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Networking The Internet

First New Generic Top Level Domains Opening 198

umdenken points out that the first batch of generic Top Level Domains will go live within the next several days, including .bike, .guru, .clothing, .holdings, .singles, .plumbing, and .ventures. (Early access began Jan. 29th.) ICANN CEO Fadi Chehade says there is currently huge demand for ICANN to reopen their program to let companies run their own gTLD. He said, "Many, many brands and many, many communities didn't know about the GTLD program. I get significant amounts of questions about when can we open the next round, because certainly there is a bit of angst that if Canon [who applied for the .canon gTLD] uses this to do an incredible mass customization campaign to win users to their product, I'm sure the brand next to them will say "Why aren't we doing this?" So I do believe this will snowball. But many will find a .com or whatever they have now will be good enough, and I believe that one excludes the other." He also said the $185,000 price tag to do so is likely to drop.
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First New Generic Top Level Domains Opening

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  • Just saying... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    This is a terrible idea for the internet but a great idea for the businesses (eg. custom marketing like the summary mentions) and ICANN (because who wouldn't love large wads of cash!)

    Can anyone give a few points on how this is good for the general internet user?

    captcha: complete

    • Re:Just saying... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by game kid ( 805301 ) on Sunday February 02, 2014 @03:46AM (#46132593) Homepage

      The general internet user gets to be tracked, advertised-to, and generally fucked over as usual. But the address bar will look swag with that .bike in it, yo.

    • Re:Just saying... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by mikael ( 484 ) on Sunday February 02, 2014 @07:52AM (#46133141)

      Now you can make your domain name look like a USENET discussion forum:

      alt.fashion.goth.clothing
      comp.languages.cobol.programmer.guru

      • Cue scammer in 5, 4, 3...

      • Now you can make your domain name look like a USENET discussion forum:

        alt.fashion.goth.clothing
        comp.languages.cobol.programmer.guru

        alt.binaries.sex.pictures.erotica.bestiality.hamster.duct-tape - You can expect our A-1 tapes of sexy colors to take a beating and still provide you the protection required; be sure to catch our ads in the newspaper.

        Freaking people have reinvented the wheel.

        • Freaking people have reinvented the wheel.

          No, they just found another way to monetize it...
          I look for a browser add-on to appear soon to black list/white list the new TDL's like ABP does for ad domains...

    • It would have been more honest to ban generic terms for TLDs (except the big five), and instead require the new TLDs to be the names or reasonable abbreviations of the controlling registrars. So instead of ".bike", they would have registered... wait they're called Donuts? Seriously? You gave a TLD to a company called Donuts? Sigh. Okay, bad example. But you get my point.

      I think there is a lingering cringe against companies (*cough*Microsoft*cough*) having their own private TLD. But, in practice, that's all

      • Re:Just saying... (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Sunday February 02, 2014 @10:24AM (#46133735)

        Well, I could think of a few reasons why Apple should not have .apple. One of them being that there's allegedly a fruit by that name that even allegedly has older rights to that name.

        But in general, what good would it serve? So FINALLY, after all those years, the internet community learned that their company can be found at "www.company.com". What would we gain by getting ".company" now instead? Aside of having to reteach everyone? There is exactly zero net value to the internet users.

        What? Oh, we could be certain that .company is actually $company? We already can if $company gives a shit about its domain name. It's trivial for $company to win the rights to "www.company.com" from the average domain squatter. And if they don't give a fuck, well, then .company won't save you from a scammer either because guess what, they can register that themselves. It's fairly trivial to open up $company in some country the name of which ends in -stan and claim the TLD. If nobody challenges it, who would keep you from doing so?

        So what exactly do you expect from .company? Personally, I see exactly zero benefit. Well, aside of the benefit for the ICANN because everyone HAS to buy his .company TLD lest some scammer does.

