[HN Gopher] The Problem with Vanity TLDs (2011)
___________________________________________________________________
The Problem with Vanity TLDs (2011)
Author : phantom_oracle
Score : 35 points
Date : 2022-01-01 17:33 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.templetons.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.templetons.com)
| niedzielski wrote:
| There is already http://microsoft.bing. See
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_dom....
| kijin wrote:
| Which redirects to bing.com, proving that they really have no
| use for the .bing TLD other than to prevent someone else from
| grabbing it.
| firekvz wrote:
| .bing tld is theirs, is not available for the public
|
| and even if it was available to register, they can reserve
| words for their own usage before launching it
|
| and if you mean, someone else actually doing the paperwork to
| get the .bing tld for them, it wouldnt ever be approved.
| mavhc wrote:
| Imagine the clamour of people who want to be associated with
| Bing
|
| The real problem is can I still type weirdfilename.exe into
| the browser bar and get to a search engine?
| dredmorbius wrote:
| The Crosby estate?
| quicksilver03 wrote:
| I would tolerate the ICANN TLD money-grabbing scheme, but the
| "new" TLDs are a little more than an indication of bad taste. I
| can't be the only one to dislike anything more than 3 characters
| in a TLD, like .cloud or .engineering.
| mindslight wrote:
| ICANN has clearly strayed from its charter of nonprofit root
| trustee, and is acting like any other for profit entity and
| arbitraging away their assets. I'd love to see a root-
| restandardization effort that aims to take anything that isn't
| (com/net/org, the country code tlds, and whatever other
| traditional ones I'm forgetting) and sticks it under a new
| .icann or whatever. So ICANN can "sell .google", but most
| everyone would end up referring to it as ".google.icann". The
| sooner this is done the better, to make it clear that
| attempting to use the root pollution will end up being a
| painful experience.
|
| Heck, let Big Tech take .google/.apple/.amazon/.comcast etc if
| that's what it takes to get this done. Point being to keep the
| root pollution to a finite amount rather than the ongoing sell
| off of any name imaginable.
| duskwuff wrote:
| And invalidate every URL and hostname in existence? That's an
| absolute nonstarter of an idea.
| mindslight wrote:
| If you thought about the implications of my proposal you'd
| see that it was only invalidating hostnames in these ICANN-
| giveaway new "TLDs". Traditional domains would remain
| unchanged. Trustees of traditional domains would still
| continue their corruption (as was narrowly avoided for .org
| a few months ago), but that's probably inevitable.
| Meanwhile we'd preserve the root namespace for the adoption
| of better technologies (eg .onion).
|
| And honestly we need better mechanics for machine-intended
| references regardless. It's ridiculous that you resolve and
| load a webpage, only for that webpage to require you to
| resolve a bunch more human readable (ie non-decentralized)
| names for loading subresources. For example, going to a
| bookmarked page shouldn't result in any DNS queries for
| human readable names.
| bobbob1921 wrote:
| I agree with this. I feel it takes away from the
| standardization or uniformity 2 and 3 char TLDs bring to
| domains. Also it does feel like a bait and switch- where for so
| many years three character tlds (and then 2 char tlds) were so
| valuable and sought after, only to have these >3 char tlds come
| along and change the landscape/market.
|
| Additionally, I always found it interesting how the .xxx TLD
| never took off (was essentially DOA), even after they were so
| popular and valueable in the pre-sale auctions icann and others
| conducted b4 their introduction/release several years ago.
| collegeburner wrote:
| No there just shouldn't be a thing as a "TLD". I should be able
| to register abc.ou8hurbaskjdbflubsaduf if I want to. Or just
| 8huasidvbsd with no domain. Only way to fight domain squatting
| and the stupidly overpriced domain hacks.
| acheron wrote:
| I'm never going to remember a domain with a silly tld. I don't
| necessarily think badly of the company when I see a link to one
| (I mostly think "fuck you ICANN") but it is anti-memorable.
| sofixa wrote:
| Oh please. A Cloud Guru's acloud.guru is awesome and easy to
| remember, and there are probably tons of other examples.
| marc_io wrote:
| Notion.so is another example. The gTLD in this case could
| even be considered part or the brand, as notion.com points
| to it.
| easrng wrote:
| .so is a ccTLD, not a gTLD.
| dqv wrote:
| And a lot of the .com domain space is polluted either with
| people sitting on domains and wanting to sell them for
| thousands or just leaving it unregisterable. So you have
| this choice of either creating a really long .com, or a
| shorter .other
|
| Granted, the domain name system is not ideal, but adding
| new TLDs, however long, is a better solution than dealing
| with having to name your company so you can get a .com that
| matches it.
| unbanned wrote:
| pm90 wrote:
| What's the problem with longer length tlds?
