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The Internet

Forget Dot Com, 2019 Will Finally be the Year of Weird Domain Names (wired.co.uk) 93

Posted by msmash from the shape-of-things-to-come dept.
An anonymous reader shares a report: Latest registration figures released by Verisign, an internet network company that oversees some domain name endings, seem to indicate that after a rocky few years, new gTLDs may finally be finding their niche in the marketplace. 2019 could be the year of the obscure domain name. Registrations for new gTLDs rose by nearly 11 per cent in the last year, compared to an average 3.5 per cent increase across the entire domain landscape, according to Verisign. One in five domain name registrations in the last year were on new gTLDs.

"The numbers are picking up as well as the usage," says Thomas Keller of 1&1 IONOS, a German web hosting company. In part that's down to saturation in more traditional domain name endings like dot-com, and country code TLDs (such as .uk, .tk and .cn). It's difficult to get good, precise and short dot-com domain names now, but hyper-specific and new gTLDs still have plenty of choice. Around ten per cent of new URLs registered through 1&1 IONOS were for new gTLds, Keller says.
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Forget Dot Com, 2019 Will Finally be the Year of Weird Domain Names More

Forget Dot Com, 2019 Will Finally be the Year of Weird Domain Names

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  • slash.dot (Score:3)

    by Spy Handler ( 822350 ) on Thursday December 20, 2018 @03:06PM (#57837652) Homepage Journal

    i own it, bitches!

  • No it won't (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    For intellectual property reasons you will still want to own the .com or risk confusing your customers forever. Sure there are some people using a few things like .io, but that is going to be rare for a long time for larger corporations.

  • Oh good, more entries for the spam filters (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ahodgson ( 74077 ) on Thursday December 20, 2018 @03:14PM (#57837692)

    ugh.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Yep my spam filter has over 50 TLDs that are permanently blocked because no one I know uses them, but they are used by spammers.

      All it takes is ONE spam from these throw away TLDs and it gets blocked forever. But then again, I also have whole countries that are blocked too because the only thing that comes from them is spam, scams and malware.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ahodgson ( 74077 )

        Oh yeah. Anything from Eastern Europe is straight to junk. Much of the rest of the world gets a big score boost.

      • But I'm FROM Christmas Island, you insensitive clod!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by antdude ( 79039 )

      lee for ugh.lee domain. ;)

  • ICANN can go fuck themselves (Score:5, Insightful)

    by damn_registrars ( 1103043 ) <damn.registrars@gmail.com> on Thursday December 20, 2018 @03:15PM (#57837702) Homepage Journal
    They made a terrible, terrible decision with selling gTLDs. They'll be happy when the money is coming in but the wheels will come off on this con and we will all be stuck holding the bag. The sale of gTLDs is the ultimate win for global spamming and phishing operations as they will be able to start an arbitrary number of obfuscated domains and as the owner of their own gTLD they will be accountable to exactly nobody. They'll be able to negotiate with each other for more registrations, making the currently hopeless game of whac-a-mole we're playing look structured and logical.

    Thanks a lot ICANN. I hope you money grubbing assholes rot in hell, and soon. We can't put this genie back in the bottle.

    • They made a terrible, terrible decision with selling gTLDs. They'll be happy when the money is coming in but the wheels will come off on this con and we will all be stuck holding the bag. The sale of gTLDs is the ultimate win for global spamming and phishing operations as they will be able to start an arbitrary number of obfuscated domains and as the owner of their own gTLD they will be accountable to exactly nobody. They'll be able to negotiate with each other for more registrations, making the currently hopeless game of whac-a-mole we're playing look structured and logical. Thanks a lot ICANN. I hope you money grubbing assholes rot in hell, and soon. We can't put this genie back in the bottle.

      So what is your solution to increase the address space for law abiding people but avoid the problems you highlight?

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Try putting letters together in different ways like drug companies do. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to register microsoft.corn.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Desler ( 1608317 )

        Since when did we run out of .com, .net, .org, etc. addresses? Did we all miss that memo?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Etcetera ( 14711 )

        So what is your solution to increase the address space for law abiding people but avoid the problems you highlight?

        This isn't IPv4. We're not running out of space in traditional gTLDs, country codes, or the secondary and tertiary level domains in the countries that have them.

        If you want to sell shoes online and shoes.com is taken, "shoes.shop" is not a solution to your trademark, branding, or advertising problem. You can pick a broader "domain name" within the existing TLD that more uniquely identifies yourself, *OR* you can use delegated subdomains for your small local shop. The bigger issue is that the giant influx of

    • I'm not saying, "That won't happen!!" What I am saying is that the current fee is $185,000 to start up a new gTLD, plus a $25,000 yearly fee, plus there's a sunrise period, review period before you do go live because you also need to submit a rules and regulation prospectus to ICANN, that review period is to look over everything you've submitted and can take as long as four years to complete, and you need to provide the name/address of your legal representative whom they indicate that they will be contacti

      • As far as if gTLDs are good or bad. Meh, I can think of worse things that ICANN could have done.