        • And i suspect Paul McCartney and the owners of the rights to apple music might disagree :-)
          • And i suspect Paul McCartney and the owners of the rights to apple music might disagree :-)

            and I suspect they won't.
            From APPLE Press Release February 2007 [apple.com]:

            CUPERTINO, California and LONDON—Apple® Inc. and The Beatles’ company Apple Corps Ltd. are pleased to announce the parties have entered into a new agreement concerning the use of the name “Apple” and apple logos which replaces their 1991 Agreement. Under this new agreement, Apple Inc. will own all of the trademarks related to “Apple” and will license certain of those trademarks back to Apple Corps for t

        • by zieroh ( 307208 )

          Well, I could think of a few reasons why Apple should not have .apple. One of them being that there's allegedly a fruit by that name that even allegedly has older rights to that name.

          Corporations are people. Fruits are not. I'm personally against expanding the right of personhood to fruits.

        • Re:Just saying... (Score:5, Interesting)

          by FatLittleMonkey ( 1341387 ) on Sunday February 02, 2014 @11:30AM (#46134105)

          It's clear that ICANN wants to create a bunch of privately owned TLD registrars. Good or bad, they have been pushing that barrow for several years now. But the current scheme hides those registrars behind idiotic faux-generic TLDs as if they were the original .com .net .org .edu .gov .mil. I'm just saying that it's more honest if you want to allow companies to buy private TLDs, then use their actual names.

          ICANN has this cringe against letting companies use their names as TLDs, but want a bunch of registrars running private TLDs. It's self-contradictory and results in the current stupidity.

          If nobody challenges it, who would keep you from doing so?

          $185,000 non-refundable application fee plus $1 million per year. Plus whatever additional rules ICANN wants to attach. This isn't intended for the average company. If it went beyond, say, a hundred company TLDs, I'd raise the annual fee until the number drops below that. If it was below 25 coTLDs, I'd reduce the fee until it rises.

          Let me put it another way: Why should the island of Tuvalu be allowed to have a TLD, (actually leased to and run out of a ISP in Canada IIRC), but not Google? (Or rather why should a small ISP in Canada have the entirely for-profit .tv TLD, when Google/Apple/Microsoft/Yahoo/ATT/Amazon/etc can't?)

          Or for that matter, why should Nauru, population 9000, but not California, population 38 million?

          • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

            by Anonymous Coward

            Because some nuclear power somewhere thinks that those countries should have sovereignty, and no other nuclear power wants to seriously dispute the issue.

            Countries are countries because there is a military protecting them. As countries, they have sovereignty. They make their own laws, and so it makes sense to give them a TLD on which their laws apply.

        • Well, I could think of a few reasons why Apple should not have .apple. One of them being that there's allegedly a fruit by that name that even allegedly has older rights to that name.

          You'd think a pane of glass would have the same advantage. Windows shoved that gimme out the watching hole in the wall.

        • So you just pointed out WHY we will get .company.

          ICANN will have every company out there, buying and squatting on .company, and then a few million speculators and more squatters hoping to mind gold by having .spoon, and .gold, and .shovel -- every single word in the dictionary will have to be bought from iCANN.

          Then of course Coke will have to register coke.coke, and IBM ibm.ibm -- just because.

          There's ZERO use to the world for this confusion, but when has that stopped anything when profits are on the line?

      • ban generic terms for TLDs (except the big five)

        Oops. Big six. I forgot .mil.

    • Re:Just saying... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ObsessiveMathsFreak ( 773371 ) <obsessivemathsfreak.eircom@net> on Sunday February 02, 2014 @08:37AM (#46133257) Homepage Journal

      Can anyone give a few points on how this is good for the general internet user?

      The presence of a custom TLD on a website is an instant indicator for me that the website is almost certainly a flash in the pan marketing project, not being taken very seriously by its owners, and probably not worth my time to click on the link.

      Pluses all-round I'd say.

    • New domains like these are difficult to sell as advertising hooks because so many common folk insist on adding '.com' to the end of anything other. But in what way are they bad for the Internet?
    • by Monoman ( 8745 )

      Money grab. Without enforcement on TLD usage (new and old) they can be meaningless.

