With a quick look there are some interesting things. Doesn't look like too many consumer companies came out to play. One of note is that Coca-Cola did not bid on .coke nor did P&G bid on anything.
Car companies were late to the internet game the first time, and probably don't want to be left out again. Some car companies paid through the nose to domain squatters, others were unsuccessful (ie. nissan.com)
"The evaluation fee is US$185,000. 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. "
Skimming through the page, Amazon is going for a landgrab too with 76 gTLDs. Interesting to see how the major web player prioritized this. Microsoft went for 11 highly relevant gTLDs and Facebook for none.
These applications (the Google ones) are registered under "Charleston Road Registry Inc." Anybody knows why ? The mail address is in @google.com, so I suppose Google has some relation to it, but still..
Just corporate separation of things. They may have thought it would be slightly obscure (if you haven't been around Google much), but the email addresses got printed anyway.
Nobody knows what legal mess these TLDs will cause.
Kinda like how AWS isn't run by Amazon but by "Amazon Web Services LLC."
I guess they made up a new legal entity for that purpose. There are probably legal reasons behind that but quickly, it's a registry which suggest they intend to propose domains under their gTLDs and it's on Charleston Road, just like the Googleplex.
There are many companies applying for .app TLD. Edit: Google is one of them under an alias.
What was noteworthy was that many companies seem to be formed for this purpose only. There's "DotApp Inc", ".app registry inc" and a bunch of other names like that.
FWIW, in google's list, what the heck is ".srl" supposed to be? (maybe the italian/spanish/romanian equivalent of .llc)
EDIT: I meant, is google really asking for "a domain for limited liability company acronym in some romance languages" or is there something that makes more sense?
Another heavy hitter: famousfourmedia.com, who are responsible for the majority of the "dot [tld string] Limited" filings. They seem (I suppose "claim" is more accurate) to be registering on behalf of many companies, but from my rough count (60 filings), they are pretty close to Google (about 101) and Amazon (about 76).
Not to be too judgmental, but the site for famousfourmedia.com has so much stock photo that it hurts. Then again, with 60 filings, they probably can't hear my criticism over the sound of all the money they're making.
.コム makes sense, it's the japanese pronunciation of .com - although whether they'd make that a synonym of .com, or a special Japanese domain (tons of confusion), remains to be seen.
That cost them roughly $57M. Holy crap that seems like a lot of money. On top of that, every one of those applications seems to be from a different LLC (the names are nonsensical and look generated from a small list of words). The additional cost in setting up and managing that many shell companies... crazy.
I'm not sure what to make of Apple only asking for .apple. Do they just not think this is worth getting into (I'd agree with that) OR have they been the most sneaky and used some shells to hide their other applications. I assumed they'd at least want to throw they hat into the ring for .app or .cloud or .book.
I'm also concerned about the gTLDs that are file extensions. I think that could be confusing at best... and a disaster as worst.
I mean which usually they can be a clever websites. You've gotten very much discovering regarding it subject, for that reason a whole lot curiosity. You furthermore may get experience to become people to proceed in back of the software, evidently from complications.
http://www.seocorporation.ca/
The most contentious domains are .app (13 applications), .inc (11), .home (11), and .art (10), followed by .shop, .blog, and .book, and .llc at 9. Rough list here: https://gist.github.com/2923898
Interesting to note that Google has applied for 101 TLDs (search for @google.com in that list) including a lot of generic words like car,book, dad, dog, eat, family, film, fly. While some words are related to Google's business many aren't.
A little over $21 MM[1] in application and first year fees. $185,000 for the application fee and $25000 for the annual fee.
This is a complete and total mess. Worse, when registering with one of these corp tld operators, how much can you trust they'll be around in XX number of years to keep your domain name alive?
Google will win big out of this, not because of the number of tld's they will own, but because the browser's address bar will become useless without a search engine.
Good opportunity for next-gen domain name resolvers!
I could see pay.barclaycard or apply.barclaycard. shop.bloomingdales and fashion.bloomingdales would work as well. donate.cancerresearch would work, but I'll grant you the money could be better spent.
Basically what these new TLDs are for is to eliminate the .com in shop.bloomingdales.com.