        Have they got round to unicode yet?

        That'll be fun - a link to bankgrandmotheruses.com, except one of the characters has a tiny little umlaut or squiggly thing.

    • They made a terrible, terrible decision with selling gTLDs

      They made a terrible decision selling and TLDs! Having ".com, .org, .net" etc didn't add anything of value; it just added confusion.

      This website should be
      https://slashdot/ [slashdot]

      Google should be
      https://google/ [google]

      Microsoft should be
      https://microsoft/ [microsoft]

      - simpler, easier, and less confusion with other sites. I'm not saying that "." shouldn't be allowed but it should be treated no different to any other character in the URL. The different TLD just made it easier for website squatters to have more places to squat.

    • Some gTLDs were commonly used internally to organizations. Included are things like .test, .dev, etc. Well, Google bought .dev. I'm sure there are other examples.

  • I think the new gTDLs are dumb. I know why they did it amd why they think this time it will work: barrier of entry. Look at .biz: intended to alleviate the .com shortage, but buying one is cheap and as such everyone could buy one including for very shady studf. Not so gTDLs. No way I could even dream of getting one. I believe it's a minimum of $35k to apply for one, basically limiting the audience to companies and eccentric millionaires.

    • basically limiting the audience to companies and eccentric millionaires.

      And scammers.

    • Re:I think the new gTDLs are dumb. (Score:4, Interesting)

      by techno-vampire ( 666512 ) on Thursday December 20, 2018 @08:14PM (#57839452) Homepage
      Blame the registrars and the clueless computer users for the shortage of .com domains. I have a pair of friends, nice people but completely clueless when it comes to computers. When their daughter was borne, they bought a domain with her name so that they could put up a website about their infant daughter. Not only that, they bought DAUGHTER'SNAME.com, even though it had nothing to do with a business simply because they thought that all websites in the US ended in .com and the registrar let them. The request should have been refused because it's an improper use of the TLD, and they should have had to pick either .org or .us, with the latter being the best choice. If people weren't allowed to have .com domains unless they were for commercial use, there'd be a lot more of them available.

      • And how would you enforce that a .com domain is or is not legitimately used for commercial endeavors?

        • Good question. I'd have the registrars require people requesting to buy a .com domain to explain what they're going to use it for, and reject any (with an explanation of what .com is for) that don't qualify. Granted, people can and will lie about it, but at least the companies will have made a good faith effort. And, at least some of those requesting .com will change to a more appropriate TLD once they understand. (I'm fairly sure my friends would have if they'd known.)

  • Beware of incompatabilities (Score:4, Insightful)

    by jtara ( 133429 ) on Thursday December 20, 2018 @03:32PM (#57837820)

    Beware of incompatibilities due to assumptions that domain names have no more than a 3-letter TLD.

    The company I work for has a .education domain. They were not able to open a bank account at a certain bank, because their system does not permit an email address with a TLD > 3 characters.

    Although I HATE the practice of multiple domains to "brand" different functionalities or marketing channels (example.com, example-mail.com, example-cloud.com, myexample.com (I especially hate the "my" prefix...)) I had proactively set up .net for our backend API (our company name includes the word "education" at the end). Multiple domains with similar names confuse consumers, leaving them uncertain if an auxiliary domain is really associated with the main one. And then it slowly entrains them to automatically trust, which they shouldn't. IBM is currently going through a painful rebranding of bluemix.net to cloud.ibm.com. Which is what it should have been in the first place. (They are also rebranding softlayer.com/net at the same time, not avoidable by thinking ahead, since it was an acquisition.)

    So anyhoo, then I had to set up .com so that we could open a bank account at the bank that only takes 3-letter TLDs. That's probably what we should have had in the first place. Thankfully, the company name is long enough that .com and .net were available, so long as we used the full company name with "education" included.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jtara ( 133429 )

      FWIW, I realize we could have used the .net that I already had set up for the bank account. I wanted to keep infrastructure separate, which actually is in keeping with the original intent of .net.

      We use the .com as an "emergency" email domain in case we run into further issues dealing with others that can't handle a .education domain.

      I recall registering live.net many, many years ago, at a cost of $0, by sending an insecure email.(I was the original registrant.) live.com had been taken a few months earlier

    • Beware of incompatibilities due to assumptions that domain names have no more than a 3-letter TLD.

      My domain name (and thus my e-mail address) ends with ".name", the TLD intended for individuals. I had some issues 10-15 years ago when I started using it, but nothing in at least 5 years.

      However, I would strongly advise against using non-ASCII characters...

  • No, it's not (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Voyager529 ( 1363959 ) <.voyager529. .at. .yahoo.com.> on Thursday December 20, 2018 @04:18PM (#57838124)

    So, for those of us keeping score, we've already tried giving alternatives to .com, .org, and .net, but they haven't picked up.

