
Expanding the Internet domain space - cleverjake
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/05/expanding-internet-domain-space.html
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TazeTSchnitzel
I don't like the introduction of new gTLDs for a number of reasons:

1) It seems like a very clever way to milk rightsholders for hundreds of
thousands of dollars to protect their names

2) The root zone file will get pretty big

3) It's very expensive. Big companies will be able to afford their own TLDs,
but smaller businesses, organisations and individuals won't. We might see
.microsoft, but we might not see .linux

4) The G in gTLD loses its meaning. Top-level domains are no longer generic

5) The root names are now no longer neutral, they are corporate-influenced -
and hence the root nameserves are also no longer neutral, they're storing the
names of potentially hundreds of companies

~~~
stfu
The expense factor is the essential one. But it is a smart move, after almost
all of the "new" domain introductions (info,biz,pro...) failed to gain
momentum, the new strategy seems to try to harness the power of big
corporations to push their own extensions into the market.

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josscrowcroft
It's my understanding that .info didn't take off because all the internet
marketers and SEO people pounced on it as a way to pick up cheap meaningful
names, thus creating a swarm of appalling 'informational' sites. I don't know
of many if any .info sites I use regularly or ever.

OTOH, .biz and .pro didn't gain traction because they were shit.

~~~
jonmarkgo
I'd say .pro didn't gain traction because of the lengthy and restrictive
application process

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dmbaggett
How on earth could it ever be a good thing -- much less non-evil -- for a
single company (say, one with the "Google Docs" trademark) to exclusively
control a broad, generic TLD (say, ".docs")? Given the $185,000 application
fee, this is just another way the big players can tilt the playing field
against disruptive competitors aiming for their core products. (Think .apps,
.search, .mail, .social, etc.)

Let's hope consumers ignore these new TLDs and this dies a horrible, expensive
death for everyone involved.

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CJefferson
A cynical person might think it would be in Google's benefit to explode the
number of top-level domains, to reduce the (already) small chance that people
visit company.com directly, rather than going to google and searching for
'google'.

Personally, I approve of this. It is getting increasingly difficult to find a
'nice' domain name, and with this latest change I think most companies will
stop trying to buy companyname. _

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cleverjake
with all due respect, I say bananas.

"good" domain names are not terribly difficult to come by. Good branding, can
be though. Hulu, Google, Yahoo, Comcast are all fairly meaningless words,
until they were branded as such. It may be true that for someone that can't
afford the buy a ~$100-$5000 domain from a broker may have to look/think
harder to find a suitable domain, it is not THAT hard.

Country codes showed us that average users don't want other TLDs, unless they
are domain hacks and can be spoken easily (.ly, .it, etc). They almost always
prefer the .com, unless they can get a translated version using their own
country code (google.tld, etc).

This is purely to raise money for ICANN. I understand they need money, and I
understand they can do this, it just feels...bleh.

~~~
treitnauer
> Country codes showed us that average users don't want other TLDs, unless
> they are domain hacks and can be spoken easily (.ly, .it, etc). They almost
> always prefer the .com

Wrong and a typical US-centric view... Germany's preferred TLD is .DE and has
>15 mio registrations, .UK > 10 mio just to name the two largest ones.
Generally speaking the easier (and cheaper) to register a ccTLD the more wide-
spread it is in a country.

~~~
cleverjake
"They almost always prefer the .com, unless they can get a translated version
using their own country code (google.tld, etc)."

ccTLDs are never easier to register the gTLDs. Ever. Every single one of them
require more than a .com/.net.

Also, registrations != user preference.

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callmevlad
I find it sort of amusing that Google is interested in the ".lol" TLD,
especially when the post is authored by Vint Cerf. While I have my doubts
about how much of an impact the new TLDs will make in the domain market, it's
nice to see things shaking up a bit. Almost like the discovery of a new
continent in the real world, with only rich people being able to get to it
their fancy helicopters.

Also makes me wonder if this trend continues and leads to a TLD-less type of
keyword DNS system at some point, where typing "facebook" in the
address/awesome bar takes me directly to Facebook (versus some intermediate
search page).

~~~
jack-r-abbit
The problem with TLD-less system is that we already have mismatches of site
names with different TLDs. Facebook is great a example of one that would work.
But let's say you have callmevlad.com and I have callmevlad.net. With the TLD-
less system, who gets the traffic when someone puts "callmevlad" in the
Awesome Bar? All those conflicts would need to be resolved before this would
work. Maybe it should have been that way from the start but I think it is too
late to make that kind of switch. You can't get poop back into a horse without
making a big mess.

~~~
callmevlad
I'm not saying that there won't be any issues, but given that there is obvious
demand for ~$200K TLDs, I wouldn't be surprised if someone started to push it.

And (currently) putting things into the Awesome Bar either a) detects a domain
and goes there or b) goes to an intermediate step: the search engine. I'm
pretty sure some browsers do an intermediate DNS lookup before going to the
search engine. So I'm not sure if there would be a conflict - if I was first
to register "callmevlad" to point to some IP that I control, typing that in
always goes to my site.

