Google Taking Over New TLDs 185
bobo the hobo writes: In the corner of the internet where people care about DNS, there is a bit of an uproar at Google's application for over a hundred new top-level domains, including .dev, .lol, .app, .blog, .cloud and .search. Their application includes statements such as: "By contrast, our application for the .blog TLD describes a new way of automatically linking new second level domains to blogs on our Blogger platform – this approach eliminates the need for any technical configuration on the part of the user and thus makes the domain name more user friendly." They also mention limiting usage of .dev to Google only: "Second-level domain names within the proposed gTLD are intended for registration and use by Google only, and domain names under the new gTLD will not be available to the general public for purchase, sale, or registration. As such, [Google's shell company] intends to apply for an exemption to the ICANN Registry Operator Code of Conduct as Google is intended to be the sole registrar and registrant."
Monopolistic: Do no evil? (Score:2)
Google is just trying to bully the world for its own interest; not unusual at all. Now will ICANN put its foot down or will every other Fortune 500 company do the same thing and subvert the intention of the creation of new TLDs?
Re:Monopolistic: Do no evil? (Score:4, Insightful)
Now will ICANN put its foot down
It had better hope so, because giving entire TLDs to specific big companies could easily be the straw that breaks the camel's back in terms of the rest of the world accepting US-led administration of the general Internet. There's plenty of scepticism already, but organisations like ICANN are tolerated because frankly no-one has much of a better idea or wants to take on the responsibility. However, it is not difficult to think of a better idea than letting big businesses rewrite the established rules in arguably the most important address space in the world today for their own benefit.
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When was the last time ICANN put its foot down? Hell when was the first?
Re:Monopolistic: Do no evil? (Score:5, Interesting)
I might be guessing wrong here, but I'm thinking the primary intention of these new TLDs was to earn ICANN shitloads of money. It costs $185,000 just to apply for one, and $25,000/year to keep it.
Every Fortune 500 company doing the same thing would be a dream come true for them.
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Hey somebody has to pay for the quarterly five star junkets and 3X government scale salaries. A lot of the 1099's are online.
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Suspicions Confirmed (Score:4, Interesting)
Google must be using .dev internally. This move is only to prevent others from confusing things.
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and what prevents them from using dev.internal.google.com as domain? add a search dev.internal.google.com to resolv.conf and you can resolve skynet-testsystem.dev.internal.google.com. And the sole access to google.com is already granted.
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who cares ? (Score:4, Insightful)
If I need the web site of a church, I wouldn't try name-of-church.church, but I would just search for name-of-church in google. Who cares about the URL ?
Re:who cares ? (Score:5, Insightful)
I wouldn't try name-of-church.church, but I would just search for name-of-church in google.
But how do you know which is the real site? If I am looking for Foobar Inc's website, and I see www.foobar.com, I can be pretty sure that is legitimate. But if I see foobar.info, foobar.dev, foobar.sucks, I don't know if they are legitimate or not. The proliferation of TLD's just pollutes the namespace and sows confusion. They can be used for fraud, or they can be used to extort money from businesses that feel they have to lock down more and more domains. The drawbacks outweigh the benefits, especially as more and more are added.
Re:who cares ? (Score:4, Informative)
If I am looking for Foobar Inc's website, and I see www.foobar.com, I can be pretty sure that is legitimate
Maybe legitimate, but there may be 10 companies in the world called 'foobar', so you still don't know if you've got the right one.
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Which is still the same. Have a look at:
www.volkswagen.com
www.volkswagen.de ...
www.volkswagen.it
they all redirect to volkswagen.com/XX.html
So, if there is another volkswagen from let's say italy, they are still fucked. And they are fucked anyway because of trademarks.
Re:who cares ? (Score:5, Interesting)
Nissan is a better example, try nissan.com
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But how do you know which is the real site?
Its the first result in the Google search response ... at no point have I gotten back a first result for something else when searching for a business, at least not a scam or other illegitimate site.
In case you haven't noticed, many of the original TLDs have names that are meant to redirect people from the legitimate site to a scam, adding more doesn't make it anything new.
I would argue however, if they're going to play these TLD bullshit games, just stop and get rid of the concept of a TLD. Let people register whatever they want except for existing TLDs and move on.
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How is that worse than the existing condition? My company is -----.com, and another is ---.net. They advertise much more. Some of my employees think they work for them.
Basically all this really does is eliminate the value of the domain name altogether...
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Fortunately, we don't compete in the same markets, but we are in the same broader market. It has been this way for nearly a decade,
If they want to give us a few hundred $k, he'll, I am happy to re-brand and give them the "better" domain... but it isn't really impacting either of us.
