[HN Gopher] Mixed views on new DNS top level domains
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Mixed views on new DNS top level domains
Author : pcr910303
Score : 39 points
Date : 2021-08-07 11:07 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (utcc.utoronto.ca)
(TXT) w3m dump (utcc.utoronto.ca)
| chana_masala wrote:
| There is barely any viewpoint argued in the article. So vanity
| tlds may be bad, why??
| flemhans wrote:
| Yes I was surprised that the article ended after what I thought
| could be the introduction to the topic
| j56no wrote:
| JUR just another rant, surprisingly made to the homepage
| j56no wrote:
| is there a list of the new ones?
| CydeWeys wrote:
| This is the list of all currently existing TLDs:
| https://data.iana.org/TLD/tlds-alpha-by-domain.txt
|
| Note that IDN TLDs are presented in punycode in that list (the
| XN-- ones), so you'd want to convert them to Unicode to see
| what they actually look like (e.g. many are Chinese
| characters).
| karmakaze wrote:
| There's a wikipedia entry--can't speak for its accuracy[0].
| There's likely more official/accurate lists elsewhere that
| shouldn't be too hard to find if needed.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-
| level_dom...
| 7ewis wrote:
| I don't like the fact that the prices can wildly differ between
| different TLDs.
|
| I think it was nice that it was easy to recognise website.com was
| a website too, whereas website.wtf is less easy to identify, but
| then now there are more available to makes it easier to get a
| shorter, better name and can make the pricing more competitive,
| hopefully driving it lower for everyone.
| robert_tweed wrote:
| I registered my own name under one of the new gTLDs because it
| was $10 for a year and I thought, "why not?". I didn't do
| anything with it, partly because I remained sceptical of the new
| gTLDs so didn't want to switch anything critical over to it, like
| my email address.
|
| That is probably just as well, because a year later, it had been
| reclassified as a "premium" name. The renewal fee was over
| $400,000.
|
| The fact that the owners of gTLDs can set pricing arbitrarily is
| the biggest problem in all this. A given domain name usually has
| no intrinsic value. What gives it value is the effort someone
| puts into marketing it.
|
| With the new gTLDs, the domain operators are free to offer useful
| names that aren't trademarks, but are unavailable as .com or
| similar. Then should anyone build a successful business on that
| name, they are free to seek arbitrarily high rents.
|
| There is no sense in which you can buy a domain name outright.
| Nor do the new gTLDs have any form of rent control. That is a
| fundamental problem with the system as it stands.
| ziml77 wrote:
| I was looking at gTLDs when getting my own domain. I think I
| got lucky with the timing because all the desirable ones had
| already classified the name I wanted as being premium. Around
| the same price you're saying your renewal would have been. I
| ended up going with firstnamelastname.net.
|
| I don't thing it's a good idea for anyone to use a gTLD for
| anything serious. Even without the prices being uncapped,
| there's no guarantee that a gTLD will stick around. Would be
| crappy to lose a domain because the company who owns the gTLD
| went out of business or just didn't want to deal with handling
| domains anymore.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| > Even without the prices being uncapped, there's no
| guarantee that a gTLD will stick around.
|
| Actually, there is a guarantee that a gTLD will stick around.
| ICANN correctly determined that this would be ruinous to the
| health of the Internet as a whole if entire TLD's worth of
| domains could simply disappear, hence they set up procedures
| to guard against it, including a required daily data escrow
| deposit from all TLD operators that can be used to spin up
| the TLD by another registry operator if the worst catastrophe
| were to happen (which, it should be pointed out, has never
| happened). For more info see:
|
| https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/ebero-2013-04-02-en
| https://newgtlds.icann.org/en/applicants/data-escrow
|
| The only TLDs that have ever ceased operation entirely, like
| .xperia in the linked articles, are closed brand TLDs that
| were never used for anything, were never available for
| external registration, and that the company in question (Sony
| here) simply got tired of paying the annual fees on given
| their lack of use of it. These TLD discontinuations don't
| threaten anything.
| ziml77 wrote:
| That's good to know! Still worried about the prices getting
| out of control if someone thinks you have a valuable name,
| but at least it's not too easy to nuke an entire TLD.
| oauea wrote:
| Oh good, it will remain available at the low, low price of
| half a million per year. That soothes my worries entirely.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| You're painting a very broad brush with that one extreme
| outlier. Most registries don't operate like that; stay
| away from the few that do.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| What was the TLD with the huge price hike?