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drcube
I hate to disagree with the inventor of the internet, but TLDs are not
necessary. Not new ones, not the old ones. (While I'm at it -- Mr. Gates, file
name extensions should not be necessary either.)

A domain name should be composed of a string of characters on a first
come/first serve basis. A company shouldn't have to buy multiple domains to
protect their brand.

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josscrowcroft
My big question: Why do we have TLDs in the first place? Why are they needed?

Or are they an accident of happenstance much like "<http://> ?

~~~
phillmv
My understanding: arbitrary decision back in the 80s. People needed some kind
of label-to-ip-address resolution protocol, and why not make it hierarchical?
A top-level-domain is just the top of the hierarchy in the domain name system.

Someone correct me if there's a juicier anecdote.

Here is what I mourn: that we write subdomains from right to left, instead of
right to left. We see it in programming namespaces, but I still wish we had
com.foo.bar.baz instead of baz.bar.foo.com

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gwright
The original intent of the hierarchical namespace was to distribute name space
authority along existing administrative boundaries.

At the top-level this was/is accomplished via the two-letter country code
domains.

The support/creation of generic top-level domains (com, net, org, edu
originally and .info, .biz and so on afterwards) was a mistake in that there
is no way for these top-level domains to map to any real-world administrative
boundary. Administration and adjudication of these domains requires a a
complex web of international agreements, legal frameworks, and a fair amount
of hand-waiving. It is a mess and will always be a mess as far as I can tell.

I don't see how the genie can be put back in the bottle but we would have been
much better off if all names had been within the two-letter country code
namespace.

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jack-r-abbit
I have mixed feelings about this. I can see some value in some new TLDs. But
the whole .xxx debacle (aka extortion scheme) left me hesitant to support
willy-nilly creation of more TLDs. When the .xxx TLD was being introduced,
mark owners had first dibs at paying a totally ridiculous price to make sure
they owned the .xxx version of their domain for fear it would be misused by
someone else and tarnish their name. A cynical person might think this is just
a way to extort money from companies that want to protect their brand.

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nopinsight
It's simply good economics for Google to support the expansion of TLDs. When
the costs of your complements go down, your market expands and/or you can
charge more for the same service.

For the interests of the public, additional supply also means lower cost in
general. Although desirable new TLDs may be relatively few in number, it will
still help drive down the costs of doing business, esp. for new startups and
experimental projects, at the expense of domain squatters. As an entrepreneur,
I welcome this.

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makecheck
Trademarks were incorrectly ported to the domain name space.

Normally a trademark applies to an industry. For example, I know of a company
called "Apple Moving" and I'm sure no one confuses it with the "Apple" of the
tech world.

In my opinion a site should be required to register only in an _industry_ or
other broad category (think Usenet). For instance maybe I can say
<http://www.apple.computers>. These industry domains should also be localized
automatically, e.g. typing <http://www.apple.ordinateurs> should bring you to
_exactly_ the same domain; the words used for standard industry terms in all
languages would be publicly available.

What should _not_ exist is a globally-screwed-up namespace that anyone with a
checkbook can warp to suit their own interests.

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caladri
The proliferation of new TLDs is already, quickly reducing some interesting
shibboleths of the web. In a few years, young audiences won't be expected to
realize how awkward and silly mid-'90s through '00s movie and TV show dialogue
seemed when the writers threw in silly TLDs to round out their jargon. That
some domain name ends in .ponycorn won't seem preposterous and silly. Probably
an opportunity for someone to pick up some of the more memorable fake TLDs
from recent history.

I do also wonder how it impacts organizations that have used internal TLDs to
manage their intranets, e.g. the FBI's .fbi. There have to be collisions at
some point, right? And as the amount of fanfare with each new TLD falls, it
seems likely that some of those things could get missed, and lead to some
interesting vulnerabilities.

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tomlogic
If over 50% of the domains out there are in the .com namespace, why will
creating more gTLDs change that? If the 14 gTLDs created in the past 28 years
haven't gained traction, what makes you think .lol or .youtube will?!

~~~
jonmarkgo
To be fair, there will be an obscene number of novelty .lol domains registered
- but it still wont make a dent in the .com namespace

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FreebytesSector
One of the arguments for this proposal was the protection of trademarked
names; however, the registration for protection would not be needed if this
change was never implemented. It seems to cause more problems than it solves.
I can see what Google might be trying. Perhaps they want to offer free domain
names at .google or something similar.

Back to the trademark defense, there are already solutions to protect the
trademarks. I obviously would not have gotten away with registering the
.google TLD even if I had $185,000 to do it.

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chris123
Using an extension other than .com (at least in the US), will result in at
least _some_ traffic "leaking" to the .com version of the domain name. The
question then becomes is that _some_ number big enough to matter?

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nthitz
.lol ? I wonder what other TLDs they went for in this category?

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
.+1?

(I doubt that's a valid domain name, but I'd love to see them try)

~~~
josscrowcroft
No doubt they've applied for .plus