I had not thought of that. A current .com site with a fair number of sub domains could probably justify this. But that is a pretty pricey way to shave 4 chars off your url.
Yeesh...in case there was any doubt beforehand that this is a terrible idea, the initial list is now proof. They have taken something that has a valid technical reason to exist and turned it into a cesspool.
Hopefully those in control of infrastructure take a stand and simply reject these "domains" entirely. Shouldn't be hard to set up sanity-restoring filters...let us please just pretend these are spam domains and never acknowledge their existence.
Ironically anyone vain enough to reserve ".<whatever>" is surely ALSO going to keep a death grip on "<whatever>.com" so this will do nothing to improve the size of the name space.
I was gonna say communities like Catalan speakers (.cat) have a good excuse, but then I remembered that ICANN already gave these people their own TLDs.
:-) Your post nicely shows why having a top level domain 'Berlin' could be good idea: without it you would not be able to find those German bike tours. Germany has top level domain de for 'Deutschland'; ge = Georgia (the country)
I believe they cannot just toss a coin - there has to be an element of skill - so they are using a "digital archery" approach.
The user sets a time in the future, and then later must come back and click a button as close to that time as possible. Then users are ranked by the delta between their target time and actual time.
OMFG what the hell is with all the real email addresses listed - its a spammers paradise. You'd think they'd be all throwaways but there's a lot of real ones (eg. banks, communications) and also noticed a smattering of gov domains.
Of course, best thing would be not including the addresses at all (that's what professionals would do), but if they deemed it necessary, "obscuring" the addresses would at least stop the most rudimentary harvesters.
Also, why the downvotes? Have I offended anyone?
Also, if you're relying on e-mail obfuscation and other tricks (that usually just make it harder for legitimate people to contact you) to prevent spam from getting to your inbox, you really don't understand spam.
I'm curious why some of those rows are colored blue (IDN, KIDS, UMMAH). I also wonder what effect this will have on domain squatting (probably very little, all told).
Anyone have any favorites? I see .DOT (dot.dot, anyone?), .WINNERS, .SUCKS (more desirable than .SEX), .NINJA, .MATRIX (registered by L'Oreal rather than HP, sadly), .IRA (financial planning and domestic terrorism in one convenient location), and absolutely no sign of .CAT (what do you think the internet is for, anyway? (No, wait, .PORN is right there.)).
.cat is registered by Catalan organisation puntCAT. According to Wikipedia, its intended use is to promote the Catalan language and culture, these pages notwithstanding:
It would be fitting, considering slashdot was named such as a pun from the days when you needed to type http://slashdot.com. When you told someone out loud how to get to the site, it came across as http colon slash slash slash dot dot com. They could renew the joke with http colon slash slash slash dot dot dot.
There's already a ton of [big company]sucks.com domains out there. Once you reach a certain size you need to go register those domains as a defensive measure.
The .sucks people will make a crazy amount of money in registration fees for domains that will never ever be used.
donuts.co is a domain registrar (and/or holding company). They're probably a broker for a large number of other companies, because various other @donut.co email addresses for a multitude of other custom TLDs are present on this list, with the email address username generally matching up to a slugified version of the applicant name.
See section "1.1.2.10 String Contention" of the applicant guidebook. In the guidebook it ultimately may come down to "community resolution" or auctioning.
The list appears fear-driven to me. High probability the investment will not pay off, but everyone is afraid of not taking part in this historical moment that MIGHT change users' assumptions and behavior.
Is there a default domain for these tlds? Let's take .home for example. How will this work when typing it into a browser?
If you have my.home, it makes sense. If you type www.home, it really looks ugly, but I guess it works, and we've spent the past few years moving away from including "www" as a whole.
Typing "com" into my url bar doesn't get me anywhere, so I'm assuming typing "home" won't either. If I bought "apple", is there going to be a conventional or canonical "default"? home.apple?
There would be no default, just like there is no default for .com, .net or .org.
These are top level domain namespaces. So in the case of .home. The registrar for that domain can sell my.home, your.home, newyork.home, etc. The equivalent for the .com domain would be my.com, your.com, newyork.com, etc. Make sense?