    • It is getting to the point where domain names themselves are useless; you basically need a search engine for everything. Maybe we should just switch to IPV6 addresses instead; it will make things easier...

    • No, it's bad for businesses. It means they have to invest funds in protecting their brand. Just like how the .xxx domain people blanketed television with ads, saying how they'll extort your non-porn business by registering your name under their TLD.

  • Generic? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by tgv ( 254536 ) on Sunday February 02, 2014 @03:21AM (#46132503) Journal

    Nobody knew about GTLD? Perhaps that's because .bike isn't really "generic", is it? And it's pretty Anglo-centric too.

    • by Grismar ( 840501 )

      I agree with your point about it being Anglo-centric.

      Unless of course the Igbo-speaking Nigerians really wanted a ".automotive" TLD, the Japanese wanted ".bicycles" or the Yoruba in Benin wanted ".healthy". :)

      • by xaxa ( 988988 )

        I agree with your point about it being Anglo-centric.

        Did you look at the list? The first one is in Arabic: (Just a redirect.) [www.xn--ngbc5azd], http:/// [http]./ probably won't work on Slashdot, so try http://xn--ggbla1c4e.xn--ngbc5... [xn--ggbla1...--ngbc5azd] instead. .VERSICHERUNG is for the "German speaking insurance industry", .BERLIN is obvious, and there's a few in Russian, Chinese and Japanese.

    • And it's pretty Anglo-centric too.

      That one is, but there are many non-English GTLDs, too, including some that are in non-latin character sets. For example, the first one launched is a Japanese phrase, written in Kanji.

  • why do we even have .com or .org or .net on the end. Surely the classification of organization at a address can be stored in some other way, and not be so important as to need to be typed in every time you go to that url. I mean, why cant i just type 'slashdot' in the address bar. Damn near everyone defaults to .com anyway.
    • by mysidia ( 191772 ) on Sunday February 02, 2014 @03:43AM (#46132579)

      why do we even have .com or .org or .net on the end.

      To identify which registration authority the domain name was created under.

      Also... to distinguish domain names from just any other name.

      I'll give you an example: "BOOKS"

      No one entity should get a monopoly on the name BOOKS. If you type BOOKS into your browser address bar; you should not be summarily redirected to whoever happened to get there first ---- logically, you would be presented search results based on relevance.

      The authority system allows, there to be a BOOKS.COM under the Commercial registration authority... that might be a book store, Or an accounting vendor....

      There can be a BOOKS.ORG, under the non-profit organization reg. authority ---- that might, for example, be a library-related organization.

      Then there can be a BOOKS.EDU under the education reg. authority --- that domain might, for example, be an institution of higher learning that specializes in the library sciences or authorship/book writing.

      Such domains a .INFO; were added later, and Don't really fit logically in the original DNS system.

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward

        No one entity should get a monopoly on the name BOOKS.

        If all TLDs were random six letter combinations, or local geographic regions, I'd see your point, but with the TLDs we have now, using your logic, ONE books.edu for all institutions of higher learning in the world is about as dumb as one books.

        Either make a lot more of them, or get rid of them... doing nothing isn't solving your problem.

      • by SuricouRaven ( 1897204 ) on Sunday February 02, 2014 @04:27AM (#46132717)

        That's the idea, anyway. In practice .com became such a buzzword everyone wanted one.

        • by Kjella ( 173770 )

          More like if you had anything of the slightest value under a non-".com" domain the equivalent ".com" domain will be registered for ad squatting and/or to get a payout from you. They're not meaningful either, last I checked slashdot for example is not a non-profit, it's owned by a quite regular for-profit holding company so why is is NOT slashdot.com? And I never know what ".net" was supposed to be, I mean I can't even tell without looking up some sort of definition and even that one is vague as fsck "organi

      • Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)

        by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Sunday February 02, 2014 @06:41AM (#46133001)
        Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • by reikae ( 80981 )

          I think that the fact that you had to point out the double slashes shows why replacing the dots with slashes is a bad idea.

