Startup Applies For 307 GTLDs 239
itwbennett writes "Startup Donuts has set its sights on being a domain-name registry. With $100 million in venture capital in its pocket, Donuts has applied for 307 of the most generic of generic top-level domains. The new domains will be targeted toward specific services, said Jon Nevett, a cofounder and vice president of corporate affairs at Donuts. For example, the .tickets domain would be where Web users could expect to go to buy event tickets. 'There will be more names geared toward what consumers are looking for,' Nevett said."
List? (Score:5, Interesting)
Wasn't this supposed to be for trademarked brands? (Score:4, Interesting)
I really hope they revise this back to its original intent of corporate brands rather than generics.
Then again, one could argue that domains have become brands rather than the other way around, e.g. "flowers.com," which has no meaning without the TLD, so I suppose you could indeed have DotFlowers for the *.flowers TLD.
Wow, this is messy.
Re:How 1997 (Score:2, Interesting)
It's like everyone competing over a worthless chunk of land.
We go to gain a little patch of ground ...
That hath in it no profit but the name.
To pay five ducats, five, I would not farm it
This is the imposthume of much wealth and peace,
That inward breaks, and shows no cause without
Why the man dies.
- Hamlet, IV, iv
Re:Can we short them yet? (Score:5, Interesting)
I regularly start with a TLD and work backwards when I'm looking for things, rather than searching Google...
*facepalm*
Yeah I never really understood the logic here. The best site for searching isn't search.com, the best site for porn isn't porn.com, the best site for buying books isn't books.com, and we all know the best social networking site isn't socialnetwork.com. In fact I'm struggling to think of even one case where the name of a TLD actually is the best site in it's category? I don't understand why anyone would pay a premium for a TLD when it is demonstrated to make no difference to the success of your site?
Re:I hope they do not start to put limit on the Ne (Score:4, Interesting)
It's not like they are sticking to the rules about .org and .net, so I don't think they would mandate you need a .tickets to sell tickets.
Mandating that you would have to purchase one would only make sense if you needed help to sell out the space. With asshat squatters and speculators I sincerely doubt they will have problems selling it.
Re:List? (Score:4, Interesting)
After looking through the list [newgtldsite.com] I am surprised at how few of them caught my eye. At $185k a pop I thought, wrongly, that the list would be of a bit higher quality than your typical domain name goldrush when a new tld is released, but I'm not sure there are really any on that list that I would consider registering a domain with. The only ones I wouldn't mind are .web and .tech, but I'm rather indifferent when we've always had a tld (.net) that encompasses both of those.
Many just don't sound right, like .dog, the only domain names I can come up with that don't sound ridiculous followed by "dot dog" are generic types of dogs, like sheep.dog or hunting.dog, and even then the singular doesn't make any sense, hunting.dogs sounds much better. .sport is another WTF, whoever ends up with blood.sport may be content, but there's nothing after that. And .website is great for those times when you don't know if the website you're on is a website.
.sex and .porn were entirely predictable, and I have no doubt that .rocks and .sucks sites will soon plague us all, but I think .inc and .llc are maybe the biggest winners so far, as a .com alternative they should rake in big bucks, but it makes me wonder why we didn't have these 20 years ago.
I wish they whould have restricted it to 4 chars max, maybe even 3, the majority of this is more .travel and .museum tlds that will be about as successful.
My biggest surprise is that the two things I most expected to happen did not, at least not yet. I thought for sure that the MLB, NFL, NBA, NHL at a minimum would be the first in line. It seems like a natural fit to have yankees.mlb, patriots.nfl, etc, it looks like .MLS is the only one so far. And that there would be some common file extensions registered like .txt, .exe, .ttf, .pdf, .zip, and seriously no .mp3 ?
And still no indication of a clownpenis.fart any time soon...