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Say Hello To Branded Internet Addresses (cnet.com) 146

Posted by msmash from the domain-fame dept.
On September 29, Google published a new blog which uses .google domain rather the standard .com. It seems the company may have inspired other companies to tout their brand names in the digital realm as well. According to a report on CNET, we have since seen requests for domain names such as .kindle, .apple, .ibm, .canon, and .samsung. And it's not just tech companies that are finding this very attractive, other domain requests include .ford, .delta, .hbo, .mcdonalds, and .nike. From the report: Approval, of course, is just a first step. It's not clear how enthusiastic most companies will be about the new names. So far, Google is the eager beaver. What's fun for Google is a daunting financial commitment to others. A $185,000 application fee and annual $30,000 operation fee will keep mom-and-pop shops away from their own domains. Still, plenty of businesses other than Google see the new domain names as a good investment. Branded domains can add distinction to an internet address, and renting out generic top-level domain (GTLD) names can potentially be a lucrative business. At a January auction, GMO Registry bid $41.5 million to win rights to sell .shop domain names. And in July, Nu Dot Co won .web with a bid of $135 million. Hundreds of new top-level domain names are approved. The single most popular in use is .xyz. Hundreds of new top-level domain names are approved. The single most popular in use is .xyz. Where does all the money go? To a nonprofit organization called ICANN -- the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. The organization oversees internet plumbing on behalf of companies, governments and universities, as well as the general public.
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Say Hello To Branded Internet Addresses

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  • The summary misses some important answers to questions like "how many top-level domains are approved?" and "What is the single most popular in use"? Once the summary answers these questions I will take it seriously.
  • What a luxury! Having a domain being only a TLD. But will that work, using the TLD without any subdomain, i.e. no '.' dot? That's likely to break a lot of applications.

    • Re: https://google (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Only standards non-compliant programs. Standards suggest adding a search suffix unless the domain ends in a period. "google" -> "google.your.home.net" and then "google." if all fails.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by fisted ( 2295862 )

        unless the domain ends in a period. "google" -> "google.your.home.net"

        So "google" -> "google.your.home.net" -> "google.your.home.net.your.home.net" -> "google.your.home.net.your.home.net.your.home.net" -> "google.your.home.net.your.home.net.your.home.net.your.home.net" [...]

        Thanks for explaining the matter! I totally get it now.

      • Only standards non-compliant programs.

        In other words, anything written by Google or Microsoft. Got it.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by dkone ( 457398 )

      what is the difference if it is google.com or google.google. No on is saying there won't be a '.' dot except you. It will be a TLD. Although in Googles case I am sure it will be search.google, apps.google, maps.google, etc...

      • What i'm trying to say is that would be classy to have a page on a TLD (but that may not work)

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by fisted ( 2295862 )

          technically that's not a problem, but i have yet to see a browser that wouldn't shit itself over a real FQDN (i.e. one that ends in a period)

          • You need better glasses:

            Here, https://google.com. [google.com.] just works.

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by arth1 ( 260657 )

            technically that's not a problem, but i have yet to see a browser that wouldn't shit itself over a real FQDN (i.e. one that ends in a period)

            I cannot find a single one that doesn't work. Palemoon, Firefox, Midori, lynx and even good old NCSA Mosaic works just fine with a terminated FQDN.

            Some of them might send the dot in the Host: header, and the remote web server might not handle that correctly. Most do, though.
            And some might show unneccessary warnings for https, unless the CA has also put the name with the dot in the certificate.
            But the browsers themselves work quite well. Which ones have you tried that don't?

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by fisted ( 2295862 )

              Sorry, you're right. Even my browser handles it correctly now. (For the record, I remember trying this with firefox two-weeks-ago (version 20-30ish) and with chrome (version unknown) on a friend's computer, unsuccessfully both times, but it might have been due to the Host header indeed. I hadn't thought of that..

      • That's not a TLD. Using a TLD would mean http://google/ [google]

    • Why? Is there anything about DNS that's tied to .com/.org/.net/.gov?

      • DNS is fine. Some applications, however, require an public domain on the Internet to have '.' inside... A regex that requires a '.'!

        • DNS is fine. Some applications, however, require an public domain on the Internet to have '.' inside... A regex that requires a '.'!

          Most applications I've run across that do email validation are way too restrictive. If you have a 4 letter or longer top level domain, many will reject your email address and more exotics like a plus in your email, a percent in your email, etc... will almost certainly be rejected.

          • The reason why plus signs are rejected are for the same reason you found out they are rejected. Because Google ignores everything after the + in an email address - allowing you to sign up for multiple accounts with one email address. They don't want it to be easy...because reasons.

