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Ask HN: Over time why wouldn't companies and people switch over to the new TLDs?

5 points by xandyrox ↗ HN
I feel like this is real estate 100 years ago - undeveloped so no one wants it but as the internet gets older and more people go on the web as well as more people utilize it, there still will only be one restaurant.reviews and discount.clothing.

10 comments

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a3n
Because they benefit no one but the TLD issuing authorities.

I as a consumer don't want to know about 12 different urls for the same business.

I don't even want there to be TLDs at all.

http://cocacola.

That should be enough. If someone needs more differentiation they can use subdomains.

alexforster
Unfortunately, that isn't compatible with the DNS spec. Specifically, it conflicts with the concept of "short names" versus "fully qualified names" (FQDN's).

A DNS resolver interprets a "dotless domain" to mean that it should try applying its search-suffix list during name resolution. Your computer would take a "dotless domain" and mangle it into something like "http://cocacola.local" before trying to resolve it. This means ICANN couldn't implement "dotless domains" without first changing the way every DNS resolver in the world currently works.

a3n
Clearly.

I just added that in to amplify my opinion that more tlds are not helpful.

xandyrox
Wouldn't you rather go to wendys.menu then their website and search for it? Or your local pizzastore.menu?

Or instead of searching for pages - samsung.support?

Also people remember things like searchenigne.travel better than some jumbled made up word. Once one brand shows it is easy to market I think we will see adoption.

a3n
No, I just want to go to http://wendys, or since we have the DNS that we have, then http://wendys.com. I don't even like guessing which of com, net or org something might be today. At most I'd prefer just .com and .gov (under which .mil would be absorbed).

I'm on the fence about country TLDs. If we're going to have them then I think all URLs without them should break, which would be virtually all US URLs, forcing us to use them too.

It's up to a site owner how to present and organize information.

I don't want to have to guess among an ever expanding list of tlds, and whether a site used .menu or presented their menu in some other way.

EDIT: And as a site owner I don't want to have to buy .menu etc. just to present information that I can currently present for free.

But that's me, that's my opinion, I'm very comfortable being in the minority, and I'll get along just fine living under our new TLD overlords, even if I don't welcome them.

ereckers
I would rather go to menu.wendys and menu.pizzastore.

This also saves Wendy's and Pizza store from having to pay for another TLD.

xandyrox
I agree, I think everything will depend on how companies embrace the new TLDS.
justinsb
What makes you think they won't?

I don't think they will ever have the gravitas of a dot-com, but the unavailability of good .com domain names has led people to accept other TLDs. The popularity of .io in tech is a good example; people prefer $(name).io to iwanttoget$(name)app.com.

I bet we'll see at least one of the new TLDs become as popular as .io. Maybe .app?

busterarm
Maybe over time. A long time. Lots of folks don't seem to have the mental real-estate to spare to realize there's anything beyond '.com' in the US.
glimcat
I'd say .app is probably a shoe-in. The other short ones have a pretty solid chance of seeing real use.

The long ones, not so much. How popular are existing TLDs like .info or .name?

Given sufficient time, maybe the others will amount to more than an unabashed cash grab. But not this decade. Probably not the next, either. And at that point, you're talking about a situation where "remembering a domain name" is even more of a broken process than it is today.

How will we connect to computers on the global network of fifty years from now? Two hundred? I'm betting it's not going to look like http://blog.johnjohnson.photography or whatever new list ICANN releases next time they want to play.