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?
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.
Agreed, that's why I never use or recommend any else use any of the domains run by private operators, just asking for troubles like the above. The attempted sale of org was scary.
Which is all very unfortunate because some of those TLDs are quite nice, like .forum. What a mess we've gotten ourselves into.
Should have been kept as a public service, but no putting the genie back in the bottle now. Only way out of this mess is a distributed system, but I can't imagine what that would like without a massive proliferation of competing services.
Interesting article. One concern is that the steep cost of the new TLDs might make it more difficult to establish a domain name that has "credibility". For instance, second-level domains under .com might eventually be seen by some consumers as "second-rate" ("inferior goods" in economic terms, perhaps the way some users view non-.com domains like .biz now).
Sites with their own TLD might be seen as more credible consumer destinations, establishing 2 different tiers of credibility, and reinforcing the standing of incumbent e-commerce sites.
You can imagine that having your own TLD might factor into your search engine rankings at some point or might be given more leeway by spam detectors.
The steep $185K registration fee for a service whose cost to provide and maintain is pretty miniscule in comparison does not level the playing field.
Simultaneously this weds ICANN even more strongly to the interests of deep-pocketed clients and would make it even harder for non-commercial entities to get fair treatment.
Wealthy organizations should not have special privileges when it comes to naming rights. Especially when the supply of naming rights is essentially unlimited. This is a good example where a quasi-public good with nearly limitless supply is privatized and made artificially scarce for the benefit of a few.
And what about users who register second-level domains within a privately-managed TLD? Would they be subject to even more sweeping seizures and shutdowns for objectionable content? ICANN may find it easier to deflect both the responsibility and blame for such "oversight" onto privately-managed TLDs once the number of such domains increases. "Sorry your domain was snatched, but you'll have to take it up with .SomeTLD."
Hopefully P2P-DNS and namecoin will gain traction.
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)
Yes, this, though I really am disappointed in ICANN here. ICANN should not have sold a TLD known to be in heavy use already. Their desire for cash from this process seems to have overwhelmed their good sense in managing the domain system.
Yeah, this whole TLD expansion program seems like it was extremely poorly handled by ICANN. I think it was a good idea to expand TLDs beyond the country codes and the original ones (TLDs like .travel or .nyc are genuinely useful), but approving TLDs that could be used for defamation (like .sucks) or scams like this is clearly a huge mistake. Also, putting it in the hands of private companies that can charge extortionate rates for domains is just terrible.
I've long held the view that DNS is no longer fit for purpose. It made sense back in the day, but what is the real point of TLDs these days? It means many folk have to register their name multiple times and there's problems with domain-name squatting. It's just a money-making ploy now.
Whenever people talk about new tlds, I always think mostly about names like google.con or googl.ecom. Yeah, yeah, it's cool that you can get some awesome tld, but I don't see the point. What's wrong with .com/org/net?
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.
Very disputable. They haven't made the .org tld, it wasn't a private resource (read: private as in used to generate profit), they just captured it and turned it into private property.
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!
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.
Together with selling .org to Ethos Capital, we're getting a worrying picture of problems with the current model of managing TLDs.
Managing TLDs is a lot of power in 2019, since the Internet is such a powerful player now.
I'm not sure what's the best way to manage it, but I am sure that if we leave it as is, we'll see more and more deal with dodgy commercial entities or more entities getting domain names they should not own.
Good to see that the .com tld will finally start to become a non-priority thanks to this. People/startups/companies in other countries will hopefully start to think twice before they purchase a .com domain name and consider using their own countries tld or a tld more appropriate to their website.
Indeed. I'm quite disgusted by the principle of the thing. Something about being deprived of property without due process of law.
My primary domain is a .net. I'm loathe to part with it since the TLD is a useful descriptor in this case, but now I'm very seriously considering registering and switching over to the .eu equivalent, which is only a couple bucks more per year.
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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