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by arth1 ( 260657 )

            Most applications I've run across that do email validation are way too restrictive. If you have a 4 letter or longer top level domain, many will reject your email address and more exotics like a plus in your email, a percent in your email, etc... will almost certainly be rejected.

            Or they demand a @ and domain name. Try IP literals or bang paths, like:
            [127.1.2.3]!somehost!someotherhost!user

            Not a lot of sites still support them.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by erice ( 13380 )

            DNS is fine. Some applications, however, require an public domain on the Internet to have '.' inside... A regex that requires a '.'!

            Most applications I've run across that do email validation are way too restrictive. If you have a 4 letter or longer top level domain, many will reject your email address and more exotics like a plus in your email, a percent in your email, etc... will almost certainly be rejected.

            One of the most embarrassing of such cases is from Google themselves. For some time (it is fixed now), there was a bug in the job application form. If you used an email with more than two parts to the domain name (foo@bar.example.com), it would be flagged as invalid. I've seen other sites make this error too.

    • Its likely to break a lot of poorly designed applications, ones that do not use DNS properly.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Not allowed by ICANN rules, but technically it would work. There is nothing preventing a root nameserver for the TLD to return an A/AAAA record. Not all applications would handle it properly I would guess. If you have a search suffix set this will be queried first, eg http://samsung could be http://samsung.linksysrouter and then fail to resolve. http://samsung. is completely valid.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ADRA ( 37398 )

      Maybe not too many applications, but It'll break a million web email entry fields which require an '@' and a '.'

      • There are already a million and one which refuse to allow + or other non a-z0-9 characters left of the @

    • ICANN requires the registry operators for new TLDs to have a: label (dot) TLD

      They are also prohibited from wildcarding DNS so they cannot use *.google either, they must register each domain separately and publish the zone files.

    • www.google.google

  • Sigh (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ledow ( 319597 ) on Tuesday October 18, 2016 @11:00AM (#53099861) Homepage

    Just people some idiot paid that much to run that name, it doesn't mean that's what it's worth (except to that one seller, that one time).

    How do you profit from, say .xyz? By selling domains at .xyz. If those domains are expensive, nobody will touch them. If they are cheap, you'll never make your money back.

    You would need to sell tens of millions of TLD addresses to recoup the money invested, even over a ten year period. That's unlikely. Hell, by that time, TLD's might be entirely dead and we've all moved on to something else.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by flink ( 18449 )

      Sounds like ICANN should have their operating costs covered for the next 50 years though.

    • Re:Sigh (Score:5, Interesting)

      by OtisSnerd ( 600854 ) on Tuesday October 18, 2016 @11:39AM (#53100163)
      The only thing we saw in the .XYZ domain, was a drastic increase in spam. It was so much that we added a specific rule to the spam filter to reject connections from any email or host that used .XYZ. The other new TLDs mostly are suffering the same fate, they are full of spammers.
      • This. I ding all TLDs that aren't on the list of known good ones, myself. I've had to whitelist ... one. (1) That's the spam-to-legit ratio I have observed.

  • ICANN, you failed... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    ...miserably

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by SumDog ( 466607 )

      I cannot agree more. I am so sad this got approved. This was one of the worst ICANN decisions ever. It effectively another step towards a more closed, exclusive and closed wall Internet. The big names get their own TLDs now, well out of the reach of individuals. It's AOL keywords all over again, except worse.

      • I doubt it'll make much difference in the long run, after seeing how .top, .info, etc.. turned out - just more playgrounds for spammers while the registrars get to rake in fees for useless registrations for "brand protection". Legit companies will still have a .com, legit organizations will still have a .org (or a .com), etc.

        Maybe after some time, one or two of these new TLDs will get some legitimacy. I expect, though, this will just end up making me spend that much more time updating my check_helo_access a

      • This is all about money and Peter Dengate Thrush's (Ex-chair) world domination plans.

        It's not a coincidence that he went for the position after discovering how much money could be made whilst the chair of Internet New Zealand and it's not a coincidence that he went from chair of ICANN to being a senior staffer in a DNS company. (It's also not a coincidence that his ethics are well-documented as being non-existent)

  • I like it! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Now, it's going to make it even easier to filter shit out.

  • Does it really matter? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Pollux ( 102520 ) <speter@[ ]ata.net.eg ['ted' in gap]> on Tuesday October 18, 2016 @11:10AM (#53099927) Journal

    About half the users in my network just go to Google and type "youtube" anyways. When I say, "Go to the address bar, and...", it's a foreign language to them. And mobile devices now hide the address bar, sometimes making it incredibly frustrating and difficult trying to locate it. With half of all users just Google the link, and the other half expect it to be a .com, why pay that much money for a specialized web address?