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Go ask the White House about the original whitehouse.com
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If I am looking for Foobar Inc's website, and I see www.foobar.com, I can be pretty sure that is legitimate.
That's not been true for a decade. Due to overloading (i.e. multiple organisations, same name), the Foobar Inc you are looking for could be at foobar.com - but it could also be at foobar-inc.com or foobarinc.com or foobar-newyork.com or foooobar.com or whatever domain name was still available when they finally went on the Internet.
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The church might care if google decided to delist them, say for political reasons.
Greedy bastards. (Score:5, Insightful)
I think their application for .dev to be Google-only highlights a major problem with a company like this having control over any TLDs: They intend to use their control to crowd out competitors in a monopolistic fashion. That no non-Google developer can register a .dev is akin to saying that if you don't work for Google you're not really a developer. The only TLD restriction I would be OK with Google having reserved entirely for personal use is .google - and even that I'd be wary of without concrete rule for revoking the exclusive use if a good reason comes up.
Necessity of search (Score:2)
I guess they are doing it because descriptive TLDs makes search a tiny little bit less necessary.
On the other hand search - or at least search that might deliver relevant results rather than the spam that Google delivers - would make DNS almost completely unnecessary
Google isn't likely to give us that kind of search. Ever.
Google Scholar notwithstanding.
Re:Greedy bastards. (Score:4, Insightful)
That no non-Google developer can register a .dev is akin to saying that if you don't work for Google you're not really a developer.
This doesn't make much sense. No developers have a .dev URL today, so obviously nobody associates the two that way right now. And if it's restricted to Google developers, that association is never going to be formed in the future either.
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This doesn't make much sense. No developers have a .dev URL today, so obviously nobody associates the two that way right now. And if it's restricted to Google developers, that association is never going to be formed in the future either.
This is totally at odds with reality. Strong pushes in branding can and will warp public perception. If Google pushes ".dev = good developers" it will cause a branding in people's minds. At first it's not going to be considered an exclusive requirement that good developers have .dev, but eventually, as the .dev becomes a cognitive shortcut for "good developer" people will start thinking that those without .dev are in some way suspect - after all, if they were that good, why wouldn't they have a .dev?
This is
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At first it's not going to be considered an exclusive requirement that good developers have .dev, but eventually, as the .dev becomes a cognitive shortcut for "good developer" people will start thinking that those without .dev are in some way suspect - after all, if they were that good, why wouldn't they have a .dev?
If Google was capable of doing this, then there would already be a perception that all good developers are Google developers. And that isn't anywhere close to true.
This isn't just speculation, either - the same thing can be seen in the computer world today (or at least recently) with the "XXX Certification" nonsense, be it A+ / MSDN / whatever. I've seen job hiring requirements that require certifications that are pointless to the job, or that focus more on certifications than actual job experience or ability.
Nobody but idiot managers think that not having a particular certification means that someone is a bad developer. This isn't a problem where general perception is concerned.
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If Google was capable of doing this, then there would already be a perception that all good developers are Google developers. And that isn't anywhere close to true.
You're missing the point of how powerful branding can be.
Nobody but idiot managers think that not having a particular certification means that someone is a bad developer. This isn't a problem where general perception is concerned.
Tell that to every good developer who wasn't hired because some shitty developer with an MSDN certification and no experience got hired instead.
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You're missing the point of how powerful branding can be.
No, I'm not. But it's not the ".dev" TLD that makes the branding. You're making the assumption that having a ".dev" domain registered to yourself will transform into that branding without any evidence, and against all logic.
Tell that to every good developer who wasn't hired because some shitty developer with an MSDN certification and no experience got hired instead.
So what? Idiot hiring managers will do what they do, and there's a huge list of stupid reasons why they might refuse to hire somebody. The availability of .dev domains doesn't make any difference in that respect -- anyone who would make a decision based on something that moronic woul
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It's you that's out of touch. So much so that I wonder if you're in marketing and thus feel somehow entitled to be dishonest. Just look at .net, word, excel or even google.
On what planet is the branding power of any of those examples derived from a domain name?
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No developers have a publicly accessible .dev URL today.
FTFY. A lot of developers use dnsmasq to redirect .dev to a webserver on localhost or a testing server. It's pretty much a default in the web development world. My laptop resolves .dev addresses so that project.user.dev works out to the same as http://testingserver/~user/project .
Google taking the .dev domain opens up weird DNS possibilities.
Re:Greedy bastards. (Score:4, Informative)
.dev was never reserved. so use .dev.local, which is reserved for your LAN.
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.local is used my mdns (eg: avahi, bonjour), so you shouldn't use it with a static, classic dns if you want to avoid colission.
