Some other corporate/brand TLDs that exist are .allstate, .capitalone, .cookingchannel, .fedex, .honda, .lplfinancial, .marriott, .nike, .panasonic, .samsung, .statefarm, .toyota, and many more.
I have http://edd.xxx/ as my personal domain, which I’m sure is not doing great things for my SEO (or accessibility from heavily controlled corporate networks!), but hey, people remember it. And I have another more sanitised domain that I give out when needed…
And that's why Internet trolling is called that -- back in the Usenet days it was "trolling for newbies". Dragging your baited line around and seeing who'd bite.
I paid an embarrassing amount of money (as I purchased it on the secondary market), but not even 1% of $185k. .bond was originally created for Bond University who presumably did pay something like that; they sold the TLD to ShortDot, and now it's marketed to people selling bonds.
Answer:
To get your own TLD, you need to submit a completed, detailed application and fee (likely around $200,000) to ICANN. Then, ICANN will evaluate the application (and Afilias can help with this). If approved, you can proceed to launching with domain registrars.
Skimming the recommendations, they want wider participation from the non-western world and I suspect the $185k application fee may go down a bit (there's also an annual fee of $24k, +25 cents per second-level domain)
Anyone know how much a company like Afilias charges for its end of things if you choose to outsource the IT? (e.g. assistance with the application, spinning up the TLD, ongoing costs to maintain)?
> I suspect the $185k application fee may go down a bit
Honestly, my expectation would be that the application fee will go up, because the first round received so many terrible applications (like brand TLDs that the trademark owner had no intention of using).
There haven't been any new gTLDs delegated since ICANN ran round 1 of the gTLD expansion program in 2012. It doesn't matter how much money you have; you need to wait for round 2.
Neustar got .neustar and switched the UltraDNS domain to ultradns.neustar. Then they did some sort of corporate split last year and now they’re telling all their customers to switch back to ultradns.com.
Highlights one of the pitfalls to custom TLDs: the corporate sponsor might split or even go bankrupt. Then what happens to all those URLs? Talk about link rot… never thought we would have to worry about TLD rot.
> http://bestbuy will get re-write to .com by firefox, I don't like that
You can disable this in firefox by setting "browser.fixup.alternate.enabled" to "false" in about:config
You might have to disable autocomplete too...
I always disable that sort of thing. I figure that when I type a URL in the address bar I'm not making a suggestion and I don't want my browser pulling up some other site instead, especially not based on some guess or assumption about what I "actually" wanted.
Do they have this because they think it's useful? Or is it because they're afraid someone else was going to try to get ICANN to create this gTLD? Sort of like how companies will buy up alternate regular TLDs just to prevent people from impersonating them.
I'm not sure about best buy, but I've seen companies that use a TLD for their internal dns.
Like: server.nyc.company
Maybe they want to make sure the domain is under their control, and it may be cheaper just to buy the entire gtld than to change every internal domain name.
With so many laptops and byod, I've seen some issues happen when the external and internal domain names resolve differently.
Like when the internal domain.corp overlaps with the public domain.corp owned by somebody else.
You can kinda fudge it though. Like, I don't think too many people are going to fork out the money to buy and operate the .bestbuy TLD other than ... Best Buy. So if they wanted to have it just for internal stuff, they didn't really need to own the TLD.
What's even more perplexing is that they own bestbuy.com - which is IMO more desirable than any dot-bestbuy domain for public-facing stuff.
Dunno. It may be a defensive IP thing where it’s cheaper to spend $300k on the TLD than to litigate domain name versus TLD against someone who sets up cars.bestbuy and shoes.bestbuy and stuff.
Does Best Buy’s trademark for retail extend to all categories? Maybe? But consider that booking.com spent millions and took years to get the Supreme Court to decide that “booking.com” is trademarkable, where “booking” is not.
The more I think about that the more I think I’d make the same decision.
This makes sense; $200k is only what, a 0.01% of their weekly ad spend, and we're talking about it here so. . . That combined with defensive squatting, makes business sense to me, also probably fulfilled some VP's pet project
That's true but best practice is to own the public one too. I'm pretty sure Microsoft recommends owning the domains you use for Active Directory, and not using anything that isn't it can't be made public
Some companies uses bare hostnames for internal systems. Those same companies use HTTP Basic auth to log into those systems. And some routers have weird behaviour for DNS resolution, like prioritising .net as the default TLD.
I ran into a situation where, even on VPN, going to https://<company>vacation/ on my home network would take me to https://<company>vacation.net (a valid domain). It would have been trivial for the owner of that domain to phish for credentials.
I had an issue with an old Access Point whose DHCP server set up the local domain suffix as accespointbrand.com, with no way to change it from GUI nor config file.
Unfortunately the AP manufacturer didn’t renew the domain and it was squatted by an ad serving website.
Every hare domain became subdomain.accesspointbrand.com
So now and then I would get those ads when using wifi. I ended up changing the Access point.
I think they used to recommend using .local as the TLD for internal stuff. Not sure if that is a good idea or if you are shooting yourself in the foot these days with if you plan on using AAD.
