
Ask HN: Shouldn't gTLDs be non-generic? - aeurielesn
Shouldn't the gTLDs express directly the company itself?<p>I can understand let's say '.apple', but '.app' is just too much. Yeah, Apple runs an "App Store". But, be serious they are not the only ones and that doesn't give you any rights over such a generic TLD. The same applies for mostly all other name grabs.<p>If they want their own TLD kingdom then let them be, but not by powering them with such generic ones. It is so clear that these companies don't have any intention to make these TLDs publicly available.<p>Can anyone clarify me how these things got through?
======
MPSimmons
Tragedy of the commons.

Plus greed on the part of ICANN. You can only sell one .google TLD, but there
are thousands of relevant words in the dictionary for anyone with a deep
enough coin purse.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Greed by its own board members, too. One of them, after seeing through opening
up the gTLD market... quit to start a company that filed for over a hundred
TLDs.

------
darxius
What will this mean for Chrome users who use the address bar also as a search
bar for their favorite search engine. If apple, for example, owns
'<http://apple>, what would happen when I type 'apple' in the search bar? What
if I'm actually searching for pictures of apples? Scary stuff.

~~~
petercooper
Are there any TLDs that are valid hostnames on their own? Also, will this
become true for the new ones? I certainly hope not.

~~~
kijin
I don't see why they won't be valid hostnames as long as they resolve to an IP
address. "localhost" is a valid hostname, too. A lot of existing software, of
course, will complain that it's not a valid FQDN.

~~~
petercooper
Do you know of any that work that way though? I'm just intrigued if any exist.
The only example I can think of where a generic suffix resolves separately on
its own too is <https://gov.uk> but that's still a second level domain.

UPDATE: Aha, "to" has an A record. It doesn't respond to an HTTP request for
me but it does exist at least.

UPDATE2: OK, there are quite a lot: <http://ydal.de/a-records-on-top-level-
domains/> .. <http://dk/> goes to the .dk registry.

------
JamesPeterson
The ICANN administration is notorious for its motives. While a public
organization, many of its decisions are clearly to benefit their own and are
clearly not in the public benefit.

------
eli
Couldn't you say the same for .com domains? Is it fair that one company gets
to own search.com?

~~~
matthewowen
I don't think so. TLDs are, by convention, categorical in a way that
search.com isn't. It's problematic for a company to own a category in that
way.

------
gyardley
Heh. You want to see generic, check out Verisign's applications. '.com' in a
whole bunch of scripts other than Latin - they've applied for the Cyrillic
script 'ком', the Hebrew script 'קוֹם', and what I assume is the same thing in
a bunch of languages I don't read.

On the other hand, I'm sure they'll make them publicly available - for the
right price.

~~~
tomerv
There's also كوم which is 'com' in Arabic.

I'm not sure how the gTLD are supposed to work technically, but it seems to me
that VeriSign made a mistake when registering the Hebrew '.com': Their version
uses the Holam diacritic (the dot over the middle letter), which is not used
in every-day Hebrew (it's mostly used to teach reading and to differentiate
between different words with the same spelling, when such a thing might cause
confusion). In any case, most computer users in Israel don't even know how to
add diacritic marks, so I don't see anyone typing such an address in their
browser.

~~~
gyardley
Yep, I'm guessing whoever wrote the Verisign application didn't know about
כתיב מלא. Whoops.

------
personlurking
Generic gTLDs should remain free for all to use. Of course, this makes it hard
for some companies whose names are generic but to me app.apple is easy enough
to remember. Amazon.books? Perfect. Google.books? Works well, too. From a
user/customer point of view, making generic gTLDs non-purchasable makes
perfect sense.

------
watmough
Who cares. This is just another way to fleece idiots.

How are those non-standard .cc addresses working out for everyone.

------
SkyMarshal
I've always thought the entire TLD taxonomy was an ugly, unsystematic hack,
but I can't actually think of a better way to do it.

Were any alternative methods of allocating TLDs ever proposed?

------
buster
Thought the same. most of those are ridiculous...

------
mparlane
The fact that apple will literally control <http://apple/> is more scary.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
This thing _could_ have its benefits. If Apple grabbed .icloud, say, then
people could have yourname.icloud, or something like that.

~~~
MPSimmons
Yes, and .icloud makes a lot of sense, because it's company or product
specific. .cloud makes NO sense because neither Apple nor Amazon nor any other
company owns the idea of clouds.

------
lambada
I agree with your point, but your specific example is flawed as Apple did not
apply for .app.