Why not just use a real TLD for internal stuff as well and stop complicating things?
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Anyone know a good petition site we could place a petition on? Maybe try and collect some opposition signatures, get some tech media coverage and -gulp- resist?
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You already missed your chance to give your opinion on generic TLDs [icann.org]. If you were opposed to them, you should've said something 3 years ago. Not that ICANN bothered listening with the prospect of millions of dollars of free revenue weighing down the other side of the scale.
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I was referring to the Google attempt, before it gets approved.
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No, it highlights the major problem with turning generic words into a TLD ownable by any single entity. I mean the whole idea of making a generic word a TLD was pretty stupid to begin with. But then selling it off for $100,000 or the highest bidder? That was nothing but pure greed on ICANN's part.
Given Google's history (e.g. Android is FOSS), I actually consider them
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Sure, using generic names is stupid
The only thing less stupid is not using them. You'd be stuck with brand names only then, the IP lawyers dream.
i don't thik .shop or .gallery are bad names because they're generic.
All your dev are belong to us.... (Score:2)
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# sudo ln -s /dev/null /dev/google
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But why does that matter?
I really can't see any reason why this is any "worse" than a single entity owning, say, http://developer.com/ [developer.com]. Domain names really aren't like real estate -- the namespace is so big that you're always going to be able to find an alternative.
If there's some group organization that feels strongly that there should be a TLD reserved for developers, then they should go ahead and register one.
And no one cares (Score:5, Interesting)
I am watching the "new generation" use the internet/web browser. They don't do it the way we (I?) did. They have little concept of "url" or web site address. Any resource they access is entered into the ever-present search box or "magic combo url bar", as series of search terms or a common name. They rely on the (non-standartized but helpful) search subsystem (usually, Google, but not always) to bring them to the right place. Domain names with their formal fixed format are not part of their use pattern, and I don't expect that to change.
So, let it be .whatever.
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And half those sort of "new generation" searchers won't know half the time if they are redirected to a phony site.
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And half those sort of "new generation" searchers won't know half the time if they are redirected to a phony site.
Half the "old generation" didn't know half the time if they are redirected to a phony site by a phishing email. Anyway, that assumes you're going somewhere worth scamming. Email, online bank, ebay sure... but in the last 15+ years I haven't seen a single phishing attempt for my slashdot account info. And stuff that you just read, what's to phish? And that's why the important stuff is moving towards two-factor authentication so just stealing your password isn't enough.
It's the same generation
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And half those sort of "new generation" searchers won't know half the time if they are redirected to a phony site.
Or if they are blocked from reaching the site they want by the search provider choosing to delist what they are looking for.
Who needs an actual government internet filter when you can ask your good friends at the search providers to make the site "disappear" for a growing portion of the population.
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Well, then that's their limitation, not mine. I am tired of this trend of dumbing things down to the lowest possible. In this case, it puts the search engine in control of who gets to find your site. Also, having sites memorized removes the search step from the process which is a net win for people who actually have brains.
Re:And no one cares (Score:5, Funny)
Well, then that's their limitation, not mine. I am tired of this trend of dumbing things down to the lowest possible.
Damn straight. It's like all these stupid GUI interfaces. I mean, I can see using a graphical interface if you're editing photos or something, but for reading and writing text? It's ridiculous and just makes it so that stupid people can do it without having to understand anything.
It all started with visual text editors, you know? Line editing was good enough, heck, you could argue that it made things too easy, too. What was really good was when we used toggle switches to enter data and read the output from a sequence of lights. If you can't mentally translate binary to ASCII you don't deserve the power of computation.
</sarcasm>
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What does the "new generation" do when entering a host name for some random API request?
Should we just search for the hostname and hope it's the right one?
Absolutely true (Score:2)
not sure how new of a generation you mean but I see this every day from 6th - 12th graders.
Even when being explicitly told what to type and where most will end up at the wrong URL because they don't listen and think that search is the way to enter addresses.
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I am watching the "new generation" use the internet/web browser. They don't do it the way we (I?) did. They have little concept of "url" or web site address. Any resource they access is entered into the ever-present search box or "magic combo url bar", as series of search terms or a common name. They rely on the (non-standartized but helpful) search subsystem (usually, Google, but not always) to bring them to the right place.
So in other words, AOL keywords.
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That is very true. You have to remember that when this domain stuff started some of the actors involved still used CRTs and an old Sun and had never used the web. Postels thesis advisor's thesis advisor (Einar Stefferud) and I became good friends and I talked him into buying a laptop so could do something other than say "what is this" when I sent him a URL.