You mean is there a default host for these domains? I doubt it, that's not how domains work. These will be alongside .com .org .gov etc. It's a domain name, not a host name. Expecting to get somewhere when you type ".com" or ".home" into your address bar is like typing "192.168" and expecting to get a "default host" for your local network.
And thus my question about a conventional default. It just seems to me that buying the gTLD will leave users fairly confused.
If you want to access Apple (generically), users will still go to apple.com because even if they know that there's a .apple domain, what's the root host?
My best guess is a conventional default emerges shortly.
Well it's up to whoever runs the root DNS for the domain I guess. But I've never heard of a domain with a default. edit: oh never mind i'm being thick :)
And this isn't necessarily about people wanting to find apple's main website. Apple would have control over all subdomains and hosts in the namespace. They could give a subdomain to every app in the app store. So if you want the Pandora app, you don't navigate to Pandora.com were you might see ads for other mobile devices. https://www.pandora.com/everywhere/mobile You would go to Pandora.apple and only see the iOS mobile app.
Is there a default domain for these tlds? Let's take .home for example. How will this work when typing it into a browser?
I believe it's possible to set things up so that "home" or "co.uk" on their own will work. As below, my memory is hazy, and I have no idea how many RFCs this behaviour might violate, but I certainly remember us doing so.
My background: many, many years ago, I used to work for a minor country-code tld, and we set up fun email addresses such as: a@cctld or t@cctld (for Tom ;-)). My memory is hazy, but I think this violates some RFC somewhere. Mail still got delivered, though.
This would be tricky for LANs. I'm not sure too many corporate network admins would be happy with the amount of work they'd have to do to change up all the DNS entries when "test" no longer routes to "test.company.com" while you're on the company.com domain. You'd have a riot when the development staff has to take a couple weeks to change over all their pathnames.
I'm of the opinion that RFCs don't matter if they're not being enforced. What matters is the implementation that exists in the real world. It doesn't matter what the ITU says 4G is supposed to be when 4G already implemented as something completely different. What would make sense is www.home routing to the default .home domain.
It wouldn't be quite such a big problem, since well-behaved clients should attempt to use 'home.company.com' before the root 'home'.
Regardless of what is possible or allowed by RFCs, that behaviour should discourage TLD holders from trying to use a naked 'home', since a lot of users wouldn't be able to access it.
Just guessing: Maybe the .apple won't be used for the root apple site, but could be useful for microsites like ipad.apple or icloud.apple? Or, heck, they could have just applied lest some cybersquatter gets hold of that TLD.
Try entering "ac" or "ac." in your browser. It's a TLD with an A record, so it should just work.
If you have a host on your domain also named that, well, things might get interesting depending on how your resolvers work (domains, search order, dotting, whatever). Plus, if you're in a corporate environment or something else with a proxy, add all of those demons, too.
Buckle up.
(Random trivia: I checked all 676 two-letter possibilities, and these are the ones which should work: AC AI CM DK GG IO JE KH PN SH TK TM TO UZ VI WS)
That ("fixup") and the other leak-to-Google stuff ("keywords") are probably the first two things I turn off when I start using a browser. I had too many mispastes turn into potential data leaks before figuring that out.
"Despite not being a valid top-level domain in the Internet, considerable DNS traffic that queries the local domain exists in the public Domain Name System.[1] In June 2009, the L root server received more than 400 such queries per second,[2] ranking 4th in DNS traffic of all TLDs after COM, ARPA, and NET." [1]
Scary potential for mischief-making. Hopefully ICANN would reject applications for these domains, but I'm not sure I'd take that level of competence for granted.
.local is the default 'local domain' in most routers, it couldn't be used reliably as a tld. These queries are probably just routed by mistake/buggy software.
So basically, we are creating a two-tier internet where people with money can pay a lot for nice names and others will be considered cheap for having a .com at the end? Way to go democratic internet....
I wonder if they actually stopped long enough to consider the actual pros and cons on this.
