

Canon to begin acquisition of the ".canon" Top-Level Domain name - eswat
http://www.canon.com/news/2010/mar16e.html

======
kgosser
Is this an attempt to bypass search engines? So I go to an address bar, and
search for "canon" which in the old days would do a google search on that...
but on the new days checks for a TLD and goes to <http://canon> ... ?

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hkuo
Honestly, I wish this is how it was from the very beginning (minus the huge
cost of entry).

If you think about it, what really was the point of .com, .net, .org etc...
Does it really make sense that you can have both twitter.com and twitter.net?
In both cases, you recognize "twitter" as the name, with .com and .net as
fodder. And considering that twitter does not own twitter.net shows how
meaningless that .net domain is.

So you currently have twitter.com/yourname, when it could be just
yourname.twitter. Or yourname.facebook. And instead of yourname@gmail.com, it
would just be yourname@gmail. blahblah@hotmail. whosit@yahoo.
mikeymike@doodad. stevejobs@apple. pg@yc.

Furthermore, the ".com" has always been a blemish to branding. You have this
beautiful simple brand name (Nike, Apple, Cisco) but then you have to
advertise the url (nike.com, apple.com, cisco.com), both decapping your name
and sticking the .com on the end.

I know this whole .com, .net, .org, .ly has been ingrained into our structure
and psyche, but just consider the above to see how much simpler it could be.

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allenp
"The new gTLD system is expected to allow a company name, brand name,
geographic region, or service type to be used as a gTLD within website and
e-mail addresses."

So I guess we can expect more of these soon. Probably a few years of super
expensive costs before the floodgates are opened.

------
Hexstream
"With the adoption of the new gTLD system, which enables the direct
utilization of the Canon brand, Canon hopes to globally integrate open
communication policies that are intuitive and easier to remember compared with
existing domain names such as "canon.com.""

Yeah, because canon.com is really unintuitive and hard to remember.

Besides, I'm thinking lots of confusion will ensue. You see a TV ad: "Visit us
on the web at canon!" Typical human being: "Well, what's their address? They
forgot to tell!"

~~~
chronomex
"Visit us at ICANN keyword Canon!"

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jackowayed
So, Canon realizes that half of the programs in the world (if not more) that
autodetect urls aren't going to detect <http://canon> or
anemailusername@cannon as urls/emails, right?That limits what they can really
do with this.

I guess they could have other stuff redirect to <http://canon>, and urls for
"subdomains", which are now normal domains, become nice and might catch some
more url detectors. <http://slr.canon> and the like. It's still a major
problem.

~~~
jerf
Of course, they own canon.com, and <http://canon> will generally redirect
there. Then they set up their own nameserver to simply do things like redirect
blah.blah.canon.com to blah.blah.canon.

Then you find yourself asking what the point of all this is again because DNS
is already hierarchical and once you own canon.com you already own an
effectively-infinite series of subdomains, so Canon is spending $185,000 +
ongoing maintenance so they can trim ".com" off and incur first-mover expenses
as they encounter those problems you mention and that seems hardly worth it.
But hey, who am I to argue?

------
gsiener
Shoot, was it MyWedding.canon or MyWedding.nikon?

~~~
clistctrl
Cannon would likely have e05.cannon i bet you meant to type
MyWedding.HackerNewsPhotographyInc

Thats not so bad, in my opinion.

------
est
IMHO too many TLD is harmful. It creates conflict with LAN hostnames.

~~~
hartror
User: I can't get to the canon website it just shows a print queue for the
other floor.