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _That is probably just as well, because a year later, it had
| been reclassified as a "premium" name. The renewal fee was over
| $400,000._
|
| At that price it may be cheaper to simply create your own TLD.
| devwastaken wrote:
| .coms are cheaper now anyways with cloudflare. 8 years pre-
| purchased for $60.
| cpach wrote:
| Yikes. That's very lousy behaviour of them.
|
| Thanks for the warning.
| iomcr wrote:
| Was it {firstname}{lastname}.gtld or only one of those?
| robert_tweed wrote:
| It was just my last name. So in a way surprising it wasn't
| classified as premium to begin with. But the fact such a
| concept exists at all, and the goalposts can move at any
| time, is the troubling part.
| ryan29 wrote:
| Which TLD was it? I've been trying to find an example of a
| domain being reclassified as premium _while registered_ for
| almost two years. Are you sure you didn't let it expire?
|
| That violates the registry agreement AFAIK. They're not allowed
| to arbitrarily change the price for a registered domain. Can
| you give more detail?
| axaxs wrote:
| My view, as someone who did a lot of work around it:
|
| Purely a money grab by everyone involved. In what I'd consider a
| more normal fashion, ICANN could have slowly picked and rolled
| out sensible new TLDs to operators interested.
|
| Instead, it was a free for all where you had to pay an insane fee
| to ICANN mafia to even apply, and get in bidding wars if multiple
| applications existed.
|
| If you won, you had to go find and pay your own registry, too.
| So, you had registries preemptively spamming local businesses
| convincing them to buy a tld and use that registry.
|
| Many thought they were gonna make a fortune. The only one who
| made a fortune was ICANN and to some extent, registries. That's
| probably why owners keep trying to jack up prices, they still
| want their windfall.
|
| Don't even get me started on how terrible ICANN is organized. The
| whole digital archery fiasco should be enough for nobody to ever
| put any faith in them. Anyone with a quarter of brain function
| would realize how terrible that idea is.
| shiado wrote:
| TLDs are like neighborhoods or ZIP codes, you will be judged for
| being in a bad one even if you are a good person. That's why I
| suggest consulting this site before you register anything to make
| sure you don't accidentally get a TLD that is used mostly for
| abuse, which many of the newer ones are.
|
| https://www.spamhaus.org/statistics/tlds/
| iomcr wrote:
| I do have a complaint about relatively new TLDs. Did you know
| .forum domains are $500 to $2000 per year?
|
| We live in a world where everybody is complaining about
| censorship and nazis, but one of the best new TLDs for an
| independent forum is prices out 99% of the market!
|
| Of course, there are plenty of TLDs in the $5-$20 range, which
| are great, but this will cause cheap TLDs to become crowded and
| .forum will be a ghost town.
|
| Forums generally don't make money. Any forum making money,
| probably isn't making enough to budget $500 extra in another
| domain. Any company that would say "wow, $2000/year is
| acceptable" would already have something like
| {forum,community}.acme.com.
| ziml77 wrote:
| Is it the best TLD for in independent forum? It could be
| completely irrational on my part but I'd be hesitant to click a
| search result that would bring me to a .forum domain.
| beprogrammed wrote:
| Well, to be fair, censorship and fascism are worse things than
| extortionate domain name prices. Though both are bad.
| iomcr wrote:
| While true, a free and open web is generally desirable, and
| we'd like to keep the barriers of entry for federation to a
| minimum. If someone was ready to start mycool.forum, but
| doesn't have $500/yr to start a website, they must now wade
| through a garbage pile of "minimum $2,000 bid" squatted
| domains, weird TLDs that could declare your domain premium
| and charge $400,000/yr at any time, maybe even if the only
| thing "premium" about the name is that your website got
| popular, or buy a domain like themycoolforum50.com.
|
| This might be only one managable issue, but these things add
| up, and the more they add up, the more facebook becomes the
| only website people use.
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(page generated 2021-08-07 23:02 UTC)