165 comments

[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 780 ms ] thread
Why do we need this?
Cynically, any new tld is banking on the legion of big companies that will pay fof theirname.whatever so nobody else can.

Hopefully, if enough of these tlds are around, there's too much real estate for it all to be squated on. Although I have a feeling it's still going to be a .com world for a long time.

Edit to add: the terms are pretty weird on this. I would not want to build my brand around a domain thag Google could take away capriciously because they didn't think you followed their terms enough.

Why would TLDs need to be created based on need? What’s wrong with a company making a TLD as a whimsical cute idea (and still expecting to be profitable doing so, because whimsical people will go along with it)?
Using .new for something "cute" means it can't be used for something useful anymore.
I'm not necessarily talking about the TLD. This is more like a "service" that's controlled by google and certain rules are enforced to those who hold the domain.

This makes very little sense to me. I get that it's nice to have a short domain that points to some action. But why do you need a completely separate namespace for this?

(comment deleted)
I'm looking forward to .old
I'm really sad that registering clin.sucks would cost me $250USD or whatever. The intent of the TLD seller is to hold companies to ransom (buy yourcompany.sucks, or someone that hates you will).

I'd kill clin.sucks as a mail domain.

Even without the TLD, someone could register a multitude of other names, e.g., brandsucks.com. Or brandreallysucks.com. You couldn't buy all of them.
Yeah, but apple.sucks is far more iconic than applesucks.com. I'm sure companies as large as Apple would have purchased both, and other variations as a defensive move.

I can't think of any other justification for .sucks to charge as much as they do for registration other than to ransom large companies.

TLDs are a complete wasteland any way you look at them.

com.au domains (owned by AUDA) at have a policy against squatting but it's reactive, toothless, time consuming and painful. On releasing a squatted domain, it's flagged as being a squatted domain (rather than expired) and AUDA approved registrars such as drop.com.au host blind auction domains, with the highest bin winning. Meaning you're either paying more than you need for a resource that should cost $15AUD to fight off real or imaginary squatters who will offer you the domain at a highly inflated cost. If you lose the auction any money you bid ends up as non-refundable credit within Drop.com.au ecosystem. I'm still unsure if it's good intentions gone bad, or just blatantly corrupt.

/rant

What's clin?
Presumably yoloClin's name.
I'm looking forward to .old

If you're .old enough, you might want to register coke.new.

It's like they're trying to turn the address bar into a terminal. I really don't get it.
They're trying to make some extra $$$ before Chrome starts hiding the TLD for user convenience
The address bar is a thousand times cooler than my terminal because it understands English and does package management automatically, often in under a second.

I just wish it could convert files.

It's so unfortunate that an idea like this is completely spoiled by who gets what term going to the highest bidder instead of to the services you personally use.

docs.new doesn't do me any good if I use a competing product to Google Docs. Similarly, I might want to use playlist.new without Spotify.

Sure, these are just domains, but it really sours this weird use of this tld as a "way to do things" that it's set to specific companies' services.

I typed word.new and I got a cert error. Use at your own risk.
That certificate is for *.oneroute.microsoft.com. It appears that Microsoft is in control of the domain. It just isn't configured properly.
I believe the entire .new TLD uses HSTS. In up-to-date browsers you will never make a request on port 80, even if you omit the protocol in the URL.

Probably Microsoft didn't get around to re-issuing the cert yet...

So the stated use case is for 'performing new actions online: any act that leads to creation can have a quick and memorable .new shortcut associated with it.'

So it's expecting users to go to a different website to perform one specific action, and then return to the original website?

If I'm on github.com, click the new repo button, and get redirected to 'repo.new' I'm assuming the website has been hacked.

If I want to create a new repo on github the last thing I'm going to think is 'oh yeah, I'll just type repo.new and that will be super easy' - I'll go to github.com and click the new repo button.

I just have no idea why anyone would use a whole .new domain to achieve the stated purpose!

Other way around: repo.new would redirect to github.com/repositories/new.

Imagine a webapp whose landing view page is very heavy-to-load because it’s a view of your library of documents. Like, say, Google Docs. Now imagine there’s a thing you can type instead of docs.google.com (i.e. https://docs.new) that’ll let you skip past that library view, straight to a blank new document view, so you can immediately start typing. That’s the idea here.

> Other way around: repo.new would redirect to github.com/repositories/new.

Look at that!, it does redirect to github.com/new/

I guess that will be useful for some people? It feels a little bit like mystery meat though; how do I discover these super useful shortcuts?