Stef was thesis advisor to a lot of people: Dave Farber, Brian Reid, etc.He was one of the coolest people ever.
Search engines were very new and there wa
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Right on. It annoys me when I see people using google search to go to a specific website, rather than use the address bar to go there directly. If you try to explain to them that the address bar will take them there without having to click the first search result, it's like they don't even want to know.
I think this is just a further extension of the location bar vs search bar change.
I remember when I first saw the Chrome omnibox. It offended me. Mildly, but still. I know the difference between a search and a URL, and I am perfectly capable of clicking into the correct bar. Then I actually used the omnibox for a while (because Chrome was so blindingly fast compared to other browsers at the time) and found that when I jumped back to Firefox I got annoyed at the mental effort required to use the split loca
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Yes!! They need to make it so that IP addresses in the address bar default to http:/// [http] the same as if it was something.com....
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"I just click and type, no need to spend a millisecond deciding which box I should click into. "
Assuming you are going to type something in that box, see if you can find the TAB key. The exercise of moving your hand from the keyboard to mouse to keyboard may be healthy, but if you are worried about milliseconds, just use keyboard commands. You can pretty much browse the world without ever touching your mouse.
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Assuming you are going to type something in that box, see if you can find the TAB key
Why? Why not just type without bothering with the tab and let the machine figure it out? That's my whole point.
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Right on. It annoys me when I see people using google search to go to a specific website, rather than use the address bar to go there directly. If you try to explain to them that the address bar will take them there without having to click the first search result, it's like they don't even want to know.
And you know what annoys them? Your insistence on harassing them about trying to use their computer more "optimally" when what they're doing works just fine. Moreover, you're actually wrong.
Frankly, I think it's probably better for most people to use search than typing urls anyhow. A search captures their intent better than an actual URL in most cases. Consider the case of a single mistyped letter. The actual search will likely correct this error automatically [google.com]. A URL with a mistyped letter may well be
Right thats not abusing your company size (Score:2)
when will the next competitor come to unset googles eventual strangle on the way to access and search websites. This move is BS and should not be allowed except as stated .google or a few other domains but they should be made available to the public.
End of TLD:s - we just get "google" or "microsoft" (Score:2)
And soon or later, why wouldn't any larger organization apply for their own TLD:s? And how long until the rules are changed to allow organization names or product trademarks as TLD:s? Then everyone may just register <organization>, <product>, <whatever> as their domain. And some lucky gals or guys get "mail" (like mail.com before) and try to sell it to the highest bidder.
I don't see much advantage to this TLD proliferation.
.blog (Score:2)
If google is the sole registrar of all .blog domain names, then you never actually 'own' it.
While I understand the convenience aspect of it, the user cannot transfer it out and is forced to use Google Blogger, and ONLY Blogger. Despite the fact that there are thousands of ways to get a blog online.
On the topic of .dev: I also don't understand where they are coming from with the .dev TLD. I can see it being valuable to both developers and device makers. Why wouldn't they try to capitalize it instead of hog i
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You never own any domain, they're all structured as service agreements.
All the more reason (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:All the more reason (Score:5, Insightful)
The new TLDs are a cash grab and nothing more. Not only for ICANN, but for every company that manages to buy up a gTLD.
Basically, the people buying up these gTLDs are hoping to cash in on companies wanting to register .searchterm domains. Which, in my books, is nonsense. I don't trust any of these new domains to be anything but spam traps and phishing expeditions. Given the options in search results, I would always go to the .com, .org, or .net address over a gTLD.
Time for new root servers (Score:2)
relay country TLDs, com net org info to icann, refuse to relay specific stuff like museum, edu, gov, mil (they can use country tlds, if they want) and open the new stuff like .dev .app for everyone, ignoring the monetized use in the icann dns.
It's all about Ballmer! (Score:2)
It was to keep .dev out of the hands of Steve Ballmer!
The Infamous "Developers" Rant [youtube.com]
Re:It's all about Ballmer! (OK, right video...) (Score:2)
Oops! Mea culpa. Note to self: watch the video before you post it!
Really, the Infamous Steve Ballmer "Developers" Rant [youtube.com]
No. Just no. (Score:2)
I got to pile on about this.
".dev, .lol, .app, .blog, .cloud and .search." .dev certainly has usefulness well beyond Google. ICANN should refuse this outright. .app? After the fight with Apple, let ICANN deny both of them. .cloud? See .dev for the explanation. .lol? More of the same. .search? Ask Yahoo, Microsoft, and Steve Wolfram about this. .blog? Remarkably tone deaf.
ICANN should specifically refuse not only Google, but any Google-related applicant.
