Why does ICANN allow TLDs that are obviously trying to be extortionate? Locked nameservers? Blocked registration? Sunrise period for trademark holders? It's like they're just totally admitting that new TLDs are moronic and pointless and have absolutely nothing to do with increasing domain name space or providing value for the Internet community.
The whole NewTLD project is a misguided, worthless money grab by ICANN which doesn't make sense on a lot of levels. At this point, why even expect them to apply any sort of logic for the common good?
Those places has a legal system with laws, courts, lawyers and judges in order to define the limits of free speech. Is there a strong argument why that system has failed here, and why ICANN should step in and police?
See Brandenburg vs. Ohio. But I really fail to see how this tld meets that test. This is about huge corporations getting their panties in a wad when I register starbucks.sucks.
Why does ICANN allow TLDs that are obviously trying to be extortionate?
Because they collect $0.18 USD per domain per year.
It's like they're just totally admitting that new TLDs are moronic and pointless and have absolutely nothing to do with increasing domain name space or providing value for the Internet community.
I remember seeing something about how .museum and .aero and a lot of the first round of dumbass-TLDs was announced. Despite the only .aero I've ever seen was Boingo which seemed like a rather tenuous link. They offer WiFi all over, including airports, so that makes them aerospace? There's a really great yogurt/oatmeal place in SFO in Terminal 3 -- should they have whateverfraiche.aero, too?
And at some point I thought it was, well, at least about DNS. But registrations with no nameservers, or registrations purely to "block" registration seems rather much opposite of resolving names.
The justification for these new names is some of the dumbest I've read. I think Canon or some camera company was saying that with their own TLD, users could automatically share photos. ... WTF? What does that have to do with anything? It's just bizarre.
The best idea is probably just allowing anyone any domain, anytime, for some smallish price. Or force a standard registrar agreement so anyone can buy any second level from any registrar. Then we can just go back to ignoring all these terrible special TLDs. Why get .sucks, when you can have .blows, or .isshit or any other name.
on the inverse, why are there any TLD restrictions at all? Why can't google get google.chrome? It's just a text field, after all
This is a serious question, because I know a lot of people are against the expansion of TLDs (now I wouldn't have put .sucks on the top of my list for expansion, but...) and I haven't seen a real argument against it.
DNS is hierarchical. You know those dots? They actually mean something. Each name is a separate layer you have to query. Each one means more work for people who maintain infrastructure like the public suffix list[1]. Sure, each one might not count for much, but a world with thousands of TLDs isn't better for anyone.
Besides: TLDs function as a lexical tagging mechanism. When you see a string of letters like "foo.com", you recognize the word as a domain name because it's tagged with ".com". If we have thousands of TLDs, it's harder to recognize domain names as domain names.
I don't think any of these concerns will stop our descent to the world of unstructured AOL-keywords-as-DNS, though, and that's a shame.
Domain names are a mess. They're backwards (should be us.ag.bobsforestryservice), and since most domains just end with .com, there's no hierarchy. In my opinion, if ICANN wanted a hierarchy, they should be strictly regulating the names, including checking ownership of trademark, checking country of registration, etc. So thus we have AOL keywords.
That's the second time I've seen this argument made on HN this week. Why does that make more sense?
If I start typing in my address bar "g" then google.com is the first completion suggestion. If I want to get more specific, I can type "n" and news.google.com becomes the first suggestion. Or "m" and I go to mail.google.com. If we had to write "com." before any of these came up, it would mean a serious loss of productivity for everyone. The current system provides one or two layers of specificity before the TLD, then as many more as you would like (like /item?id=9357898 on the end of this URL, something nobody will every type) - it's ideal for everyday use even if it doesn't fit into some clean sorting method you're imagining or something.
Because directory hierarchies go from top to bottom - /dir/subdir/file.ext - or, globally, //hostname/dir/subdir/file.ext, or protocol://hostname/dir/subdir/file.ext etc.
That the hostname part's components, as presented to users, goes from bottom-to-top in DNS when the rest goes from top-to-bottom is an accident of history, but one it's too late to change (in DNS). Not everything made that mistake however - Usenet didn't.