If I am someone who would benefit from learning a quick-to-type shortcut for performing an action, say because I create these things all the time, what does this offer over a bookmark or autocomplete in the address bar?

You can type it on arbitrary people’s computers, not just your own. Same reason text-editor default shortcuts are important.

Not sure about discoverability. Probably they’d just mention the shortcut on the canonical page.

You still need to login in your account then, which can took a significant amount of time especially with 2FA. Then the time gain is so marginal it's insignificant.
Not if your app is structured in the way where you can use the create flow in the context of an ephemeral session, and then get asked to log in when you go to save.

But yeah, in general, apps don’t do that much, and I wouldn’t see many being pushed to do so just to add such a shortcut.

Maybe the case here is where the login will be automatic (e.g. OpenID Connect based)? So, in the case where you’d be using some random workstation, but you happen to be authed to it anyway, by e.g. creating a temporary browser profile and logging into the sync on that. But in that case, the browser sync would still give you access to your bookmarks....

Okay, maybe it was never about browser address bars at all. It seems like a lot of these blurbs on the registrar page are talking about how these things are equivalent to certain API calls you can make to these sites. So maybe the point here is to create memorable API endpoints, such that you can now do something like (not saying this works, but it might):

    sort -n mydoc.csv | http sheets.new
...where the API endpoint accepts your IO-stream as a POST or PUT request, and returns a URL of the generated document.

This would make more sense, because you don’t really have access to your browser’s bookmarks from a terminal; and you might want random agents that you write, which aren’t “logged in” in any particular sense (like a CI bot) to use these shortcuts as well.

You know how, when you've just recently pushed a new branch to master, and then you go to GitHub, it'll auto-suggest creation of a new pull request with the correct source and destination repos/branches automatically selected, and all you have to do is confirm to send it?

That's what I think pr.new should do. I'd definitely use that one a lot.

Yes, this one sounds like a perfect use case.

I use docs.new and sheets.new several times a day. It saved me a couple of clicks per action, but subjectively it made so much smoother to stay within Google's ecosystem.

> what does this offer over a bookmark or autocomplete in the address bar?

google keyword ownership

you don’t necessarily need a bookmark. eg github.com/new is a reasonable enough shortcut

I just have no idea why anyone would use a whole .new domain to achieve the stated purpose!

Domain squatting is so last decade. The 20's are going to be all about corporate TLD squatting.

google's already got a pretty good head start, too...
I wonder if CLI commands is a valid use case, e.g:

curl -L https://myapp.new | bash

But we already have .sh [1]!

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/.sh

But sh is not a top-level domain.
This is the first sentence of the wikipedia article linked in the comment you responded to: .sh is the Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for Saint Helena
I meant it's not a "generic top-level domain" like .com or .org so its semantic meaning is the "domain name for websites for St Helena." This is similar to the situation for .io, which was really intended for the British Indian Ocean territory but has been appropriated by the tech industry. I'm in favor of using generic TLDs if at all possible. I believe google also treat generic TLDs differently than country-specific TLDs.
As mentioned on the linked page, http://docs.new, http://sheets.new, and http://slides.new exist as shortcuts to get to a new google doc, but it doesn't play well with Chrome's address bar - using them makes getting to existing docs and sheets take an extra step. Not the worst, but still, kind of annoying.
If you have a both a personal gmail account and a for-work "google for business" account - the shortcut will take you to whatever account you signed into first.

If you attempt to switch to a different account after accessing https://docs.new/, that will trigger an "ask for permission to access document" dialog.

Not awesome.

(AFAIK, the only way to fix this is to sign out and then log back in, in the "correct" order.)

(This is on a Windows desktop running Chrome.)

Note on Android this actually works great. Typing docs.new gives me a modal where I can choose between my work and personal account, and then dumps me in the docs editor app with a new doc.
Surely "PCs" must the dominant form factor for Google Docs/Sheets/Slides authoring? Still?

I mean, it's neat that you can edit a google doc on your phone, but who actually spends hours authoring that doc, tapping on a software keyboard on 5 inch touch screen?

Lots of people don't have a PC at all. If they're using Google Docs, it's with their phone.
On chrome for Android, I am asked which account to use.

On chrome desktop, I have separate profiles for work and home so nothing is intermingled.

You can try docs.new/1 and docs.new/2.
Nice!

I do understand why you didn't advertise that on the web site.