    The problem, ultimately, is twofold. First, people don't associate anything other than the big three (and maybe .gov) with websites at all. So, people will likely do something like "okay, so i typed in slashdot.cc.com, and it's not loading..." - though, to be fair, it's been a while since I've come across a user who understands the difference between an address bar and a search bar, so Google would end up resolving it most of the time anyway.

    More to the point, can you think of an established company or brand whose primary website is any of these other TLDs? Of the top 50 sites globally, only Twitch.tv doesn't end in .com, .org, .net, or a country's TLD. Even the porn industry couldn't make ".xxx" take off. If you're handing out business cards with something else, you're going to be seen as 'too small to get a .com', and spend lots of your time figuring out that people are e-mailing 'foobar.com' instead of 'foobar.vodka'; it saves everyone time to register 'foobarGA.com' or something else that ultimately ends in a recognizable TLD.

    The issue is human nature, and the fact that custom TLDs don't translate to websites for most people...and there is neither a principle nor a profit motivation for using anything other than the TLDs that already do their job well.

    • Your point is valid. Just FYI:

      > Even the porn industry couldn't make ".xxx" take off.

      The porn industry fought against .xxx. .xxx was a scumbag who bought the TLD, then lobbied government to *force* all adult sites to buy from him, and only him. Much like .net was originally for networks and .org was for non-profits, he wanted to legally force all adult sites to .xxx, while he rolled in the dough. The porn industry saw him for the scum bag he was, and also saw the writing all on the wall - after govern

      • I've always been more borderline on the concept of whether something should be done like that (not agreeing with the one scumbag owning the TLD). It sucks that we can't really trust government, and that we have a lack of competition in ISPs. Personally I do think it should be easier for parents to block content for their children, and schools, workplaces etc... as well. Though i also do agree, with the collapse of net neutrality, and the tendency of "think of the children" legislation etc... I wish it were

        • I too would like it to be easier. Unfortunately, I can't have a bureaucrat or politician deciding what is to be censored and what isn't. The phrase used in the most similar laws is "not appropriate for children". Well, Slashdot is often not appropriate for young children. In fact many of the posts are just simply inappropriate - for anyone. So the censor decides Slashdot goes on the bad list, on .xxx.

          There were a couple of voluntary self-labeling efforts that got some traction, but there are so many amate

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      So, for those of us keeping score, we've already tried giving alternatives to .com, .org, and .net, but they haven't picked up.

      Yup. My company uses companyname.net, and has for many years (because the .com was bought way back in the 1990s).

      Even within the company, lots of employees say their email address is firstname.lastname@companyname.com.

      People are used to saying .com, and it will take a long time for anything else...

    • I definitely think part of the problem, honestly, is that the whole domain naming system was bad marketing in the first place. It's a pretty clever technical solution, but bad marketing. People got on the internet, and they want to go to find stuff about Sony, so they go to the address bar and type "sony". It doesn't work.

      So then someone explains, "No, you have to type http://www.sony.com./ [www.sony.com]"

      "Why?"

      "I don't know, that's just how the internet works. You have to put 'http://www.' in front of everything a

      • It's a holdover from the way domain names were originally envisioned as being used. sony.com would be like a TLD for Sony, and they could add subdomains to it will. usa.sony.com, japan.sony.com, mobile.sony.com, playstation.sony.com, etc. Websites were supposed to be one of those subdomains, hence www.sony.com. The website is supposed to be on www.sony.com, and if you point a browser at sony.com it's supposed to auto-forward you to www.sony.com.

        Alas it didn't work out that way, and for whatever reaso

        • Yeah, I get it. I'm suggesting that it was just bad marketing.

          And yes, I know a lot of people are going to be like, "well marketing is stupid, so who cares?" But on a human psychological level, it just wasn't going to work. Even without the issues of the domain land-grabs and squatting, it would just be too much planning on the business side, and too much to keep track of on the consumer side.

          Like you're Sony, and you make www.playstation.sony.com. Then the Playstation 2 comes out. I suppose technica

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      FYI, ".tv" is a country's TLD. Tuvalu made the decision that they could make money by selling the management rights, but ultimately it's still theirs.

  • When do I use one instead of the other?

  • If you want to use those TLDs you make that choice for yourself, you don't make it for me.

    This is no different than blocking IP spaces from Trashcanistan.

  • When?

  • The evaluation fee is US$185,000 [icann.org]. Applicants will be required to pay a US$5,000 deposit fee per requested application slot when registering. The deposit will be credited against the evaluation fee. Other fees may apply depending on the specific application path.
  • I won't buy domains where they can change the fee from $9 per year to $9 thousand per year just for fun. With com/net/org and some other there are regulations in place to protect the pricing.

  • Kim Dotcom going to have to update his name for 2019

  • I have my .ninja domain...

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