[HN Gopher] ICANN's list of abandoned vanity TLDs, which now has...
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ICANN's list of abandoned vanity TLDs, which now has about 134
entries
Author : speckx
Score : 74 points
Date : 2024-07-07 19:21 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.icann.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.icann.org)
| sbarre wrote:
| There really was a bit of an enterprise gold rush for these gTLDs
| in the late 00s.
|
| They saw .google and .mcdonalds and thought "we should have our
| own one of those"..
|
| And I guess after a while of paying the non-trivial gTLD fees to
| ICANN, companies eventually looked at the ROI and realized they
| actually didn't need their own one of those...
|
| Funny how different brands in the same industries figured it out
| many years before others did.
| akira2501 wrote:
| They all have the same oeuvre that typo squatted and oddly
| hyphenated domains have and immediately make me suspicious just
| looking at them. Which is bad enough for the commercial
| purposes most of these were probably purchased for, but I can
| only imagine that they would be exceptionally useless for
| sending emails or other communications.
|
| Another "ghost mining town" left behind from the wild west that
| was the first decades of the commercial internet.
| hypeatei wrote:
| It's crazy to me that a decision to buy your own gTLD would
| even be approved outside the most rich and tech literate
| companies. The evaluation fee alone is $185,000 USD and you
| have to pay quarterly fees too if I'm not mistaken.
| bastawhiz wrote:
| For a company like Dodge (well, I guess their parent company)
| that's like selling 6-7 cars a quarter. Massive corporations
| look at numbers like $185,000 and don't even blink.
| 486sx33 wrote:
| Margins are a question but you can drop $150k on a single
| dodge diesel pickup
| CBarkleyU wrote:
| Dodge is making 30k profit off of each car?
| bastawhiz wrote:
| The higher end cars like Charger are hugely profitable
| (some with six figures of margin). They sold nearly fifty
| thousand of them in 2023.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I just priced a fully loaded Hellcat[1] Charger (even
| with stupid stuff like "real carbon fiber inserts" on the
| interior) on Dodges site, and it was $109 705. Unless you
| are proposing it costs less than $9.7k to build and
| transport one, how are they making six figures of margin?
|
| 1: "SRT(r) Hellcat Redeye Jailbreak" actually. I think
| the marketing department is staffed with 12 year olds.
| cogthrow wrote:
| > The evaluation fee alone is $185,000 USD and you have to
| pay quarterly fees too if I'm not mistaken.
|
| $185k is a rounding error in the marketing budget of many
| companies
| griftrejection wrote:
| If only there were a better way to deploy that capital. Oh
| well.
| ryan29 wrote:
| I think it can make sense for smaller companies as long as
| the costs aren't unbearable. There's value in being your own
| registry operator, especially when it comes to stuff like
| intellectual property claims, etc..
|
| By being a registry instead of a registrant you get an extra
| layer of protection that helps to ensure your domain is
| untouchable. I think it makes a lot of sense to use for long
| term infrastructure if, again, the costs aren't prohibitive.
| Ekaros wrote:
| I have a customer with one of these vanity gTLDs. And always go
| to wonder why... Oh it is cool with all the subdomains and
| services, but still... Is it really worth the money for profile
| of company it is... Which is not exactly high profile or
| known...
| brifsttar wrote:
| gTLDs went live in 2014
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_top-level_domain
| sbarre wrote:
| Yeah sorry my timeline was off there... I knew someone who
| worked on a gTLD platform and I mistakenly thought it was
| while I was at a certain job but it was the job after.
|
| Thanks for the correction!
| silisili wrote:
| This isn't exactly accurate. Google and McDonalds didn't have
| some early exclusive launch. There were hundreds that launched
| at around the same time, when ICANN opened the process, and not
| in the 00s.
|
| I'm too lazy to research them all here, but I recognize a
| number of them here from their initial applications, which
| would have all happened at the same time as the two you
| mentioned.
| sbarre wrote:
| Yeah sorry I had the timeline off... I also wasn't implying
| any exclusivity but I remember when these were first
| announced/marketed that those two domains were prevalent?
| paulddraper wrote:
| A. It wasn't the 00s.
|
| B. Much better to have it and not need it, than need it and not
| have it.
|
| As it turns out, they didn't need it, and lost a bit of their
| marketing budget.
| DidYaWipe wrote:
| This whole scam was so disappointing, although par for ICANN's
| course. When we heard that they were opening up TLDs, I thought
| that finally limited TLDs would be abolished.
|
| But nope. ICANN turned the whole thing into another disgraceful
| money grab... taken to a new level. Now that it has flopped, we
| can just hope that someday we'll be able to end a domain name
| with any valid string.
| cut3 wrote:
| Ive always wondered why a tld cant just be anything after the
| last period
| DidYaWipe wrote:
| As far as I know, there's no technical reason. I've seen
| people raise trademarks as an issue, but that's a red
| herring. There are already trademark-dispute resolution
| procedures in place.
| hypeatei wrote:
| You can see a list of current gTLDs here:
| https://data.iana.org/TLD/tlds-alpha-by-domain.txt
|
| Some of the entries in there are... interesting. Who the hell
| thought ".travelersinsurance" is a good buy?
| bahmboo wrote:
| Travelers Insurance is a huge company 98th on Fortune 500 list
| hypeatei wrote:
| Yeah but it's an awful domain name lol
| toast0 wrote:
| Sure, but did they need a tld? What are they going to use it
| for that travelers.com isn't a better choice?
|
| How much money did they light on fire to have a tld and what
| utility does it provide?