This problem is a common theme amongst all of the Google properties. (I run into it so much in the GCP console, too.) I would really like an explicit option to select the "default" or "primary" account, in that top-right user dropdown.

multilogin just won't go away, will it?
oooh neat! this is something i can see myself using quite often. i've got google drive bookmarked, but i do also type in drive.google.com or docs.google.com etc into the url bar quite a lot, often times to make a new document.

now i can just do ctrl+t->docs.new->start typing words on a page

There's a requirements list, by the way:

"That means that all .new domains registrations must:

- Be used for action generation or online content creation;

- Take the user directly into the action generation or content creation flow;

- Resolve to the action within 100 days of registration;* and

- Allow Google Registry to verify compliance at no cost."

checked link.new which is owned by bitly, it goes to bitly sign up page instead of link shortener. This is bad
That is an exception in the reqs "An exception is provided for services that require a user to be logged in, navigation to a .new domain may bring a logged-out user to a sign up or sign in page"
bit.ly does not require you to be logged in to create a new short link, so they don't seem to be in compliance.
mail.new seems broken as well, it hard-requires an @google.com login.
Lol, looks like google engineers forgot about their entire g suite customer base.
Even free users. It's the corporate email domain. Public mail is exemple@gmail.com
Well yes but also they forgot about gmail. It requires @google.com not @gmail.com
Amusingly, they list these requirements on "whats.net" - a site which clearly violates these rules.
whats.new, not whats.net

And yes, you're right.

Haha, whoops. I guess I type ".net" so much my brain autocorrected.
I'm wondering how that would work for an online shop. Lets say I went to amazon.new - what should I expect to see?

Maybe a new empty shopping cart?

Or a list of new products that have just been added to the store?

I think new products would be most intuitive for a shop.new domain...

I am more worried if AWS.new will mean new EC2 instance or new Lambda ️
The only limited use is sharing content. facebook/new would go to a share page. Twitter. Reddit.

Pointless but I guess they are trying to justify the cost of .new

Certainly sounds like an analytics goldmine.
$452 per year on Gandi (I queried two-letter names up to a dozen; they were all the same price). I get there is some cost to enforcing the intent of the TLD, but that seems rather high to query a domain and check. It should take all but a few minutes.
(comment deleted)
So Google wants to get into the "AOL keywords" business. Just like bell-bottoms, everything comes around again after 20ish years.
I'm still of the opinion that tld's are a complete scam. There should be a flat rate across all of them. Google and Donuts are a drain on the internet infrastructure.
The only super useful version of this idea is a privacy law that requires services that collect data to offer a “facebook.delete” link to temporarily and permanently remove personal data.
Please, please, please let this become a thing. I hate how many sites force you to jump through hoops to remove your data and/or close your account.
A lot of those hoops are an important security measure though. Imagine if someone else could quickly and easily delete your account if they managed to steal your password.
no, most of the hoops are a dark pattern to discourage you not to delete and/or trick you into incomplete deletion.

presumably a .delete domain wouldn't be "quick and easy", you'd still have to authenticate and perhaps verify intent via OOB method. however, the link to the action would be well known and obvious, instead of having to dig dig dig around a website.

No, a lot of hoops are barely even legal.

Many services don't even allow you to delete your account, just to disable it and have it hang around in their database as long as they want. That's a blatant violation of privacy.

I'm not keen on legally mandating the use of a particular domain extension, unless that extension is managed by a non-profit. Some of the newly-added TLDs have exorbitant annual fees, and if businesses were legally required to use them they could charge whatever they pleased.

Plus, you'd have a collision problem. What if one company has foobar.com and another has foobar.net, and they both collect data? (Imagine they're in completely different industries and the term itself is fairly generic, so there's no possibility of a trademark dispute.) They can't both get the ".delete" version of their second-level label.

(I realize I'm probably overthinking this.)

You'd have to create the real TLDs as SLDs on .delete, and then the way to make a .delete domain would simply be to append .delete to the existing FQDN.

So you'd thus have foobar.com.delete and foobar.net.delete, no collisions.

Not saying it's great, but it'd work.

Instead you could just have delete.foobar.com and delete.foobar.net instead, wouldn't need buying a new pricy domain name...
Or simply standardize a mandatory "example.com/delete-all-my-data" path on the same domain.
facebook.com/.well-known/delete would be a better endpoint. .well-known is already standardized, facebook.com/.well-known/change-password is already implemented, and you have proof you’re dealing with the right party.
Been using https://docs.new for the past 2-3 months.

It's absolutely game-changing as I'm writing a bunch of stories and need to iterate fast and recompile my thoughts just by typing in 8 characters.

huh. the sunrise period has only been 2 weeks so far. how did this exist for 2-3 months? that's unfair.
"The Qualified Launch Program (QLP) Addendum is available for new gTLD registry operators as of today. The QLP Addendum allows a registry operator to register up to 100 domain names to third parties prior to the Sunrise Period for purposes of promoting the TLD, under certain conditions."

https://newgtlds.icann.org/en/announcements-and-media/announ...