        • by dissy ( 172727 ) on Sunday February 02, 2014 @09:39AM (#46133471)

          And while I am at it, the order of the domain should have been reversed. So instead of e.g. tech.slashdot.org.us, It would have been better to go for us.org.slashdot.tech as you then follow the tree. Even neater if there would have been no dots, but slashes instead:
          http://us/org/slashdot/tech//d... [us] (Please note the second double slashes to show where the domain ends and the file system begins.

          Actually in the 80s that is pretty much how it was.

          UUCP mail was routed from one mail server to another to another before finally (hopefully!) landing in a users mail spool on a server they frequently checked more than others. This one done with whats called "bang paths" as they used ! as the separator, and the route was listed left to right ending with a double colon and the username.

          Even at the time DNS replaced hosts.txt on the ARPAnet, there were still other connected networks like BITnet and CSnet using different protocols that used mixed forms of routing paths, and neither network required NSF approval to join like the ARPAnet did.
          BITnet was IBMs VMS network, and anyone that had a VAX with the RSCS software installed and could afford a leased line was able to get on the network and get data to/from the arpanet.
          There was a serious perceived threat from these other protocols, most of which lacked a unified or centrally managed naming lookup scheme (although that is exactly what RSCS was, although only for VAX)

          At the time each protocol pretty much only looked out for their own, except for DNS which was advertized as "generic" and "non-proprietary" as only IP was required. DNS was also an open standard like IP and TCP. That was enough for DNS to "win" and become the one true naming system.

          I'm not sure why they decided to use a right to left hierarchy beyond just trying to differentiate themselves from existing protocols...
          But it doesn't follow the URL/URI standard because that wasn't to be invented for another 10 years or so.
          As you say, hindsight is always 20/20

        • by nurb432 ( 527695 )

          You clearly don't have a clue on is going on here. Time to turn in your geek card ( which i suspect is forged anyway ) and get off the net.

          People like you only clutter things up for the rest of us.

        • by terrab0t ( 559047 ) on Sunday February 02, 2014 @10:35AM (#46133781)
          According to Wikipedia [wikipedia.org], Tim Berners Lee mostly agrees with you on the URL format. From the Wikipedia page:

          Berners-Lee later regretted the use of dots to separate the parts of the domain name within URIs, wishing he had used slashes throughout. For example, http://www.example.com/path/to/name would have been written http:com/example/www/path/to/name. Berners-Lee has also said that, given the colon following the URI scheme, the two slashes before the domain name were also unnecessary.

        • they are not the global tlds are above the country codes
        • by Twinbee ( 767046 )
          I would prefer no extensions whatsoever, not country codes, not setup types (like com, net, org). Just the actual domain name itself, perhaps prefaced with just "www.".

          That would make for a far more unified and consistent system, as then each website owner can put whatever they want in that name, including dots and dashes if they so wish.
      • Amazon registered the .book TLD, I believe.
    • by satuon ( 1822492 )

      The way I see it, .com is the generic domain. It's not that hard to append it to everything. The only useful other domains are .edu and .gov. The national domains are somewhat useful because they let you know it's a local site, although I don't understand why they need it, really, they should just use .com also.

    • by mikael ( 484 )

      In the early day of internet research, they wanted to distinguish between corporations there to make a profit, non-profit organisations, educational groups and the military. So they had ".com" = corporations/companies, ".org" = non-profit organisation, and ".edu" for the educational research groups, ".mil" for the military", and ".net" for the companies that managed the continent wide networks built from fibre-optics and satellite communications.

      That gets extended to giving each country it's own domain ".uk

      • by S.O.B. ( 136083 )

        So they had ".com" = corporations/companies, ".org" = non-profit organisation, and ".edu" for the educational research groups, ".mil" for the military", and ".net" for the companies that managed the continent wide networks built from fibre-optics and satellite communications.

        .com is derived from the word "commerical" [ietf.org] which includes but is not limited to corporations and companies.

