

Ask HN: new top level domains? - bachback

In a couple of months there are going to be 700 new TLD&#x27;s. The first ones are already live. Yet, there is little or no discussion of this on HN and the blogosphere. Why? Isn&#x27;t this a significant change of the internet?
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fbnt
To get a glimpse of the impact of this new TLDs you can just look at how much
ICANN charged the registrars 'cartel' to open up this new top level names:
185K for each name [1].

This, I suppose, means each registrar plan to make a little more than a few
thousands for each domain extension if they want to be profitable. They know
already it's not going to be a widespread phenomena, otherwise the greedy
bunch running ICANN would've charged a lot more.

Still I don't understand why the internet top-level domain control is in the
hands of a private and fake non-profit organization, instead of being directly
controlled by an international, third party organism such as the United
Nations or something similar.

[1] [http://www.techspot.com/news/47031-icann-selling-custom-
top-...](http://www.techspot.com/news/47031-icann-selling-custom-top-level-
domains-for-185000.html)

~~~
bachback
very interesting, didn't know about the 185k. Why fake non-profit? I think the
whole thing is quite a mess, and there is very little analysis.

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amac
Perhaps. But consider the amount of Marketing dollars behind .com and your
country's tld. Add to this multi-billion dollar businesses (Amazon, Google,
Ebay etc) using existing tld's and one should question what impact new tld's
will make. (Especially if you plan to invest in them)