Didn't actually realize it was a .new domain (and didn't think .new was actually a new domain) since some people recommended it to me a while back (as far as December 2018 even... I think).

Obviously since it's Google, they are going to show off all the features first-hand.

If it's something I do frequently, my browser autocompletes an ordinary long URL after 1-2 characters. It doesn't seem very game-changing to have to type in a whole short URL instead. What am I missing?
My browser is not reliably auto-completing URLs to specifically post a new tweet, or create a new calendar entry, or write a new email, etc. Those URLs are often long and bulky.

The intent of .new is when you know you want to perform a specific action (like write a new doc), you type in the first few characters of the related .new domain name, let the browser autocomplete do the rest, and now you've already got the new thing and are working on it instead of having been deposited at the home page of the site in the question and then have to navigate through the UI to make the new thing yourself.

You can usually teach the browser URLS by typing the start of the long bulky address and pasting the rest and pressing enter, then repeating that a few times. If you always do it by going to the homepage and navigating, that's what the browser learns.
> It's absolutely game-changing as I'm writing a bunch of stories and need to iterate fast and recompile my thoughts just by typing in 8 characters.

Is it? Or are you being sarcastic? Every word processor/text editor that has ever existed on this planet has a shortcut for that. Every phone that is internet connected has a notes app only one click away and the option to 'share' whatever you wrote.

These cloud tools have only one appeal, easy synchronization, and for the rest a big list of drawbacks. As this 'revolutionary' (but still worse) functionality demonstrates.

I'm using with some friends a thing like that...https://telegra.ph/ The only problem is if you don't access from Telegram then it's accessible for editing just in the authoring device. The good thing for some people is that is very useful for tethered connections.
I use a .io domain and I get why .com isn't sufficient, but I really fail to see the value that this, along with most of the other cute new tld's, bring to the world.

More than anything, I fear that it will teach my parents that domains can look like anything, so that link in the email is probably fine.

You could always be sent to a sketchy .com domain too. You can still register googlemailsender.com and scam unsuspecting people; that hasn’t changed.
It's pretty much a fix for squatting.

You get a fair bit of defense for it around here, but ultimatly it's just rent seeking. Keeping younger generations out from having decent name just because you arrived earlier doesn't really promote a healthy web, nor provide real economic value.

Of course, most squatters would respond "I was planning on using that domain", so it's easier politically to just flood us with new ones.

My company name is squatted on several tlds ( by different people, obviously no intention to use them ). The .com owner wanted to charge me $40,000 or $1000 p/m. Fuck that. I used an alt tld.

> domains can look like anything

The funny part is ads having to add the "www." part, again, instead of just "word.[recognizableTLD]".

lets just go back to IP addresses at this point
Nothing’s stopping you, perhaps besides certificate problems.
I'm a bit confused. Are these domains only usable as web redirects? Or is it just that the examples shown are used as such, but we can use the domain as any other one? I wonder how having multiple entries to the same page will affect page ranking.

Looking up gist.new, I wonder why there are 2 requests done:

307 Internal Redirect

301 Moved Permanently

Before getting the 200 request to https://gist.github.com/.

Due to HSTS (It maybe preloaded in your browser), the browser internally redirects http://gist.new to https://gist.new. And then receives a 301 from the web server (which is cacheable) to redirect you to your final destination.

Edit: It is (https://hstspreload.org/?domain=gist.new)

AFAIK google is doing this (HSTS preloading the entire gTLD) for many gTLDs they own, including .app
I'm sure Amazon's not happy they gave shop.new to eBay.
I seriously doubt anyone at Amazon cares.
Shopify is probably more irritated.
Wouldn’t it be so much better if domains were specified the other way?

new.github.repo

It makes more sense and sounds better in most languages too

Although from the point of view of HTTP we already have verbs for that. It should really be

POST github/repo

Or maybe in user friendly display:

new github/repo

I guess maybe usa.github and in.github can be different domains because different organizations may have same name in diff countries

Treating a TLD as a verb is just silly. It comes at the end of the sentence...

Also it encourages stuff like repo.new to be owned by only one company - github - but what about atlassian butbucket etc?

Better to just have decreasing specificity. Like you have after the slash!

> POST github/repo

YES. Give HTTP verbs a place in the URL bar. That'd be huge.