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by jrumney ( 197329 )
      There is still a difference between the address bar and "going to google" these days? Is this in IE, because in all the browsers I use, the address bar is the search bar for at least 5 years now.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by dak664 ( 1992350 )

        That automatic search is irritating to me, does a search whenever i misstype a local address like 192.168.1,1 so i turn it off in firefox. But already I just type google, amazon, mypi3, etc. and firefox adds the http:/// [http] and .com if needed. Maybe not all browsers do that reliably enough to just list your internet address as your company name. And having the .org .net .edu .com suffix go to different sites would be a complication; choosing the priority of those would open a can of worms.

      • In some of them, it's really annoying. Like say, I want to go to blogspot.com, I type 'blogspot' and then Cntl-Enter, hoping that it will take me directly to that website. Instead, it takes me to a Google page, where the site I want to go to is the first entry. Heck, I know where I want to go - stop sending me to the search engine. I'll use a search bar when I need it

        I preferred it when there were separate extensions where you could search in another bar for whatever it was you wanted.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

          If you're not entering a proper address you don't know where you want to go and you DO need a search engine. You're just used to that search engine hitting the equivalent of "I'm feeling lucky" for you.

          • Except that I am. Using control-enter has been a standard way in browsers to automatically append www. before and .com after a site name, to form an URL. That works for me everywhere, but I've run into places where it breaks that, and forces me into the search page, adding a step to getting where I want. There should be a way of turning that off

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      About half the users in my network just go to Google and type "youtube" anyways. When I say, "Go to the address bar, and...", it's a foreign language to them. And mobile devices now hide the address bar, sometimes making it incredibly frustrating and difficult trying to locate it. With half of all users just Google the link, and the other half expect it to be a .com, why pay that much money for a specialized web address?

      You think it was just a coincidence that Google-run Chrome was the first browser to push hiding address bar features?

    • You pay that much so it will look good in printed ads and quarterly reports.
    • The U.S. government screwed this up royally when it put its site for people to get their free credit report on the domain annualcreditreport.com. The credit agencies all set up similar sites with similar domains, which would give you your credit report but require you to submit a credit card and would try to subscribe you to their credit monitoring services. For years, Google searches would return these spoofing sites instead of the real one as the top result, doubtless due to aggressive SEO. It seems to

  • I wonder if having to keep tabs on all these TLDs that seem to be created by anyone who fancies it is putting a heirarchical system designed to accomodate at first only a few (then expanded to a few hundred for country domains) under strain at the root server level? Sure technology advances, but the design hasn't really changed and I wonder if its still suited.

    • The mapping may have to be flipped. Instead of being domain name:: internet address, it will have to be internet address::domain name. Not sure whether it would be just a global prefix or the entire address

  • Anyone who calls a Domain Name an "Internet Address" probably doesn't know very much about either.

  • Provided that you can "rent" subdomains the same way we do now for ".com" and the like, $30,000 is not that much (just need 3,000 subdomains applicants)

  • huh? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by eples ( 239989 ) on Tuesday October 18, 2016 @11:24AM (#53100035)
    I've been using the internet for a long time but help me out here. What is the goal here?

    www.ibm.ibm? or just www.ibm?
    ford.ford? www.cars.ford? drive.a.ford?
    gmail.google instead of gmail.google.com?

    You can mark me down as a firm "whatever".

    • You probably didn't use it long enough.

      It's back to basics, back to the time there was no such thing as "top level domain" (the generic .com/.org/etc and the country ones) and e-mail addresses were like username@digital or username@ibm

      • back to the time there was no such thing as "top level domain" (the generic .com/.org/etc and the country ones) and e-mail addresses were like username@digital or username@ibm

        When was this, exactly? The original TLDs were defined in RFC 920, which was published in 1984. The TCP Internet didn't even exist until 1983.

        @-style email addresses are as old as email itself - Ray Tomlinson introduced them in the early '70s - but the @-suffix named a host, not a domain. This was also true for the original SMTP (which is older than DNS). The examples in RFC 821 show qualified forward- and reverse-paths.

        An address like "username@ibm" would require either a direct connection to a system name

    • You don't have to add a second-level. Not only that, but using www for a web prefix has fallen out of favor.

      You're more likely to see something like http://google/ [google] at some point.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Sloppy ( 14984 )

      A decade or two ago (I'm not really sure when he wrote it)) Brad Templeton suggested something like this [templetons.com] as a fix for various problems, especially trademark. My take is that the basic idea is that TLDs are already meaningless, so diversifying them into increased meaninglessness does no damage while offering some benefits. (e.g. makes monopolizing certain words harder, makes it easier to try out new registration policies, etc)

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by inking ( 2869053 )
      mail.google is quite a bit catchier than mail.google.com. It's just removing redundancies.
    • I think this is a roundabout way to eliminate ".com". While the collection of TLDs probably made sense in the early days of the internet, it doesn't really make a lot of sense any more. .com has become so ubiquitous that it basically means "internet".

