This needs to change as well. We nee to do away with the concept of a select few TLDs, indeed we need to scrap payed for subdomains/domains in general.
They are doing this a lot with more and more of the new TLDs. Defeats the purpose of even bothering with them. Create more, to open up the domain space, make it cost prohibitive, so we're back to where we started.
TLD/SLD should never have been a paradigm. I say merge SLDs from .com into TLDs and start selling TLDs only. With all pre existing TLDs grandfathered in.
What we don't need is a bunch of stupid TLDs that do nothing but make existing domain owners feel like they need to buy more.
What we really need is a single new TLD that is distributed so that it cannot be controlled by any particular government or corporation. Something like dot-bit.org, but with more momentum behind it.
TLDs were originally going to communicate something to the user, they never actually did.
Now they represent... how many wasted keystrokes per day? If Berners-Lee agonizes over the second slash after http, then ".com" has to be one of the biggest failures of usability in history.
TLDs were designed by folks who guessed most of the internet would be used for governments and non-profits, and commerce would be this token side niche. Now that nearly everything's .com (or under a quirky country domain to sidestep the whole system), it's lost any significance.
What a bunch of hand wavy bullshit. TLDs are like property. No one will buy into a system where they lose their valuable property. Facebook, Google, etc. aren’t interested in a decentralized, Wild West internet. The only way they get onboard with an alternative is if they control it and that’s way worse than the current system.
Today they sell .org claiming it’s not forever. Tomorrow they’ll be doing an IPO claiming it’ll be around for eternity.
My issue is that there’s corporations squatting on TLDs, which no normal person can afford.
Not only does this increase the advantages an established corporation can have over individuals or startups, it also ends up with Google literally domainsquatting entire TLDs just because they can.
And there’s no registrar above them that could simply revoke their domains for squatting.
And de is as much a ccTLD as .io – it’s not really the actual case anymore. DE is one of the largest domains overall, even counting gTLDs.
And we could simply solve this – use the power of democracy (aka, governments) to force TLD ownership to be entirely non-profit.
I don’t want to see large corporations buy massive amounts of TLDs (as google has done) and then sit on them. In addition to the antitrust issues that can appear with this.
How should a startup ever be able to compete in a reasonable timeframe with Google if we allow these corporations to grow ever further, and gain ever more power?
Companies shouldn't have ownership of TLDs, so why did you register so many TLDs that have nothing to do with Google, and which you don't allow to be used freely? Profits?
This is disgusting. The fact that corporations can control TLDs in the first place is disgusting, and I'd by far prefer if every TLD would have to be controlled by cooperatives (like denic) or other kinds of nonprofits, completely independent of everything else.
Especially in the current situation, where Google is cybersquatting on entire TLDs, just because they can. And while domains are frequently removed for squatting, nothing’s done with TLDs. Open the TLD for everyone, and use it, or get rid of it. But the current situation is disgusting. (I fundamentally disagree with companies controlling any kind of infrastructure)
Hah. Wow. At this point I feel like we should just do away with new TLDs altogether and let anyone register any domain
with any ending they want, if it's available. The idea that you can buy a TLD and then dole out domains if you have enough capital just seems antithetical to the ideal of an open internet. Unless you're a country, I guess.
There is a .amazon, a .google, a .cancerresearch, a .sex, a .rich (which costs thousands of dollars btw). Plenty of them such as .io and .tv are all completely untethered from their original meanings/purposes. At this point, a website is just a string with a '.' in it somewhere.
Instead of having 1500+ discretely decided upon TLDs why not just let people just create their own TLDs as long as they have a server to host the DNS?
I've been preaching for years that we need to get rid of TLDs. If we truly want the web to be a global/borderless place, get rid of the extensions and let us do http://companyname/ (I know it currently can't work like that, but I'm sure all the great minds out there can figure it out).
Ideally I would've liked to see it evolve into a more clean/friendly structure all together... web//companyname, yourname@companyname, etc.
Yes we'd get the clashes of people that currently have different TLDs of the same name, but maybe solve that by making the new structure an optional extra, so people buy the "new" domains from scratch (and if you currently own all major TLDs for your name, eg Microsoft/Google/Apple/etc, noone else can register your "new" domain). First to buy the new one, gets it. Person who had the differing TLD finds a slightly different one.
These new .whatever really piss me off. It's making the web a messier place, and confusing the average users even more, all for the sake for some greedy fatcats to charge stupid amounts to companies that can afford to throw money at it.
The TLD system is arguably broken, because it never turned out as hierarchical as it was supposed to. All the new TLDs do is force people to shell out more money to squat on pointless domains to avoid them being used for fraud (or, worse, by the competition).
This is a complete and total mess. Worse, when registering with one of these corp tld operators, how much can you trust they'll be around in XX number of years to keep your domain name alive?
Google will win big out of this, not because of the number of tld's they will own, but because the browser's address bar will become useless without a search engine.
Good opportunity for next-gen domain name resolvers!
It bothers me that we still have those useless suffixes attached to domains. What does „org“, „com“, „net“ even mean to the average user? Nothing. It’s nothing but a pointless ritual at this point, and after ICANN chose to add thousands of generic domains, they don’t have any significance left at all, except that nice names are very expensive now. It would be easier for everybody if we simply removed that extra step that is TLD names.
It's amazing that in the age of Google Search that anyone places any value on the TLD for a domain. Browser vendors have run dozens of studies that indicate that most people do not enter fully qualified domains in the address bar, which is why all address bars are wired into a search provider.
I feel like the the explosion of TLDs is a very thinly veiled money grab aimed at exploiting two groups of people:
Not the gp, but I see .org tld sale as a major breach of trust. Names are very, very serious business in internet.
What is next? .gov domain sale to unscrupulous private firm based on Bahamas? Per-nation dns systems without respect to each other whatsoever and resulting collapse of https, since it is based on dns?
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