        Back in 1985 when .net was created I don't think there was "continent wide networks built from fibre-optics". .net was intended for network technology companies, ISPs (local, national and international) and infrastructure companies. Although, no restrictions were put on it's use so it has become a general purpose name.

    • Not outside of America - you must be channeling Team America world police :-)
  • Oh joy. I can just hardly wait for the race to get .obama, .clinton, .christie, .huckabee, etc.

    What a wonderful advance for the intarwebs...

    (sarcasm warning for the insight impaired)

    • by rossdee ( 243626 )

      "Oh joy. I can just hardly wait for the race to get .obama, .clinton, .christie, .huckabee, etc."

      I think the NJ governor will be saving his money for legal fees

      anyway some names )like Christie) are not uncommon

      • by Hartree ( 191324 )

        "I think the NJ governor will be saving his money for legal fees"

        Now, now. It ain't over until the fat lady sings about the fat man.

    • by jd2112 ( 1535857 )

      Oh joy. I can just hardly wait for the race to get .obama, .clinton, .christie, .huckabee, etc.

      What a wonderful advance for the intarwebs...

      (sarcasm warning for the insight impaired)

      For some reason my .christie domain seems to be blocked. I guess I should have endorsed him.

  • $185,000 is Raqueteering.

  • Landrush scams (Score:5, Informative)

    by MindPrison ( 864299 ) on Sunday February 02, 2014 @04:02AM (#46132643) Journal
    Domain peddlers are going bonkers now, I tried to get my name as a .guru, but it ended up costing a small fortune...so I steered away. At first...40 bucks seems nice for a 1 year .guru name, but then there are "early registration fees" so called landrush fees that can cost several thousand dollars, and they even have hefty admin fees that costs several hundred dollars...stay away from the scammers, and they're plentiful right now.
  • With all the AJAX crap going on web browsers, why not go full circus also with the domain names while we are at it.
  • by Kaenneth ( 82978 ) on Sunday February 02, 2014 @04:08AM (#46132661) Journal

    I have as much trust in a random TLD as a site in the .cx TLD; and plan to just block/ignore addresses from them.

  • Or.. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by hydrofix ( 1253498 ) on Sunday February 02, 2014 @04:34AM (#46132739)
    .. maybe it would be fairest to just cancel this whole private gTLD expansion lunacy?
    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) *

      If it means and end to every startup having a lame txt speak misspelling name like Flickr then I'm all for it.

  • by Gravis Zero ( 934156 ) on Sunday February 02, 2014 @04:44AM (#46132759)

    how about we just drop the farse that are TLDs? the only TLDs with any credability are .gov and .edu because those are regulated. all the other TLDs are just one big bag of everything else. nobody wants to get a .net if .com is taken because of the confusion that ensues.

    • Here in Australia, we have regulations (socialism!) that require anyone registering a .com.au domain to have some connection to the name in their registered business eg if I want to register bike.com.au, my business needs to have demonstrable connection to the bike business somehow. Sure some trash slips through the cracks, but on the whole works well to keep .com.au domains relatively reliable. Not sure why more registrars don't enforce similar requirements.
    • the only TLDs with any credability are .gov and .edu because those are regulated. all the other TLDs are just one big bag of everything else.

      .mil seems pretty controlled, too.

      Many of the ccTLD's are at least superficially regulated; you have to pay more for registration and maybe even have a representative in the geographic area (which just costs more for administration).

  • A few years ago a bunch of people from Sweden announced they would create a distributed, non-trackeable DNS system. What happened to that?
    • A few years ago a bunch of people from Sweden announced they would create a distributed, non-trackeable DNS system. What happened to that?

      The problem of fraudulent servers being introduced becomes significant. An authoritative hierarchical system means there's one and only one place to go to start looking up a new domain: the root servers. Distributed systems have no such authoritative root, so the process of figuring out what the real address is in such a system is complex. Complex enough that nobody has really finished the job, though there are detailed research papers and some fairly good proposals.

