Other applications--perhaps
most notably, .youtube [4]--propose that the public not be able to directly
register names but may be able to make use of vanity domains to link to
content hosted in that TLD. These applications are also not all active. At
least 29--including the mocked .blog--have already been withdrawn.

 _It’s sort of like how North Korea promotes choice because what if some
people want to choose a totalitarian regime._

This is how the rant responds to the quote "Today, most Internet users have
only one practical choice when it comes to how their TLDs are managed: a
completely unrestricted model environment in which any registrant can register
any name for any purpose and use it as they see fit."

It's unfortunate that this quote was taken out of context, however. Reading
even just a few sentences further we see the actual meaning of the quote:
restricted TLDs such as .edu, .mil, and .gov have proven useful alongside
(rather than instead of) the unrestricted TLDs and users (both in the sense of
those registering domains and those visiting sites and using services) may
benefit from the option of relevant restricted TLDs. For example, the .inc
application proposal includes a plan to require registrars to ensure that only
corporations are eligible to register .inc domains in much the same way that
.edu is only available for accredited US institutions. How much benefit there
may be for such restrictions is certainly up for debate it certainly seems a
far cry from the "North Korea" comment.

 _That Google should be allowed to close TLDs because nobody will notice
anyway:_

This is the rant's ridiculous response to the quote "Because of the strong
user bias toward domains within .com, today a generic .com domain name (e.g.,
jewelry.com or book.com) is likely to produce more traffic and to be more
valuable for a business than a generic TLD." out of context, this quote could
mean almost anything but in-context it's not about open or closed nor about
whether anybody will notice. Rather, it is specifically in regards to the
notion owning the .foo TLD would be a significant competitive advantage over
owning the foo.com domain or whatever.

 _" Closed generic TLD". Who even knows what those words mean anyway?_

This is perhaps my favourite part of the rant. It mocks the letter for trying
to discuss the meaning--or lack thereof--of the term "closed generic" and
seems to suggest grabbing a dictionary. Even setting aside that the dictionary
doesn't give us appropriately rigorous definitions of these things, the author
seems to be missing the fact that this letter didn't spring out of nowhere. In
fact, the letter is a comment on an ICANN request for comments on the topic
[5] in which ICANN specifically requested comments "in regard to proposed
objective criteria for classifying certain applications as 'closed generic'
TLDs". If it were anywhere near as simple as grabbing a dictionary ICANN would
have done that in the first place and commentary on the difficulty of
rigorously and objectively defining the terms was perfectly in line with the
requested discussion.

As I said before, these are only a few of the problems with the rant and there
are a number of others throughout. You're obviously free to reach your own
conclusions but I really hope that you're informed by pretty much any source
other than this rant before you do.

[1] [https://gtldresult.icann.org/application-
result/applications...](https://gtldresult.icann.org/application-
result/applicationstatus/applicationdetails/535) [2]
[https://gtldresult.icann.org/application-
result/applications...](https://gtldresult.icann.org/application-
result/applicationstatus/applicationdetails/1334) [3]
[https://gtldresult.icann.org/application-
result/applications...](https://gtldresult.icann.org/application-
result/applicationstatus/applicationdetails/1312) [4]
[https://gtldresult.icann.org/application-
result/applications...](https://gtldresult.icann.org/application-
result/applicationstatus/applicationdetails/813) [5]
[https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/closed-
generic-2013-02...](https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/closed-
generic-2013-02-05-en)

~~~
mavdi
What what a load of drivel... You're killing the messenger here. None of what
you said here justifies what Google is doing for instance with .dev. How can
you compare a restricted .gov TLD to the exclusive use of TLDs by Google?

~~~
masterzora
If you read more closely you'll see that I did not say anything attempting to
justify the proposal for .dev or indeed any other TLD. Nor did I compare the
.gov restrictions to a completely-closed TLD.

My purpose was not to argue for a conclusion. I haven't even fully decided
where I stand on a lot of the relevant topics. My purpose was merely to
illustrate that this rant was full of mistaken and misleading information and
doesn't represent a good source to inform oneself.

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raggaenight
google is a branch of the us government. nothing will ever happen to them and
as long as other countries don't produce a better search engine we'll all have
to live with their control of the www

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zeugmatis
Just wait until they make them work only with Chrome.

~~~
scrollaway
And how are they going to do that exactly? Threaten firefox and IE devs with
guns if they resolve them?

Are you the kind of person who yells random nonsensical crap whenever you see
something related to someone you don't like?

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zeugmatis
Just wait until their gTLD's will work only with Chrome, as well.

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weissadam
To be totally honest, this looks more like an internal management problem at
Google than it does like a real effort coming out of their actual Internet
strategy.

First off, the application to ICANN states that the purpose of this is to "...
provide Google with greater ability to create a custom portal for employees to
manage products and services in development."

That doesn't even make much sense, and honestly sounds like a bunch of
corporate gobbledegook written by somebody who reads CIO Magazine.

Second off, this Ben dude is actually the CIO. CIO as in, guy who is in charge
of internal IT. Printers, telephones, desktops, laptops, HR systems, financial
systems, webpage based paperwork. If there were letters coming out of people
on the service side, that would be one thing, but this smells like something
embarrassing that snuck out when nobody was looking...

~~~
Kalium
Apparently Google already internally resolves .dev to a host of internal
services. They don't want those to conflict with external services. The best
way to do this is to buy .dev, that way they can make sure this does not
happen.