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| Not only that, _.insurance is a TLD_ , so why didn't they
| just get travelers.insurance?
| lolinder wrote:
| That doesn't explain why Travelers Insurance thought that
| they needed their own gTLD. Size as measured in dollars isn't
| really relevant--Berkshire Hathaway is #5 and doesn't have
| one--what matters is size as measured in registered domain
| names (for internal or external use).
|
| Basically no one outside of big tech has the volume of domain
| names to justify paying for their own gTLD, Fortune 500 or
| not.
| griftrejection wrote:
| And that's why they're bad using gTLDs anyone would actually
| ever want to use. "Hey, fellow youths, check out our snazzy
| new website: statefarm.travelersinsurance! So easy to type on
| your IBM keyboard, amirite?"
| Animats wrote:
| How many of those are even routed to anywhere?
|
| Browsers don't like to route directly to TLDs. In theory,
| Amazon could have a web site at amazon
|
| but browsers interpret that as a search request, not a request
| for a rooted domain name. Even amazon.
|
| which means to treat that as a fully qualified domain name
| doesn't work in browsers any more.
|
| (That's what the trailing "." means. Relative domain names were
| a thing. If you're on a machine within "bigu.edu", and you want
| "ourteam.bigu.edu", you can supposedly just use "ourteam" as a
| domain. This rarely works right, because few clients have
| domain names any more. Is it even still implemented in most DNS
| lookup clients?)
| zb3 wrote:
| Doesn't Google use "go" internally? Is it special cased like
| localhost?
| zamadatix wrote:
| Unofficial TLDs work fine without being special cased
| (well, so long as the browser is being pointed at the
| appropriate DNS server which knows about these entries),
| it's when the TLD itself is used as a URL you have to enter
| "http://tld." instead of just typing "tld." but any sub
| like "example.tld." still works automatically.
| marksomnian wrote:
| I believe http://go isn't special cased, but instead
| (ab)uses DNS search domains - the server is actually
| something like go.corp.google.com, and all Google PCs are
| configured to use corp.google.com as a search domain
| Animats wrote:
| That's normal DNS behavior. If your machine is
| foo15241.corp.google.com, and you ask DNS for "go", you
| are supposed to get "go.corp.google.com".
| zamadatix wrote:
| FWIW "http://amazon." still does what you want it to in
| Chrome and Firefox.
| Animats wrote:
| Huh. HTTP works, but HTTPS does not.
| jimbobthrowawy wrote:
| ICANN expressly forbid google, and other companies from
| operating these gTLDs as "dotless" domains back when they
| approved them. Annoyingly, URLs like "maps.google" aren't set
| up to go where you'd expect.
| jmb99 wrote:
| I've found that it works pretty well, at least in my home
| environment. The first time going to a new host, it has to
| include https, but subsequent visits auto-complete to the
| host rather than a web search.
|
| For example, I can type "opnsense" and hit enter, which loads
| https://opnsense, whose FQDN is opnsense.home.my.domain. This
| works on all machines on my network; most are configured to
| use home.my.domain as the primary search domain (through
| DHCP), but my DNS server also properly responds to queries
| for just the host portion. And, I've configured opnsense to
| hijack all (standard) DNS traffic on my network, so even if a
| device is specifically ignoring the DHCP-provided search
| domain and DNS server, it should be able to query all local
| hosts.
| bastawhiz wrote:
| If you're the CTO of Travelers Insurance, I bet you think it's
| a real banger of a TLD
| observationist wrote:
| https://www.101domain.com/travelersinsurance.htm
|
| They got .travelers and .travelersinsurance , maybe some
| others.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Travelers_Companies - with a
| 32 billion dollar yearly revenue, they can afford a lot of
| boondoggle nonsense projects. They probably assigned a bunch of
| people with insufficient technical knowledge and a vague
| project scope the objective of updating their cloud and web
| presence.
| almatabata wrote:
| I expect the french railway one will join the illustrious list
| soon enough (https://www.icann.org/en/registry-
| agreements/details/sncf).
|
| They registered oui.sncf initially during their rebrand. Once the
| guy who initiated that left, they switched back to .com domain
| (https://www.sncf-connect.com/).
| matsemann wrote:
| The linked PDFs contain censored sections, but it's just a black
| rectangle placed above the content. So by removing that rectangle
| the original content is still visible below...