Actually, I feel like `new` can be a really good command line tool. Think about it:

- new `github/repo` will open a browser tab for new github repo

- new `text` <document-name> will create a new txt document

can be extended by adding more definitions

"Treating a TLD as a verb is just silly. It comes at the end of the sentence..."

Yes, ending a sentence in English with a verb is definitely something that you never do. Can you imagine how ridiculous that'd be?!

You should read Mark Twain’s essay about the “terrible German language”.

Fine — it’s not a verb, it’s an adjective after a noun.

Since when is an arbitrary cross-origin domain name a valid user interface choice?

From a security standpoint, using the _path_ of a trusted domain is still a thousand times more secure and convenient, rather than navigating to another arbitrary domain name with no validation of whether it is affiliated with the domain where you've come from.

If Google push this sort of mechanism, it's opening up a whole load of fraud capabilities! If I'm on gmail and receive a phishing attack email, tricking me into navigating to "gmail.new" which asks for my google password, should I type it into the box? There is a green padlock in the URL so it must be fine.

> That means that all .new domains registrations must: ...

I don't get why anyone would want this over a regular domain with which they can do whatever they want with no restrictions.

It's just another way for Google to control and have a say over other people's businesses. For sure we'll see again posts about people having had their product destroyed because Google cut them off with no way to appeal.

This is pretty normal, all registras have usage restrictions. Most are poorly enforced but googles reqs seem pretty reasonable, The problem with all registers is you have very little recourse.

I quite like gsuite but if your only domain is bought as a google TLD on google domains with your gsuite account via google pay with google voice contact details and gmail contacts. God help you.

> all registras have usage restrictions.

Sure, but I never saw anything as ambiguous as:

* Be used for action generation or online content creation;

* Take the user directly into the action generation or content creation flow;

* Allow Google Registry to verify compliance at no cost.

That some AI script with a failure quote of ~2% will verify your compliance wont help also.

And the only way to get some human support in those cases is when you manage to get on page 1 of HN with your "crying for help" tweet.

(comment deleted)
That still seems pretty reasonable. They want ".new" to be seen and used as an interaction element, not as a random TLD. E.g. if twitter would get one, twitter.new would bring you somewhere where you could directly start typing a new tweet.
What about "car.new", where you can buy cars? Would that be enough "action generation"?
tesla.new where you can order directly online, yeh probably. That's I reckon exactly the kind of distinction I think they're going for. ford.new would make me go to a dealer so I think they should be able to never get one.
But when you can book an appointment at a ford dealer next to you that would be kind of "action generation".

Or what is when Ford will never get ford.new, is it free to register by anyone?

> Or what is when Ford will never get ford.new, is it free to register by anyone?

Trademark law still exists, this is a solved problem.

(comment deleted)
Would only apply is the domain is being used with cars. Ford is a common last name.. could be dentist call to action.
Well, good luck when your app gets flag by their bot, broken because the .new no longer works, and you can't get a hold of Google to remove you from their blacklist.

Just read all the horror stories about apps on Google Play.

Well that would be a different issue... But their requirements / vision for the .new domain are not unreasonable or ill-intentioned.
Well intention doesn't help you if the execution sucks.
As a user I don't think I'd ever go to .new directly. If you've got some other way to get users there from the main site, you might as well use a query string, path, subdomain or some combination of the three.

I'm not a web dev, but I've dabbled a bit over the years. So I guess I could be missing something. I'm sure the right marketing could make this work.

They seem quite different, restrictive, and onerous to me. In particular "registrations must have websites that are both live and compliant within 100 days of registration". You can't register a domain to use later, you have to get something up quickly, something that satisfies Google's vague "action" requirements.
That part is actually positive though - if you want to squat a domain for over 100 days too bad.
And how is that supposed to work in reality if your project takes more then 100 days to build?
start building it locally and then only buy the domain once it's close to complete?
What has the "where you built it" to do with the domain name?
I am pretty new to this space and I have a couple domains registered for some site ideas I would like to pursue in the future. Do all non-.com domains have these kind of restrictions? I thought they were always recommendations? How and why would Google ever think it is cool to restrict how I use a domain, other than the obvious illegal activities I guess?
Because I can't buy pizza.com but now I have a shot at pizza.new I guess. Some companies are willing to jump through hoops if it gets them a good domain
The medium example seems quite nice, story.new
Exactly what I was thinking too.. well said. BigUp!
Anyway.. anything Google or Facebook does these days.. give me creeps .. I am worried that internet evolution is going towards corporate censorship with licences and we have to have lifeline socket open to Google's data center 247.

That's real HALLOWEEN for me tbh.

The registration site had better be at Https://new.new
That domain appears to not be registered