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| In practice URLs often cannot be more than 2K characters.
| It's also more work to type and bytes to transmit and harder
| to see on small screens. For many use cases these are
| irreverent, but they do matter to some.
| jefftk wrote:
| Where is 2K a limit these days?
| 7steps2much wrote:
| Chromium based browsers!
|
| > The Google Chrome browser supports a maximum length of
| a web page URL of 2 MB (2048 characters) in size.
|
| taken from [0]. Do note that this is a restriction
| created by the browser developers. In theory a URL can be
| of arbitrary length. Some browsers (like Firefox) do
| comply with this, though they might now show the full URL
| to the user, cutting it off after a certain number of
| characters.
|
| [0]: https://mywebshosting.com/what-is-the-maximum-url-
| length-lim...
| sokoloff wrote:
| That would be 2KB (the error is in the reference
| material; you cited it faithfully).
| eat_veggies wrote:
| What's interesting is how 2048 characters is 2 KB (a
| factor of 1000 difference) but this conversion of 2 MB =
| 2048 characters seems to have been copy-pasted around the
| web
| hackerbee wrote:
| 2MB would be 2 million characters - if using ASCII
| characters, a bit less for special characters in UTF-8
| TheDong wrote:
| Experimentally, you can easily verify that 2MB is the
| actual limit, not 2048 characters.
|
| For example, the following domain renders just fine,
| despite being ~2076 characters long: https://postman-
| echo.com/get?foo1=aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa...
|
| See the upstream chromium docs: https://chromium.googleso
| urce.com/chromium/src/+/refs/heads/...
|
| I don't think adding ~10 or so characters to the TLD
| meaningfully impacts this limit.
| gray_-_wolf wrote:
| As non-native speaker, I always have to google how to spell
| `engineering`. And you can't really auto-correct domain name.
| spcebar wrote:
| I think that as more and more companies and individuals get
| online there's absolutely a use for more TLDs, and having more
| descriptive ones doesn't hurt anyone. I do think TLDs like
| .sucks are a flagrant display of ICANN's greed and corruption.
| dqv wrote:
| I have to disagree. I mean, yes, the money-grabbing scheme is
| probably true, but I don't agree with the part about them being
| bad taste or too long. I will probably lose at most one hour of
| my total life having to spend extra time typing > 3 characters.
| And that's a purposeful overestimation. We have browser history
| and bookmarks. As far as bad taste, I don't know, I'm not
| really comfortable with creating this "legitimacy" for .com
| domains or any 3-letter domain over any of the others.
| Croftengea wrote:
| > It creates a three-tier world. The big boys who have TLDs, the
| cheaper boys who have .com
|
| The prophecy didn't come true. Granted the big boys got their
| .googles and .amazons, but good old .coms are still a thing and
| not considered "cheaper".
| [deleted]
| lolinder wrote:
| Needs (2011):
|
| http://web.archive.org/web/20110321001950/https://www.temple...
| gnabgib wrote:
| It might even be older according to the main page ("mostly
| written in 2001")[0]. Sure would be helpful if the author
| included a publish date. Many blog entries (and stack overflow
| type solutions) need time context (it may have been the
| solution/a reasonable position _at the time_ )
|
| https://www.templetons.com/brad/dns/
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Given the reference "I wrote a satire of issues around this
| some years ago" for a piece posted in 2005, I suspect the
| 2010 / 2011 year is reasonably accurate.
|
| https://ideas.4brad.com/node/221
|
| https://www.templetons.com/brad/dns/sell-english.html
| lolinder wrote:
| You're right, it could be much older. I thought 2011 seemed
| likely because that's the earliest the web archive has and
| that's the year that the new gTLD program really got rolling.
| However, it looks from some of his other content that he
| might have been referring to discussions that were started in
| 2000 and 2001:
|
| http://archive.icann.org/en/tlds/
| Croftengea wrote:
| You can tell the writing is very old because it mentions .ibm
| as an example of super well-known and wealthy corporation. No
| mention of Google nor Amazon.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.sucks_(registry)
| hirsin wrote:
| There's a legitimate engineering issue here too that bears
| mentioning.