| lolinder wrote:
| It's even worse, the censored sections are added as annotations
| on top of the PDF, not an actual part of the document, so:
|
| * The name of the person who inserted them is rendered when
| clicking on the black boxes.
|
| * Even basic PDF readers will allow modifying and deleting the
| boxes, you don't even need Acrobat or another PDF editor.
| userbinator wrote:
| I can't say I've ever seen many of these "vanity TLDs" in
| browsing through search results; and the ones I do see, tend to
| be SEO spam.
| wmf wrote:
| This is a monument to a phenomenal amount of money wasted on
| lawyers and hype. Look upon my TLDs and despair.
| alganet wrote:
| These change _very_ often.
|
| On one library I work on, we ended up writing a bot to fetch the
| list for us and open a pr in order to maintain it. I suspect
| anyone having to validate TLDs faces a similar problem.
| treesknees wrote:
| I assume you're using Mozilla's public suffix list?
| https://publicsuffix.org/
|
| We have something similar that keeps it updated on a regular
| basis as well. We used to wait until someone complained, but it
| changes so often it's the only reasonable way to deal with it.
| matsemann wrote:
| Of the 134 entries, I find only two where ICANN decided to keep
| the tld and transition it. For .wed and .desi. I guess these are
| tlds that actually allowed others / third parties to have
| domains, while for instance .wolkswagen was mostly enterprise use
| by themselves?
| heinrich5991 wrote:
| It actually seems to be only .desi. Or does it? For .wed, I see
| a document titled "Final Determination by ICANN to Not
| Transition Operation of the gTLD (19 May 2021)", but it says
| that "ICANN org will proceed to make arrangements towards a
| transition of the .wed TLD to a successor Registry Operator
| following the Registry Transition Process with a Request for
| Proposals."
| schroeding wrote:
| If you're bored for a few hours, I can only recommend to take a
| look at the ICANN Zone File Access / CZDS. [1]
|
| There you can get a list of all delegated second-level domain
| names of most vanity TLDs. Most are quite small (less than 10
| entries, most or all technical like nic.<whatever>), i.e. the
| domain is basically unused.
|
| (They, however, sometimes also contains obviously internal
| domains which sometimes resolve to public IPs. One company also
| allows an enumeration of all sales staff, as everyone gets their
| own domain. -\\_(tsu)_/-)
|
| [1] https://czds.icann.org/home
| Invictus0 wrote:
| Amazon Registry Services is still holding a ton of TLDs hostage:
| https://ntldstats.com/registry/group/Amazon-Registry-Service...
|
| It's not even a rounding error on their income statement so they
| don't care. ICANN, in their infinite wisdom, somehow couldn't
| foresee corporations squatting on TLDs.
| DidYaWipe wrote:
| ICANN has staunchly refused to even think about combatting
| squatting.
|
| Have you ever participated in ICANN? My company did. ICANN's
| mailing-list traffic was pathetic; never accomplishing
| anything, as members endlessly bickered about procedure. I
| don't recall that we ever made a single decision on anything.
| badgersnake wrote:
| The only one I've actually seen used is .fage (e.g
| https://uk.fage). They seemed to go all in on it and it's their
| main web presence. I believe they use it internally as well.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| What's with Lifestyle Domain Holdings? Did they fold, or
| something?
| notatoad wrote:
| i love that gap registered .bananarepublic and .oldnavy as TLDs.
| those brands aren't even the top level of navigation structure on
| their own websites!
| siproprio wrote:
| ICANN should open registrations to the public.
| DidYaWipe wrote:
| ABSOLUTELY. TLDs other than government and educational ones
| should be abolished at this point. Trademark disputes are
| already accommodated, so we needn't pretend that a trademark
| crisis would result.
|
| You should be able to register something.whatever at the same
| registrar you'd use for something.com.
| trebligdivad wrote:
| Yeh, you'd think they could get registrations on '.off'
| coffeeblack wrote:
| In 2014 it wasn't all that obvious yet that the future internet
| would largely abandon the Web and become mostly apps talking to
| JSON APIs.
| crazygringo wrote:
| What internet are you talking about that has abandoned the web?
|
| Most people use both apps and websites.
|
| Websites haven't gone _anywhere_. How do you use the internet
| from your laptop or desktop?
| renegat0x0 wrote:
| Some tlds with examples
|
| http://firearmslaw.attorney/
|
| https://working.actor/
|
| https://digital.wings.uk.barclays/
|
| http://nic.bestbuy/
|
| https://ton.diamonds/
|
| https://lis.doctor/
|
| https://moonbase.lgbt/
|
| https://chaotic.ninja/
|
| https://bedford.plumbing/
|
| https://darnell.xxx/
|
| https://django.wtf/
|
| https://get.meme/
| gary_0 wrote:
| I noticed the one punycode TLD at the bottom: xn--4gq48lf9j (Wal-
| Mart Stores, Inc). That decodes to "Yi Hao Dian ", which is
| apparently Chinese for "No.1 Store".
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