Sysadmin: . . . %$#%#$%@

------
oomkiller
I like this. For years, people have been tasked with remembering if a site was
.com, .org, etc. My parents often just type "google" or "ebay" into the
address bar, and expect it to go there. Now it will, using proper DNS
architecture instead of relying on google or opendns.

~~~
loup-vaillant
The _address_ bar? If so, your parents are a rare breed indeed. Most people,
even programmers, even when given the exact domain name, even with "awesome"
auto completion, use the search bar anyway.

------
jakecarpenter
Lets all pitch in and buy .localdomain ...

------
mortenjorck
The general public already has enough trouble remembering what sites are .com,
.net, and .org, and most are flummoxed by amusing uses of other national TLDs.
What purpose can this possibly serve Canon other than as a status symbol?

~~~
amackera
The general public will get used to it, I imagine.

------
allenbrunson
does anybody know what you have to do to register your own top-level domain? i
hope it's very very expensive, or else we've got another early-nineties-style
land-grab on our hands.

~~~
wrs
It's pretty darn expensive, starting with a $185,000 "evaluation fee" to
ICANN, and then whatever it costs to run a registrar. (I expect you'll be able
to outsource the latter.)

See <http://www.icann.org/en/topics/new-gtlds/strategy-faq.htm>

------
jonursenbach
Who's going to be the first to try registering pachelbels.canon?

~~~
mortenjorck
This really is going to be like the early days of the Internet all over again.

------
derefr
This, completely separately from anything Canon the company is doing, seems
like a useful TLD. HarryPotter.canon, Firefly.canon, etc—to be able to tell
when you're not looking at a fan-site of a creative work, but rather a place
where any messages delivered through it can be considered, well, _canonical_.

~~~
akkartik
Since when can you tell anything about a site by looking at the TLD?

~~~
derefr
To register a .ca domain, I have to be a Canadian citizen. To register a .edu
domain, you have to be an accredited university (and you don't really
"register" for it either—you just tell EDUCASE who the administrative contact
is going to be, and they set everything else up.) In my fantasy-land, .canon
could be handled by some international dual of the Writer's Guild in the same
way.

------
krainboltgreene
The Internet needs a better API, architecture.

~~~
jerf
DNS is a wonderful protocol for the most part. The problems you think you have
with it are almost certainly problems with the centrally-run canonical DNS,
but nothing stops you from not using it. You can use whatever DNS you like,
set up a parallel internet if you like. Of course, nobody can find you, but
that's the price of nonconformity. However, the mere fact that this is
possible will always tend to rein in the central repository, because if they
get bad enough, we can leave. It might hurt, but we can leave.

~~~
ez77
This sounds really interesting. Would you advise some further reading on this
topic? Thanks.

~~~
jerf
Honestly, the Wikipedia article is a pretty good start. From there you can
branch out into the RFCs if you want to really dig in, or go some other
routes.

By the way, don't be afraid to read the actual RFCs; many of them are quite
approachable with only moderate knowledge. Most of them discuss not just the
what, but the why, and it's generally OK to skip a section you don't care
about. Then, after reading the RFCs, you'll usually find that even if you
still don't understand it all, you understand it better than most people.

------
fseek
I am th only one who hate the idea of generic top-level domains? Will their
web site be accessible just as <http://.canon>? .

~~~
durana
There's nothing technical DNS-wise that would prevent the name 'canon' from
resolving to an IP address, so <http://canon> could work. They could also add
a MX record for the name 'canon' so @canon e-mail addresses would work too.
Maybe ICANN has rules around gTLDs that would prevent this type of use?

~~~
rbranson
I'm sure this will break a ridiculous number of regular expressions for email
address validation.

~~~
jedberg
Yes, but that is their own fault for trying to use a regex to validate email
addresses. :)

~~~
atlbeer
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~~~
_dan
I wish people would stop posting that. Yes, that covers most (though not all)
of the RFC definitions of what constitutes an email address, but in practice
you only want to accept a tiny subset of those.

~~~
statictype
Curious: Why would you want to accept only a tiny subset of those? What do you
gain by that?

~~~
_dan
Well, the really simple example is the string "postmaster". It is a perfectly
legitimate email address, and almost always deliverable. But rarely something
you want to actually accept.