Unimaginable. I'll be looking to file comments o
Re: Concentration of power is evil (Score:5, Funny)
systemd
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HOSTS
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As the leader of the rebel alliance fifteen years ago I gotta say it's too late to do much now. Google is just dong what ICANN let them and the real problem is with them.
DHT will replace DNS
It's out there. Look for it.
Re: Concentration of power is evil (Score:4, Funny)
DHT will replace DNS
Dihydrotestosterone [wikipedia.org] will replace DNS? Just great, now we'll all go bald.
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The GNU Name System, nameCoin..
Yes. Namecoin is a great replacement for DNS. It is implemented using bitcoin technology, and you can exchange them for bitcoins too.
--M
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Blockchain stuff will turn out as bullshit. It's not really democracy, it does not scale well and its waste of ressources. the GNS model is more useful, because YOU define who you want to trust.
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RNS? oh, its just complementing dns. maybe ribosomes?
Re:do no evil (Score:5, Insightful)
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Perhaps they should be asking for a ".google" gTLD, for that purpose, instead of trying to monopolize a generic identifier.
I was about to suggest the same, but with ".goog", to make it shorter. (Can't think of a less-than-three-letter symbol that points to them as strongly.)
(It's also their stock ticker symbol, so maybe it's not such a good idea - it could cause a land rush and litigation from all the other publicly traded companies.)
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Well, there's .goo - they do seem to ooze into everything...
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They already use
Re:do no evil (Score:5, Funny)
Domain squatting is over. I, for one, welcome our new entire TLD squatting overlords. </sarcasm>
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So you welcome .overlord ?
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Perhaps they should be asking for a ".google" gTLD, for that purpose, instead of trying to monopolize a generic identifier.
.cunts
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did they apply for a .evil TLD too or something?
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d.evil
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"Don't, be evil"
Pretty much says it all.
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I think .dev should be like example.com: not able to register so DEVELOPERS (re: NOT GOOGLE) can use like, [mydomain].dev to develop, and not have to create wonky local host names.
But example.com is not like that. It's an actual domain name that was reserved due to developer abuse, mostly out of ignorance that there's the dedicated .invalid TLD already (un)assigned for that use.
Re:.dev (Score:5, Informative)
I think .dev should be like example.com: not able to register so DEVELOPERS (re: NOT GOOGLE) can use like, [mydomain].dev to develop, and not have to create wonky local host names.
RFC 2606 [ietf.org] reserves 4 TLDs for this purpose: .test .example .invalid .localhost
I've always used .test for domains for QA/test deployments. It also reserves the example.* second level domain name across all TLDs.
I think there are some other reserved TLDs, including ".xy" and some 63-character name that was something like "sixtythreecharacterdomainnamefortestingpurposes" , but I can't find the RFC. Anyone?
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It's complicated.
the RFC series defines what TLDs are not usable they're for test and local use.
ICANN maintains a list of second level words you will not use. Fifteen years ago this was "nasa" and "olympic" and it's grown substantially since then to incide batshit insane stuff like the list of all pharmaceuticals. I haven't looked in a while but I think "caffeine" was one of them. There's probably more now, the IP lawyers had their way with ICANN for a decade before any new tlds saw the light of day fifteen
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what's evil? common word TLD will have more than one applicant and thus will go to auction. We're talking millions or even tens of millions of dollars. no "regular person" or small-medium business can play in that field anyway.
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Google has already tried that with http://search./ [search.]
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I didn't want a link the first place. It should have been plain text.
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If I were an entity that had its own TLD, say .ebh, it would be nice if people could get to my site with the minimalist URL http://ebh. Is there any way to disambiguate a TLD from a nonqualified host name to make that possible?
Sure. Just end the address with a dot, which identifies the name in the URL as being absolute.
For example, http://ai./ [ai.] is a site in Anguilla that uses the TLD as its own name. However, if you leave out the dot it doesn't work -- this is a bit of a pain and most TLDs won't let anyone use the TLD itself as a name.
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.delta is the canonical example. Who gets this, Delta Faucets or Delta Airlines?
I turned on the tap and didn't get an airline schedule. Man, I'm one confused consumer.
(Trademarks exists to 1) identify the source of good or a service in a specific geographical area and 2) "consumer confusion" is the metric by which you judge infringement)
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It's way too late, they've had numerous public comment periods and that's all over now.
If it wasn't, ICANN would be the one to complain to. You would fly to a meeting and make your case to the board in the part where comments are taken from the audience. Stand in line and when you get your two minute chance at the microphone you can tell your story.
ICANN will thank you for your and will then says "next!".
I wish I were making this up.
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Actually, there is no technical reason to limit .TLDs to a single registrar. Oh, wait...