As for what you're typing in your 'awesome bar', when you start typing, your autocorrect is ranking your visited history: there's no reason it has to start at the beginning, especially when the beginning isn't the root, but there's also no reason that doesn't make sense.
In fact, drifting back to topic: GOOGLE. is in fact a TLD now. If DNS were the 'right' way round, you'd be going to //google.news - wouldn't that make more semantic sense?
Of course, in practice, we're stuck with DNS the way it is because .com is now firmly in the public consciousness. But it could easily have been different, and if I were designing something new, I'd pick the Usenet way round.
Autocomplete could work the other way around, with "n" finding `∗.news` and `g.news` finding `∗g.news`, after all that `news.google.com` actually starts with `http://`.
Yes, and I got downvoted by this crowd last time I mentioned as much. Some random SF-specific project launches, and snags up yet another .com domain. It's not even something like "san_fran_project.com", it was even more generic.
On that note, I'm fully with the GP. This sort of thing should be enforced. It would help with everything from spam, to fake sites, to weird domain name pollution as discussed here.
They should really have done that. TLDs that are properly regulated do have a meaning and are successfully used in their space. Examples are .gov or .edu (except that they should have put in a country layer) and .de, which is the most successful CTLD, because unlike .co or .io it is used only by entities that actually have a physical address in Germany.
There is no real argument against it. ICANN is doing us all a favor through inflation. Soon there will be proportionally less squatting simply because there will be more to squat.
They're making a quick buck on the side. I say: all the power to them. The only ones bleeding are squatters.
Embrace the new TLDs! Go wild! Devaluate contemporary domain names! This is how we really hurt the parasites.
.info got that reputation because Afilias has constant "promotional" pricing of $2-$3 for the first year. Very attractive to fraudsters who know the domain won't be around for that long.
Yep I worked on one of the other TLD's in that round .coop (I sat next to the technical architect) and .info was obviously in spend lost of cash to get rich quick and not worry about the long term consequences mode.
You're thinking as a 2012 netizen. Imagine how Google will sort results in 2025 on searches about Pharmacies and New York City restaurants when .nyc, .healthcare, .food and .pharmacy will be around.
You are advocating to remove the TLD system. That just decreases the available namespace.
All those hip new services under .rs or .io? That's not because those TLDs are somehow appropriate, that's because they have some even remotely pronounable names available. If you operated the root zone as an open registry, it would all be squatted. All of it.
Most of it would still be for sale however, but with prices no boostrapped start up could ever afford. That's what happens when you make a virtual resource more scarce.
Namespacing the root zone into TLDs makes sense. But it would be better if it was done tastefully. All these new silly TLDs just make everyone lose trust in ICANN.
Ask yourself a simple question: Where does ICANN derive its "authority"? Does it even have any "authority"? To do what?
Is there anything to stop anyone besides ICANN from setting up a network of FTP mirrors that offer a "clean" root.zone file, free from "new" TLD's? No.
I remember the day when ICANN most recently changed the IP they use for the ftp servers that serve the root.zone file. (It does not change very often; it does not rely on DNS!) I also remember the day that this small text file doubled in size to accomodate all the "new" TLD's. Nothing was mentioned on HN.
I guess not many folks use this file? I use it every day.
Is there anything to stop DNS admins from using some other zone file (e.g. editing the one provided by ICANN)? Maybe, but one can only wonder what these things would be.
Another simple question: Why follow ICANN as some sort of "steward" of internet naming? Because there is no possible alternative? We have already shown at least one reason not to follow ICANN. Maybe there are others?
"IPC also points out a peculiar change to the standard new TLD contract that’s in the .Sucks agreement with ICANN. It includes an additional fee for Vox Populi with $100,000 upfront and $1 for each additional transaction for up to 900,000 transactions. It’s very odd that a registry would agree to pay this additional amount to ICANN."
Why is it a given that such names are extortionate?
Whatever the wisdom (or not) of opening up the top-level hierarchy, there's a place for sites saying things suck. If companies want to engage in the futile enterprise of buying up and controlling every name that might host a site that could be critical, they don't deserve sympathy.