      In short, people are assholes, and tha

  • one word (Score:5, Insightful)

    by vikingpower ( 768921 ) on Sunday February 02, 2014 @05:08AM (#46132811) Homepage Journal
    .bs
  • by _Shad0w_ ( 127912 ) on Sunday February 02, 2014 @05:33AM (#46132867)

    Meh. It's not like most people pay attention to the domains. They just go to their search engine of choice and type-in "Canon" (or whatever they happen to be looking for) and if they can be bothered they look for the most useful result or just click on the first one if they can't.

  • popcorn at 11 (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Tom ( 822 ) on Sunday February 02, 2014 @05:55AM (#46132939) Homepage Journal

    Welcome to the end of a meaningful domain name system.

    Yeah, I know they tried raping it before, but the world largely ignored .biz, .info, .aero and I even forgot what the others were. Or have you seen more than two domains in those TLDs in the recent years?

    But brands, that was a gold mine. Advertisers are parasites and they will be happy to convince their marks^H^H^Hcustomers that they really, absolutely must have a fitting TLD now. And since in large corporations (that have the money), the people they talk to are also marketing dudes, it'll work.

    It's a huge scam, but it'll rape the usefulness of the DNS hierarchy. Too bad we didn't put everyone within ICANN to the sword while there was still time.

    • by matfud ( 464184 )

      there are a fair few .aero domains but you are unlikely to come across them unless you are in the industry (and many .aero owners also have more common TLD's).

    • Welcome to the end of a meaningful domain name system.

      As you type this, on slashdot.org

      The domain extension was originally created for non-profits, but this designation no longer exists and today it is commonly used by schools, open-source projects, and communities as well as by for-profit entities. - wiki

      The domain name system hasn't really been meaningful in terms of descriptive for a very long time now. The only 'meaning' there was, for a long time, was that if you didn't have a .com domain, you might

      • by xaxa ( 988988 )

        Even now, if you have a domain name that's perfectly descriptive - say you're a business in Zambia - you're going to have more initial success with tompopcorn.com than you would with tompopcorn.co.zm , as people don't recognize '.zm'. See other comments about people ignoring the new TLDs the same way they would ignore a .cx domain (granted, part of that might be experience with some of the shadier sites that tend to choose .cx, .tk, etc.).

        I don't know much about Zambia, but I'm sure Zambians recognise .zm. Only having a CCTLD is no barrier in most countries, or their neighbouring countries, which is what most businesses focus on. Search for .CX websites and there are plenty based on Christmas Island.

        If I've forgotten the domain, I often guess .uk (.co.uk, .org.uk) as it's more likely to take me straight to the British website of a multinational, and less likely to take me to an identically-named company elsewhere in the Anglosphere.

        • by dbIII ( 701233 )

          Search for .CX websites and there are plenty based on Christmas Island

          There are hardly any computers at all on Christmas Island. There are only a couple of thousand people living there, most of whom are prisoners and workers in the detention centre.
          It's an interesting place but the domain was nothing but a cash grab for an Australian government owned business selling domains for porn sites at the same time they were running an anti-porn campaign to get rid of anything porn related under ".au".

          • by xaxa ( 988988 )

            I meant there are plenty relative to the size of the territory. See https://www.google.co.uk/searc... [google.co.uk]

            • by dbIII ( 701233 )
              However it's a safe bet that there are more domains registered there than the total population (which turns out to be about double what I mentioned above - a lot of prisoners there at the moment). So while there may be a couple of dozen sites actually related to the place it's a bit of a drop in the bucket.
      • by Tom ( 822 )

        As you type this, on slashdot.org

        Yes? I run a .org domain myself, which for 10+ years was the TLD you'd pick for any site that was not a company, university or government/military entity.

        Sure, these days slashdot is for-profit, but it wasn't always.

        The domain name system hasn't really been meaningful in terms of descriptive for a very long time now.

        True, but at least it made some sense and wasn't just a total mess of meaningless bullshit.

      • Heck, there isn't even a coca-cola.us

        There may not be a site at coca-cola.us, but it does "exist", Coca Cola owns it.