      So it should be eliminated. But everybody wants a .com. So they need to make the company TLD a must-have. They do this by making this exclusive. Once google and other big companies have them, everyone elswill want one.

  • A $185,000 application fee and annual $30,000 operation fee will keep mom-and-pop shops away from their own domains.

    Where is the money going to? Who approves the applications and what are the mechanisms for appeals and disputes?

    What sort of framework is there to ensure, the fees are not excessive and the services thus purchased — of high quality?

    Is it done by the best means known — via vigorous competition — or somehow else? How?

    Is this new mechanism related to and/or enabled by the tra

  • well spent money ? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    What does Icann do with all the money ?

    I'm looking for a .com domain name and it looks this site was already registered but is expired for more than 60 days (according to whois.net).
    The whois of icann does not know about this domain name (WTF ? how could it be ?)

    The actual (or should I say the ancient) registrar says I can't register for a nominal fee but I can spend 70 dollars for them to try to get it with no guarantee.
    For me it's no more than a crook system.

    Should the registrar be allowed to hold a doma

  • holy.shit.this.is.retarded (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    This is going to create a TON of unnecessary subdomains just to get catchphrase addresses like Drive.A.Ford as someone else mentioned. This plays right into java's hands as an easy obfuscation techniques for links. You won't be able to easily tell if it's a object, reference, string, or an actual url. ICANN just gave virus writers a whole new avenue of creative obfuscation. Throw in a bunch of unicode % characters like XSS kids love to do and you'll get an obscenely long url that most admins won't care

  • I hate this... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by dafradu ( 868234 ) on Tuesday October 18, 2016 @12:32PM (#53100741)

    I received a letter from my bank and it had a "link" to their website, i bet 99% of the people who got that mail didn't realize banco.bradesco was actually a website. It didn't have a http or www that most people now are familiar with, it was just banco.bradesco, you could think they missed a space if you were not careful.

    Years having to tell people they don't need to write http:/// [http] now they "changed" it and people will begging to ask again - "banco.bradesco? So www.branco.bradesco? How about http, this one have that thing too? How do i open it? Oh just a regular site? " :-(

    • Pretty soon it will be impossible to even reach a TLD without the use of a search engine. How helpful that all the major web browsers are adding Google(tm), Yahoo(tm), and Bing(tm) directly to the URL bar.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Reziac ( 43301 ) *

      One of the sillier ones that used to exist was http://walmart.horse/ [walmart.horse] Tried to put that on a forum so someone else could share the nonsense and turns out the forum wouldn't allow it as a URL. Wonder how often that's going to happen with some of these irregular TLDs.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Reziac ( 43301 ) *

        Well, there's a case in point: Slashdot appended a / to the URL that I typed, apparently believing that it couldn't be real. (No, I didn't typo it, I checked.)

  • I've long held onto a naïve dream that we might achieve SOME level of security by teaching users how to read domain names, enabling status bars (note: FUCK ALL CURRENT BROWSER MAKERS that turn them off by default) so users can look at URLs before clicking on them, and NOT blindly trusting that little green padlock (oh look! I'm securely connected to totally-legit-bank.ru) but for that to happen, domain names MUST be human-parseable. I don't expect everyone to become a cybersecurity expert, but if you c

  • Google will still make you pay to compete for ranking for your trademarks unless you successfully sue them. Why drink this koolaid unless Google is going to stop profiting off of trademark infringement.

  • this is because of the new ICANN system. A complete disgrace. Abhorrent.

  • Please Namespace the Internet (Score:3)

    by allo ( 1728082 ) on Tuesday October 18, 2016 @04:35PM (#53103157)

    Stop domain grabbing and forbid to use domains, which do not match the purpose.

    a .com domain should be commercial, some american site should use .us. Use other country codes for offers in the country (i.e. bmw.de for german BMW site, bmw.us for the american one linking to bmw.com for some online shop with car parts), restrict .info to non-affiliated information sites, etc.

    With such a rule, people could finally get free TLDs again. Try to get a four letter domain. Everything already registered, mostly redirecting to the main domain. Let some organization with initials bmw have bmw.org! some person with initials BMW gets bmw.name and bmw.email is reserved for a mail provider.

    TLDs have failed. People just use country codes or .com and redirect others. Only exceptions are people using cool domain hacks (think of del.icio.us) or nice domains in the new namespaces like hilbert.space. But that are mostly nerds, anyway.

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