I don't think ICANN would allow icann.sucks to exist. Even if that's not explicitly in writing, it would be foolish to bite the supreme leader's hand, wouldn't it?
But FIFA better cough up $2,499 in "protection" money or there will be no shortage of people trying to grab that one.
Dunno. How many .com domains are too many? People around here put way too much emphasis on the top level part. They're just domains, who cares how many there are.
Mad props to Mark Jeftovic and easyDNS. Found his service by doing a WHOIS on ycombinator.com when looking for a new registrar a while back. easyDNS has the cleanest and most logical interface for managing domain names and DNS records that I've found. And Mark's blog posts (like the one above) are great. Here's another favorite: http://blog.easydns.org/2014/01/29/welcome-to-easydns-press-...
It completely ignores the fact that ease of access to information is a greater determinant of what people learn than existence of information.
Yes, right now it is possible to find discontents of a brand or company by searching and reading through various forums and webpages of differing quality and structure.
However, if there was an easy mnemonic like "just add .sucks to the end of a name" to find the bad things about $NAME then the game would change. It'd be easier for people to organize and oppose companies than anything else imaginable.
And that makes a huge difference. Think of how hard it was to find programming help before stack overflow. This would be a much more potent and wide-ranging way to organize information, because it can still be difficult for a novice to understand what to search for on stack overflow. This would remove even that last bit of friction.
I'm not denying that .sucks is a bold and roguish move. I am asserting that it is an effective move.
In which case they should've started up an independent service "sucks.com" where you could have "easydns.sucks.com", "hackernews.sucks.com"...ie. why involve DNS registration at all, if you're actually trying to provide a forum for people to air grievances?
The fact that the sunrise registrations are so expensive (as opposed to disallowed altogether) is an even stronger indicator that this is extortion for the purpose of profit, nothing more.
> However, if there was an easy mnemonic like "just add .sucks to the end of a name" to find the bad things about $NAME then the game would change. It'd be easier for people to organize and oppose companies than anything else imaginable.
That sounds far fetched. There would be no consistency in the kind of sites you'd get, no way for this to develop into a mnemonic. It would never become such a 'thing' that it could compete with the status quo – that you can just google for negative stuff about any company or person and get multiple, relevant results (instead of just the ravings of one particular random person who had a grievance).
... Or people will just use Google for "foo sucks". Like they do for Facebook login. It doesn't sound remotely effective unless Google goes ahead and blesses the TLD and increases rankings for such domains. Seeing as how stupid these new TLDs are, it'd be rather bad of Google to do so.
Except that the brands who could most benefit from public scrutiny/feedback will just buy up the .sucks domain and let it gather dust, the cost to them is far less than the amount they already spend on PR, damage controls and so on. So the consumer is no better off in any way.
I would suggest that a .rocks type domain would be redundant because the official .com or whatever is usually where all the positivity is. Often the owners of the .com try to manage negativity, and ensure their domain is a positive place, so another place is needed for free criticism. Im not sure many would trust a .rocks as independent.
Also, I can imagine something like an fabproduct.rocks would be a magnet for troll types and quickly descend in to a general bun fight arena.
Can someone explain to me any benefit that the ICANN decision to rollout new TLDs has provided? I am sure one exists but I cannot think of any. Trying to be open minded about this but I really don't understand why more geeky types weren't more anti-new-TLD when it was being proposed.
I would say there was an overwhelming anti-new-TLD groundswell in the tech community! ICANN took note of this, raised a very balanced and diplomatic middle finger, and proceeded to move ahead with its plan.
AFAICS the nominal reason was that TLDs like .com were/are getting crowded and country based one's (e.g. .io) were being mis-used as generic TLDs
So as a reaction to that ICANN allow new generic TLDs to be registered. In and of itself, I don't think that's a bad idea. However the $180,000 registration fee seems a bit like a money grab, the lack of restrictions on the allowed names (e.g. .sucks) and the land-grabbing by large companies on a wide range of generic names (mainly from what I've seen Google and Amazon) have made the process a bit of a mess.
"IPC also points out a peculiar change to the standard new TLD contract that’s in the .Sucks agreement with ICANN. It includes an additional fee for Vox Populi with $100,000 upfront and $1 for each additional transaction for up to 900,000 transactions. It’s very odd that a registry would agree to pay this additional amount to ICANN."