    • by dissy ( 172727 )

      Excluding all ccTLDs, the original gTLDs are: .arpa .com .net .org .gov .edu .mil and .int
      The first expansion added: .aero .asia .biz .cat .coop .info .jobs .me .mobi .museum .name .pro .tel and .travel.

      Then ICANN opened this new gTLD program. The listing of new gTLDs approved are here [icann.org]

      I had the idea to use it for pre-blacklisting each and every one in my mail and web filters, but opted instead to go with a whitelisting approach hoping for easier maintenance (Thus the easy copy/pasting of the list at the to

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) *

      I'm interesting to know exactly how this will "rape" the DNS hierarchy? Why practical disadvantage does it have for end users and people running DNS servers?

  • I don't think monks living in caves on himalayan mountains need their own TLD

    Its amazing how language evolves

    I remeber when guru was short for "Guru Meditation Number"

  • .slash .dot .www

    www.doubleu.dot

  • Only computer geeks like us actually enter domain names into a browser these days. Google and then scan codes have made the domain names mostly irrelevant.
  • All this does is confuse matters even further and create a total cluster-F.

    There should be a limited number of TLDs, and be 'regulated' like they used to be ( such as no commercial entities on an .org ).

  • Domain Squatters, start your engines.

    Many organizations will be caught off guard by this and have their names grabbed under the new TLDs. On the bright side, this will temporarily give us a chance to grab decent names instead of paying a squatter. It also drops the value of their holdings.

    Aside from that, looking at the list, I think some of these should have also had abbreviations. .software, .engineer and .attorney look nice, but I would immediately want a shortened version as well.

  • I hereby register

    obscurespecializeddomain.dreamedupbymarketingidiots.thatnoonewillevervisit.com

    Copyright pending.

    • There is no new TLD in that domain name. It's actually available. Register thatnoonewillevervisit.com and setup the obscurespecializeddomain.dreamedupbymarketingidiots subdomain for it.

  • well, that's .stupid

  • by Arrogant-Bastard ( 141720 ) on Sunday February 02, 2014 @12:52PM (#46134479)
    As everyone knows, there was and is no actual need for these TLDs. Just like there was no need for .xxx. Just like there was no need for .mobi. Just like there was no need for .info. The entire process is driven NOT by the communal needs of the Internet, but by ICANN, which is now completely controlled by registrars -- registrars who are always looking for new/expanded revenue streams.

    There WAS a time, as I'm sure some folks will remember, that "one entity-one domain" was the rule. That time is long gone, as it drastically restricts registrar profits. Now? It's not uncommon for single entities to control hundreds to hundreds of thousands of domains. I've been researching this issue, and have looked at about 60M domains so far: EASILY 90% of them are crap. They're owned by speculators, typosquatters, "landing page" operators, clickthrough scammers, and on and on and on. I suspect that as I expand my work, that percentage won't change much. In other words: we could delete 90% of the domains out there with no appreciable effect on the Internet.

    This latest expansion is merely an attempt to continue the same game -- but with outrageously prices and profits.

    Here is my recommendation: learn how to use DNS RPZ. As each one of these TLDs is introduced, add it to the list so that you effectively make it disappear from your view of the Internet. Encourage others to do the same. After all, you aren't required to resolve any domain or group of domains -- so don't. If enough of us do this, we will make these domains essentially worthless. (Why? Because without DNS resolution in place, end users won't be able to reach them with web browsers. MTAs that check for domain existence -- which they should -- will reject all mail to/from them. And so on.)

    The Internet doesn't need this junk. YOU don't need this junk. So make it vanish.
    • Except that the registrars for the new domains won't be the existing registrars, they'll be whoever bought the new gTLD -- and most of them were purchased by companies who are not registrars.
  • Who on God's green earth benefits from this, besides those who sell domain names?
  • I'm going to go ahead and assume that anything with an eight character TLD is a scam. It'll save time.

Get hold of portable property. -- Charles Dickens, "Great Expectations"

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