Possibly. But say I'm starting a video-sharing website - I'm at a big competitive disadvantage when my customers need to type and remember an extra domain-name level compared to my competitors (who own '.video', '.movie', '.youtube', etc. while i might own '.bobsvideo.fail').
Except that, as discussed above, "youtube" by itself is not a valid host name. It would have to be "mysite.youtube"
Still easier than you having "mysite.bobsvideo.fail" I agree, but frankly most people don't even find sites via the domain name. They'll google "Bobs Video" and see what comes up.
I've personally always thought that tlds was dumb. I never understood why things needed to be partitioned like that. Is there any technical reason to have them?
Also, it's very bothersome that domains are backwards. It's always irked me.
That being said, the amount of money required for a gTLD is absurd.
Seems like exposing readable unique resource identifiers inevitably brings some sort of confusion and/or unjustness.
The only fair alternative would be no visible URIs (UUIDs or plain IPs could be used) and better search. There still is the ordering of results and SEO issues, but it's up to user—change your query or search engine if you aren't satisfied. The security issue (phishing) would require a bit more work to sort out, but I'm sure that's doable.
Domain names could still be used, but strictly for basic infrastructure-related things, like search engine directory.
Can you imagine what would all these look like in 5 years (even 2 maybe)? It is going to look messy! I mean I like the idea of it and surely it would looks elegant if it weren't abuse...but I think this is not happening..
People are pouring money into these TLD as well...
Sad to say, but I see a totally different future, these are totally different to real estate, this is a digital world, maybe these .com, .app thing won't even needed, no address at all in the future, replace by something else, like on Facebook where you type say Dropbox, then suggested site just come out
Since the very beginning this entire concept has seemed horribly misguided. I get that we need to expand the range of possible domain names but is this really the way to do it?
It seems like 1 part extortion, 1 part destruction of a free internet, and 1 part orchestrated gold rush for squatters.
A great way to squeeze the last dollars out of domains, now that all are squatted.
The application fees were $5k registration + $185k or $47k evaluation, so they collected something between $100 million and $366 million dollars, annual fees excluded.
I can see two possible outcomes:
1. all conflicts are resolved by agreements/bidding, process goes smoothly. But usage nevers picks up, and in a years'time it's all money down the drain.
2. ICANN backpedals and decides to cancel this stupid idea, while deciding to (legally) keep the application fees. Fighting ensues and we get a new, better management organization. Or worse.
177 comments
[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 252 ms ] threadNo french though, quick, let's grab .renault!
What the holy hell? Did google just have an employee suggestion box and they applied for all submitted names?
Apple wants: .apple
Microsoft wants: .azure, .bing, .docs, .hotmail, .live, .microsoft, .office, .skydrive, .skype, .windows, .xbox
Microsoft is just defending their own brands.
Only two applicants for .sex (and one for .sexy)
Amazon wants: .amazon, .app, .audible, .author, .aws, .book, .bot, .box, .buy, .call, .circle, .cloud, .coupon, .deal, .dev (nice way to snoop on poorly configured corporate dns too. in competition with google), .drive, .fast, .fire, .free, .game, .got, .group, .hot, .imdb, .jot, .joy (smells like zappos), .kids, .kindle, .like (only applicant), .mail, .map, .mobile, .moi, .movie, .music, .news (google didn't apply for .news), .now, .pay (dangerous), .pin, .play, .prime, .read, .room, .safe, .save, .search (woo), .secure, .shop, .show, .silk, .smile (aww), .song, .spot, .store, .talk, .tunes (ha!), .tushu, .video, .wanggou, .wow, .yamaxun, .you, .yun, .zappos, .zero, .アマゾン, .ストア, .セール, .ファッション, .ポイント, .亚马逊, .家電, .書籍, .通販, .食品
Amazon is part brand defense and part what-the-hell-are-you-doing too.
There will be no winners here. The best thing they can do now is cancel the idea of corporate TLD ownership.
http://newgtlds.icann.org/en/applicants/customer-service/faq...
"The evaluation fee is US$185,000. 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. "
Google can use .plus domain to simplify links to Google+ profile. I would really like to see something like user-name.plus/photos.
I know it worked for slash dot dot org, but their target was geeks.
Nobody knows what legal mess these TLDs will cause.