Good for them. The new TLDs are really worthless in my opinion. For instance they already have .net and added .network.
The majority of people will recognize .com and maybe .net. Beyond that it's a stretch in my opinion and you're only going to get visitors via searches or links. I can't imagine anyone is going to think "oh I wonder what microsoft's latest press releases are; I'll just go to microsoft.press". No, they're going to search for it.
In all honesty domains in general are not very user friendly. I wouldn't be surprised if they are eventually replaced for a system that's more of a search than anything. I mean just look at all of the domain names being squatted on and for what? Half the times you can pick a different domain name, still name your product what you want and people will still find you due to search.
I wouldn't be surprised if they are eventually replaced for a system that's more of a search than anything.
There's no need to replace anything. Nobody[1] uses domain names any more to browse the web. That's what Google, the default browser home page, and the omni-bar is for. I don't know a single non-web-developer who uses domain names. Everybody just drops "facebook" or "google"(?!) in the search box that shows up when the browser opens.
1. Well, nobody except for a rounding error number of people who hang out in places like HN.
Hell I'm a developer and sorta technical and I can never remember the URL/domain to login to Office 365. So I end up using Google and trying to find a reasonable-looking result and then check for a cert that looks right.
And that is why Chrome did away with the bookmark pane. What people do today is largely determined by their choice of browser. I use FF and bookmark my login urls. We are discussing the problems of domain names--part of the basic infrastructure of modern communication for the entire world--in light of the fallout from what was nothing but a calculated decision to increase market share by a single company, which given the history of ICANN, is apparently more influential than most governments of the world, and of the G7, on this point. That should be a wake up call.
I do, but I suppose I'm included in that rounding error.
(It drives everyone else who's used my laptop for anything crazy - typing something in the address bar only searches my history / bookmarks, no remote communication. If you want to search, use the search bar.)
Though, that being said, I find myself only rarely typing ULs. More of the time the browser is pulling the URL from bookmarks / history.
I have firefox configured to search just my history and even that gets cripplingly slow. I'm incessantly frustrated by the preposterous need for resources of web browsers.
No, "the goal of domain names is to provide a mechanism for naming resources in such a way that the names are usable in different hosts, networks, protocol families, internets, and administrative organizations" and they "are not required to have a one-to-one correspondence with host names, host addresses, or any other type of information."
DNS is 15 years older then HTTP so of course it's not meant to be used that way. Domain names where put in different configuration files once, and then your mail client, IRC client, NTP client and so on just worked forever. With HTTP you suddenly started to use domain names by typing them over and over agian.
Personally I'm not sure the web will look like this in the future. I think domain names will be hidden from users once again. Netflix will of course use domain names internally to get content from their servers, but the user only needs to find the Netflix app from som App-store.
I don't see how email addresses were much different than HTTP URLs - they just worked iff you had a contact stored, but that's equivalent to bookmarks.
I also don't see domain names becoming invisible any time soon, simply because linking is too damn useful, and most companies have to incentive to destroy that.
The TLD's are not about searches, they are about that universal title that hangs in that text input constantly hovering over the top of all your content.
This and the "great TLD expansion" in general seems like a great way for ICANN to make itself irrelevant. People will just stop trusting TLDs they don't recognize.
I think the parent comment was implying that people will stop using services that end in ".io" or ".co" or, really, anything but ".com" because of the large number of shady websites on the off-brand TLDs.
If the $10 fee simply turns on the domain and points it to a captive forum, hosted by the registrar, how is the registrar going to avoid being sued for trademark infringement over every domain name?
For the same reason PayPalSucks.com has been online for 15 years without being sued: it's not trademark infringement. Nominative use (using a mark to refer to that product) and fair use (criticism and commentary, protected by the first amendment) are affirmative defenses to trademark infringement. Registering a trademark doesn't prevent other people from using that word, only from using it in ways that are likely to cause consumer confusion as to the source of some goods or services.