|
| Your marketing team will charge ahead with migrating all your
| product.business.com sites to just product.business
|
| You'll get half a year into that migration before someone asks
| about shared domain cookies. Oh, login.business.com dropped an
| SSO cookie on business.com?
|
| After that you'll get the lovely request - you work with the
| browser people, can't we just edit the standard to drop a cookie
| on a TLD?
| mjevans wrote:
| Discussion on stack overflow...
| https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3342140/cross-domain-coo...
|
| I would really like a better solution; but that appears to live
| solidly within a successor to current HTML pages, something
| designed from inception with security contexts in mind. Maybe
| they can fix login / logout / credential management too; I
| really hope they just use kerberos.
| Traster wrote:
| I don't understand why people are interested in keeping the
| implementation details of the internet exposed. There was a
| reason we came up with TLDs and such, and you had to type in http
| vs ftp vs https etc. But there's no reason to be constrained by
| these detalis. If the computer can figure it out? good.
| [deleted]
| mrweasel wrote:
| The real issue with the vanity TLDs, and many of the newer ones
| in general, is that they have zero recognition. They are most
| worthless.
|
| You can slap a joehardware.com on the back of your van, or a
| local TLD, and people will know that it's the address of your
| website. Now do the same with joehardware.builders, people have
| no glue as to what that might be. It doesn't even help to write
| www.joehardware.builders, that somehow more confusing.
|
| No, the issue with the new/generic/vanity TLDs is that they've
| lost all meaning. They lack context.
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| Paint a QR code on the side of the van instead, I bet it would
| get more engagement even with a .com address.
| andreareina wrote:
| QR code requires you to scan it in that moment. A human-
| readable (and -recognizable) URL stands a chance at being
| remembered at a later date.
| mrweasel wrote:
| Sadly I have no way of tracking that, because I would make
| the opposite bet. My guess is that 90+% of QR codes, that
| people aren't forced to scan somehow, are never used.
| zbrozek wrote:
| Lots of restaurants are forcing this. I stop going to them.
| I don't go to a coffee shop to spend 3-10 minutes futzing
| with phones instead of talking to the person I'm meeting.
| dqv wrote:
| A remembering problem exists with the main TLDs though. Alice's
| Home Cleaning Service needs a website, but the one she wants is
| taken, so she starts doing weird things with the domain:
| alicehomecleaning.com alice-homecleaning.com alice-home-
| cleaning.com alicehc.com
|
| These domains are also worthless. I can say I would find
| something like alicehome.services a lot more memorable.
|
| And with advertising, it's more about continuous exposure. So I
| see the alicehome.services car around town for the third time
| and say, "oh there's that weird domain again".
| s_dev wrote:
| You could write www.joehardware.builders to make it clearer.
| mrweasel wrote:
| I suggested that, but as I wrote, that's actually more
| confusing if you don't know that there's a .builders TLD (in
| fact there's also a .builder).
| togaen wrote:
| I mean, all domains are really vanity domains. This just gives
| people more ways to be vain, which is all anyone really wants.
| mixedbizness wrote:
| I bought a LOT of .biz domains, turns out carriers often block
| people from receiving SMS messages containing email addresses at
| these TLDs, without notifying me or them.
|
| Probably because they're often used for spam? (I bought em
| because they were cheap.)
| kijin wrote:
| If they're cheap for you, they're cheap for spammers, too.
| digitaLandscape wrote:
| paulcole wrote:
| Who's the joker who bought http://bad.coffee?
| dqv wrote:
| Sorry, but *looks at my nails* .com is a boomer TLD, it's passe.
| Do you really want a domain from last century? Or do you want an
| exotic .asia? A cool .club? A forward looking .future? Or even
| joining the ranks of the celebrity media with a stylish... .xn--
| 45q11c?
|
| The answer is clear, if you want to stay in the past, then go
| with .com, but the .future is in vanity TLDs. For more
| information, check out my website https://ok.boomer and
| considering buying a .boomer domain today!
| easrng wrote:
| .xn--45q11c is actually .Ba Gua (According to Google
| translate, it means Gossip)
| dqv wrote:
| Yes, a perfect TLD for the new Perez Hilton ;)
| mavhc wrote:
| Whoever invented selling 1 row in a database for massive amounts
| of money per year was a genius
| meesterdude wrote:
| it's better than that: they're RENTING database rows.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Modern Papal indulgences.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-01-01 23:01 UTC)