Kinda like how AWS isn't run by Amazon but by "Amazon Web Services LLC."
What was noteworthy was that many companies seem to be formed for this purpose only. There's "DotApp Inc", ".app registry inc" and a bunch of other names like that.
EDIT: I meant, is google really asking for "a domain for limited liability company acronym in some romance languages" or is there something that makes more sense?
Società a Responsabilità Limitata, Italian Sociedad de Responsabilidad Limitada, Spanish Societate cu Răspundere Limitată, Romanian
Close enough:
Société à responsabilité limitée (aka SARL), French
[1]: http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2006/04/guge.html
Not to be too judgmental, but the site for famousfourmedia.com has so much stock photo that it hurts. Then again, with 60 filings, they probably can't hear my criticism over the sound of all the money they're making.
VeriSign applied for all the various internationalized versions of ".com" in all the different allowed languages. (ie, קוֹם)
Nothing for facebook.
Nothing for ebay.
Nothing for nbc.
I'm also concerned about the gTLDs that are file extensions. I think that could be confusing at best... and a disaster as worst.
Section 2.2 on the FAQ page http://newgtlds.icann.org/en/applicants/customer-service/faq...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-13835997
A little over $21 MM[1] in application and first year fees. $185,000 for the application fee and $25000 for the annual fee.
[1] http://mashable.com/2011/06/20/icann-top-level-domains/
Google will win big out of this, not because of the number of tld's they will own, but because the browser's address bar will become useless without a search engine.
Good opportunity for next-gen domain name resolvers!
Not sure what the other part of the domain will be for these as well:
"Visit www.bloomingdales!"
Lots of confusion on the way!
I'm not too impressed with ones such as '.CANCERRESEARCH' paid for by the 'Australian Cancer Research Foundation'. What a waste of money.
Basically what these new TLDs are for is to eliminate the .com in shop.bloomingdales.com.
Hopefully those in control of infrastructure take a stand and simply reject these "domains" entirely. Shouldn't be hard to set up sanity-restoring filters...let us please just pretend these are spam domains and never acknowledge their existence.
Ironically anyone vain enough to reserve ".<whatever>" is surely ALSO going to keep a death grip on "<whatever>.com" so this will do nothing to improve the size of the name space.
It opens new options for "local" addresses: biketour.berlin biketour.paris antics.london etc
wether this will stick is another story.
Nope, there's room for all of those things in the current scheme.
Might I add that none of those cities are the only city to have that name, and that the country part carries real information?
Monter (the job people) and Monster (the expensive audio product people) are both going for .monster
How do they resolve that? Toss a coin? Auction it?
(Sorry, completely valueless - couldn't resist! :)
The user sets a time in the future, and then later must come back and click a button as close to that time as possible. Then users are ranked by the delta between their target time and actual time.
Anyone have any favorites? I see .DOT (dot.dot, anyone?), .WINNERS, .SUCKS (more desirable than .SEX), .NINJA, .MATRIX (registered by L'Oreal rather than HP, sadly), .IRA (financial planning and domestic terrorism in one convenient location), and absolutely no sign of .CAT (what do you think the internet is for, anyway? (No, wait, .PORN is right there.)).
I only know that because public bikes here have https://www.bicing.cat/ plastered on them.
http://nyan.cat/ http://lol.cat/ http://crypto.cat/ (hey, at least it has a Catalan version)
puntCAT can be found at: http://www.puntcat.cat/
Giving your email address over the phone took an hour.
The .sucks people will make a crazy amount of money in registration fees for domains that will never ever be used.
If you have my.home, it makes sense. If you type www.home, it really looks ugly, but I guess it works, and we've spent the past few years moving away from including "www" as a whole.
Typing "com" into my url bar doesn't get me anywhere, so I'm assuming typing "home" won't either. If I bought "apple", is there going to be a conventional or canonical "default"? home.apple?
I really find this confusing.
These are top level domain namespaces. So in the case of .home. The registrar for that domain can sell my.home, your.home, newyork.home, etc. The equivalent for the .com domain would be my.com, your.com, newyork.com, etc. Make sense?