The former. ICANN wouldn't "give" it to any third party, and nobody is going to pay $250,000 to ICANN for a failed "application" if they don't own the trademark.
Does Best Buy have exclusive use of that phrase? Doesn’t look like it. Why wouldn’t Best Buy Insurance or Best Buy Realty have just as much right to it?
Nah, it was a money grab by registries and ICANN. They marketed this to anyone and everyone, promising it was the future.
I happened to work for a registry at the time, and remember getting bizarre calls from places like doctor's offices and such inquiring about some email/flyer/call they got. I was honest with them, at least.
Bestbuy operates a "marketplace" much like amazon's, where bestbuy's inventory is blended with other sellers'. I can imagine this tld being used to further that arm of their business.
Dies (see: https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/the-death-of-a-tld). Something that anyone should consider before getting a domain on a hippy GTLD. Alongside with how "bad" reputation it has that is usually correlated with low price offers.
The link you gave says emergency operation is provided preferably for a length of 12 months. That's it's meant to be a temporary measure (which is self-explanatory by the "emergency" in the name).
The 12 months is more than long enough to get a permanent operator assigned to run the TLD if the emergency operator isn't going to continue doing so. ICANN isn't just going to let an entire TLD's worth of domain names fall off the face of the Internet. This isn't theoretical either; they already went through it for .wed: https://www.icann.org/en/blogs/details/next-steps-for-the-we...
I imagine that it would still be up for the time the NS servers would be up. If they don't care about it, after the servers go silent the domains would become unreachable. But they would probably sell the ownership of it to someone else, or at least keep a few servers just for the sake of keeping it.
Edit: As forgotpwd16 pointed out, they can also give up their ownership
They'll never go bankrupt because they have enough remnants of ignorant mall customers to buy overpriced cables and because they're the last major game left in technology retail besides big box stores.
Not sure if the employee discount is still the same (close to cost) but a friend of mine worked there around 20 years ago and I was shocked how cheap he could get cables.
When I worked there, margins on the cables were something like 85-95% so employee discounts were huge. On other items, TVs and such, the margins are much much lower so at most you got $25-50 off of the sale price.
The question wasn't "what's nic mean?", it was "is buying your own top level domain going to be the new normal?" Presumably if you have enough cash, I'd say yes.
For the second question nic.* is conventionally the domain utilized by the TLD operator. So nic.brand may contain info and functions related to the .brand TLD and then www.brand and about.brand be other sites. E.g. nic.google redirects to registry.google, Google's domain registrar whose engineers also operate .google, whereas about.google can be considered the actual brand home site.
> E.g. nic.google redirects to registry.google, Google's domain registrar whose engineers also operate .google
Negative. Google's TLDs are operated by Google Registry, as shown on that site, which is an entirely separate team from Google Domains (the registrar).
Number one problem is scarcity. Two persons can not own the same domain and tld combo. Number two problem is speculation. People buy domains and hold them hoping to resell for 1000x. Number three problem is expiration.
I would like to see an alternative in which we can assign word combinations to IP addresses and solve all these and other issues.
One obscure downside of having so many TLDs is that if you type something like "chrome.search" in the address bar and press Enter, it won't search for "chrome.search" in your default search engine. It will try to navigate to it (unsuccessfully), because ".search" is a TLD nowadays.
I do this all the time with the iPhone keyboard. Because the dot is only there for URLs it’s exactly where I normally hit the spacebar at (which expands to fill where the dot for URLs is). Drives me nuts. I can’t be the only one.
I mean their generic logo (which you can see on the OP page) reads a bit like “Best Buy.” with the hole in the price tag looking like a dot. Given the page is about a domain, they could've moved the price tag to the front so that it reads “.bestbuy” – as a subtle joke.
Also, why hasn't one or more independently wealthy folks disrupted this by obtaining their own TLD and running it on donations. Allow the registrar give out names for free. The only rules would be "no spam or activity illegal in <Country>".
The initial goal was to try to remove the artificial scarcity and value of .com domains by opening up the field.
This would also avoid the onslaught of startups with weird spellings of uncommon words because everything is being squatted.
It would also permit per tld rules. For instance, you could require someone looking for say .salon to submit documentation showing they're a salon. So then sassysalon.com may be $15,000 but sassy.salon requires documentation that you're doing salon business and it's $10 because someone can't just squat on 10,000 of them and then auction it off.
Noble goal and things like this are a consequence of it.
My guess is that it's an outgrowth of the fact that .edu, .com / .co, and .org weren't rigorously enforced. So except for .gov, the TLDs were no longer a reliable source for any important information.
But I'm just speculating; perhaps someone can correct me.
Around 1992, I applied for and obtained a .com domain name and a Class C network, free of charge, no expiration dates.
I had seen (probably on Usenet) a little tutorial about what information was expected in the applications and so I faked up a consulting company with a catchy name, and explained how our board met N times per year.
I was never once able to use the Class C - I worked for an ISP but I still didn't have enough clout to get a BGP announcement for my 28.8k SLIP dialup.