This isn't using a single mark to refer to a product for criticism and commentary; this is using an unlimited number of marks for promotion of the registrar's sites. (In addition to using the mark in the ways you mentioned.)
That is, the registrar's goal isn't to refer to PayPal, but to use the domain PayPal.sucks (and potentially every protected mark plus ".sucks") to draw traffic.
I guess the legality of this use will need to be decided by the courts.
You're allowed to criticize any company you like (as long as you don't lie), and you can even profit by doing so. For example, media companies can sell newspapers containing negative reviews of trademarked companies, and make money from it.
For trademark infringement, there has to be "likelihood of confusion", i.e. your use of their trademark could lead to people thinking that your goods/services originated from the trademark owner. In the case of someone explicitly critisizing a company, this could never be argued.
Have the courts ever ruled that you can market a series of magazines/etc called "_____ sucks"?
It's an interesting legal question, essentially arguing that adding the magic word "sucks" allows using trademarks to promote their site (perhaps even to advertise competing products).
The law is fluid, and nominative use is a fairly new legal idea. We're not going to settle the question here, but it will be interesting to see what the courts decide.
You don't need a court ruling to allow you to do something. It's the other way round.
Of course it's fine to market a series of magazines called "_____ sucks". It's just expressing an opinion. Trademark law doesn't come into it, unless the trademark owner can prove that consumers might reasonably think your use of their trademark is somehow authorised or affiliated with them. In the case of "____ sucks", that would be self-evidently not the case.
I didn't say it was a free pass to do anything. You can't lie about the company, for example. But that would be libel, not trademark infringement. As long as it's obvious to consumers that your use of the trademark is not on behalf of or authorised by the company, then it's not trademark infringement.
And yes, simply adding "sucks" would pretty much always be a free pass against trademark infringement , except in really contrived scenarios, like if the trademark was a brand of vacuum cleaners :)
That said, the Dumb Starbucks example is interesting, I think that's in a grey area, the kind of edge case you're talking about. Starbucks might well be able to demonstrate that some customers thought it was official (albeit obscure) marketing effort by them, especially because it's a coffee shop.
The show "nathan for you" made a parody starbucks called "dumb starbucks" that mimicked starbucks exactly but put dumb in front of everything. starbucks didnt sue them so no rulings came out of it, but it is exactly what youre discussing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumb_Starbucks
"Lawyers who specialize in trademark and copyright law say not so fast. While parody is generally a protected form of speech, there is no clear-cut legal definition of what separates legitimate parody from trademark infringement. The reality is, any infringement case that makes its way into a courtroom will be evaluated on its own merits, with judges weighing various factors against a body of existing legal precedents. Historically, cases could go either way."
- It is dirt cheap to bid on paid search brand terms for "brand sucks." Be smart in where you take people and you manage against concerns.
- Having an exact match domain is not anywhere near as useful as it used to be per Matt Cutts[1]. Someone would have to also manage to rank for your brand terms consistently for it to be of any note. I would laugh so hard if this went the route of .info and became recognized as a poor quality TLD that didn't rank worth a hoot.
- There is no avoiding the vocal minority of upset customers. If you have an awesome product/service, you have nothing to worry about. Focus your energy and budgets on positive things and don't look back.
Without all the background info, in paragraph 15 (after 644 words) they answer the initial question from the post's title.
TL;DR: anyone can register easydns-sucks.com or anything like it anyway. No need to "protect" yourself by buying [yourdomain].sucks at exorbitant prices.
I see a great public service business here ... become a consumer advocate and buy a huge number of domains for $9.95/year. Charge the trademark holders a few dollars above that per year and deprive these trolls of the huge fees (> $2,499 per year per domain for premium names) they were expecting (yes, I'd rather they made nothing too).
It should be pretty easy to automate the process. The down-side is that if you're Comcast (or one of the other common targets) you're probably going to have to live with a .sucks site. Try not to incite people into believing you suck so much!
We've used easydns for more than a decade (yes, my new marketing people are trying to move us away from then, I'll fix that).
My experience with easydns is that they are like us. They care about their customers, they care about doing the right thing, and they do that even when it hurts.
Great company. Very slightly more expensive than the cheapest but they are definitely in the you get what you pay for category.