If you want to access Apple (generically), users will still go to apple.com because even if they know that there's a .apple domain, what's the root host?
My best guess is a conventional default emerges shortly.
And this isn't necessarily about people wanting to find apple's main website. Apple would have control over all subdomains and hosts in the namespace. They could give a subdomain to every app in the app store. So if you want the Pandora app, you don't navigate to Pandora.com were you might see ads for other mobile devices. https://www.pandora.com/everywhere/mobile You would go to Pandora.apple and only see the iOS mobile app.
www is the default, he's not talking about software.
I believe it's possible to set things up so that "home" or "co.uk" on their own will work. As below, my memory is hazy, and I have no idea how many RFCs this behaviour might violate, but I certainly remember us doing so.
My background: many, many years ago, I used to work for a minor country-code tld, and we set up fun email addresses such as: a@cctld or t@cctld (for Tom ;-)). My memory is hazy, but I think this violates some RFC somewhere. Mail still got delivered, though.
I'm of the opinion that RFCs don't matter if they're not being enforced. What matters is the implementation that exists in the real world. It doesn't matter what the ITU says 4G is supposed to be when 4G already implemented as something completely different. What would make sense is www.home routing to the default .home domain.
It just seems weird to have a tld absent a host.
If you have a host on your domain also named that, well, things might get interesting depending on how your resolvers work (domains, search order, dotting, whatever). Plus, if you're in a corporate environment or something else with a proxy, add all of those demons, too.
Buckle up.
(Random trivia: I checked all 676 two-letter possibilities, and these are the ones which should work: AC AI CM DK GG IO JE KH PN SH TK TM TO UZ VI WS)
Also, RFC 5321 explicitly mentions the possibility of email addresses where the domain consists of just a TLD: http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5321#section-2.3.5
Non-authoritative answer: Name: ac Address: 193.223.78.210
then again my upstream provider defaults to opendns.com so http://ac in the browser does not work.
"Despite not being a valid top-level domain in the Internet, considerable DNS traffic that queries the local domain exists in the public Domain Name System.[1] In June 2009, the L root server received more than 400 such queries per second,[2] ranking 4th in DNS traffic of all TLDs after COM, ARPA, and NET." [1]
Scary potential for mischief-making. Hopefully ICANN would reject applications for these domains, but I'm not sure I'd take that level of competence for granted.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.local
I wonder if they actually stopped long enough to consider the actual pros and cons on this.
So give it time and you, too, can have a .fail domain.
Still easier than you having "mysite.bobsvideo.fail" I agree, but frankly most people don't even find sites via the domain name. They'll google "Bobs Video" and see what comes up.
Edit: Seems I'm wrong. See discussion downthread:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4105707
Also, it's very bothersome that domains are backwards. It's always irked me.
That being said, the amount of money required for a gTLD is absurd.
Cons: Internet nerds whine a lot.
It was unfortunately a no-brainer for them.
The only fair alternative would be no visible URIs (UUIDs or plain IPs could be used) and better search. There still is the ordering of results and SEO issues, but it's up to user—change your query or search engine if you aren't satisfied. The security issue (phishing) would require a bit more work to sort out, but I'm sure that's doable.
Domain names could still be used, but strictly for basic infrastructure-related things, like search engine directory.
People are pouring money into these TLD as well... Sad to say, but I see a totally different future, these are totally different to real estate, this is a digital world, maybe these .com, .app thing won't even needed, no address at all in the future, replace by something else, like on Facebook where you type say Dropbox, then suggested site just come out
It seems like 1 part extortion, 1 part destruction of a free internet, and 1 part orchestrated gold rush for squatters.
The application fees were $5k registration + $185k or $47k evaluation, so they collected something between $100 million and $366 million dollars, annual fees excluded.
I can see two possible outcomes:
1. all conflicts are resolved by agreements/bidding, process goes smoothly. But usage nevers picks up, and in a years'time it's all money down the drain.
2. ICANN backpedals and decides to cancel this stupid idea, while deciding to (legally) keep the application fees. Fighting ensues and we get a new, better management organization. Or worse.
I find lots of fine domain names for TLDs that aren't .com