I think I sort of used the domain name, at least as a reply-to email address, but I don't remember operating authoritative NS or anything.
They were both eventually reaped. The Class C was under 192.x.x.x and surely was hot property within a few years. My boss engaged in a little speculation and snagged some really hot domain names, and probably did better than I had done.
At this point ICANN is hopelessly corrupt. Every giant corporation with money to throw at having its own GTLD is not how the internet was supposed to be.
Look at the revolving door between ICANN and private for-profit domain name companies like the people who tried to "buy" .org, and the people who run Donuts and its competitors.
Don't really see the issue. Is having just few TLDs (com/net/org) somehow better? Is there a significant difference in having a domain on those and having an entire TLD? Other than the later being much more expensive that is.
Having some hierarchy or structure to DNS would be better. But that ship sailed around 1996 when Postel explicitly rejected the idea of closing .COM
So, the argument goes, just close the COM (and NET and ORG)
domain to new registrations and tell all those making
registration requests "were sorry, COM was a mistake, you
now have to register under your country code". After all,
by the growth argument, in a couple of years the number of
companies in COM will be a small percentage of the total
population.
I don't think this will work. There would certainly be a
lot of complaints (and probably legal actions) suggesting
that some unfair practices were being followed and that the
new requesters were being arbitrarily disadvantaged. I
think it would be hard to argue that over 200,000
registrations following a procedure in place over 5 years
was a small mistake.
Leaving .COM to be the everything TLD pretty solidly settled the non-existence of hierarchy in the public space, which I see directly paving way for these "new" gtlds.
>Don't really see the issue. Is having just few TLDs (com/net/org) somehow better?
One way it (may) arguably be better is that there are fewer avenues for impersonation or abuse. Ten years ago, bestbuy (or, insert your own small brand here) would buy bestbuy.com, bestbuy.net, bestbuy.org, bastbuy.com, etc to make sure malicious actors couldn't commit any tomfoolery against their customers, devalue their brand, etc.
Adding more gTLDs, as we see with examples elsewhere on this thread, means some companies now feel the need to spend hundreds of thousands more buying up gTLDs lest someone sets up cars.bestbuy, shoes.bestbuy, a malicious login.bestbuy, etc.
In a perfect world without any abuse, I think more gTLDs would be desirable. As a small business owner who has felt pressured to buy up several similar-sounding domains after others caused mischief with them... I'm less sure.
I've also seen TV ads where they just say "Search for $BRAND $PRODUCT to learn more", and by "search" they probably meant "google".
Or brands just advertise with [f] (their facebook page), and if you go down the list you'll also see their Instagram, Tiktok and formerly Snapchat usernames listed.
What's corrupt is that ICANN is somehow the gatekeepers of new GTLD's. And they demand $185k with no details on what the "evaluation process" is and no transparency. So you're right the internet was supposed to be open.
It is open. You can run your own DNS server and create your own GTLDs. Might not get a valid cert, but then you can also add your own root cert to your devices and everything will work just fine.
It's the "all of the major browsers, OSes and DNS resolvers should comply" part that's the hard part
While it's cool to hate corporations, can you provide some substantiation on why GTLDs are bad? What harm is .bestbuy causing you or to the internet? That name space didn't exist. Now it exists. I immediately went "Cool", but then comments are again needlessly negative. I just want to know why.
What does "polluting the namespace" even mean? Is getting a new domain polluting the namespace? Maybe shutdown the web and have only a single site to be more cyberenvironment friendly?
Okay, let’s not let “corporations” buy domain names at all then. The difference between foo.bestbuy and foo.bestbuy.com is cultural, namely that you personally are used to one but not the other. Corporations are as much the owners of the internet as they have been for…decades. The registries for .com and .net are operated by publicly-listed billion-dollars-in-revenue-earning Verisign. The majority of the internet’s underlying infrastructure is owned by for-profit entities that are in it to make money from you.
The reality is that the commercialisation of the Internet is the only reason that you or I or venture capitalist plaything Hacker News are all even here at all. ICANN just found a way to extract buckets of money from brand-obsessed companies for essentially just adding a line to a database. It’s hilarious and I challenge you to point out how this itself is affecting the openness of the Internet in any tangible way.
So you must be against all GTLDs, not just .bestbuy right? They're all polluting the namespace. It shouldn't matter who bought it, "pollution" or whatever that constitutes, still exists?
Why are TLDs so special? Why are the few known private TLDs (com/net/edu/gov, etc) so important, how are they so special that it is valuable to society to keep them limited?
I think the everyday person doesn't even understand that google.com is a little endian hierarchy.
I doubt it's that easy to pull something like that off. And besides, people fall for phishing scams even when the domain name isn't even close to what they're trying to imitate.
https://www.internic.net/domain/root.zone
Some other corporate/brand TLDs that exist are .allstate, .capitalone, .cookingchannel, .fedex, .honda, .lplfinancial, .marriott, .nike, .panasonic, .samsung, .statefarm, .toyota, and many more.