[HN Gopher] The Problem with Vanity TLDs (2011)
___________________________________________________________________
 
The Problem with Vanity TLDs (2011)
 
Author : phantom_oracle
Score  : 35 points
Date   : 2022-01-01 17:33 UTC (5 hours ago)
 
web link (www.templetons.com)
w3m dump (www.templetons.com)
 
| niedzielski wrote:
| There is already http://microsoft.bing. See
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_dom....
 
  | kijin wrote:
  | Which redirects to bing.com, proving that they really have no
  | use for the .bing TLD other than to prevent someone else from
  | grabbing it.
 
    | firekvz wrote:
    | .bing tld is theirs, is not available for the public
    | 
    | and even if it was available to register, they can reserve
    | words for their own usage before launching it
    | 
    | and if you mean, someone else actually doing the paperwork to
    | get the .bing tld for them, it wouldnt ever be approved.
 
    | mavhc wrote:
    | Imagine the clamour of people who want to be associated with
    | Bing
    | 
    | The real problem is can I still type weirdfilename.exe into
    | the browser bar and get to a search engine?
 
      | dredmorbius wrote:
      | The Crosby estate?
 
| quicksilver03 wrote:
| I would tolerate the ICANN TLD money-grabbing scheme, but the
| "new" TLDs are a little more than an indication of bad taste. I
| can't be the only one to dislike anything more than 3 characters
| in a TLD, like .cloud or .engineering.
 
  | mindslight wrote:
  | ICANN has clearly strayed from its charter of nonprofit root
  | trustee, and is acting like any other for profit entity and
  | arbitraging away their assets. I'd love to see a root-
  | restandardization effort that aims to take anything that isn't
  | (com/net/org, the country code tlds, and whatever other
  | traditional ones I'm forgetting) and sticks it under a new
  | .icann or whatever. So ICANN can "sell .google", but most
  | everyone would end up referring to it as ".google.icann". The
  | sooner this is done the better, to make it clear that
  | attempting to use the root pollution will end up being a
  | painful experience.
  | 
  | Heck, let Big Tech take .google/.apple/.amazon/.comcast etc if
  | that's what it takes to get this done. Point being to keep the
  | root pollution to a finite amount rather than the ongoing sell
  | off of any name imaginable.
 
    | duskwuff wrote:
    | And invalidate every URL and hostname in existence? That's an
    | absolute nonstarter of an idea.
 
      | mindslight wrote:
      | If you thought about the implications of my proposal you'd
      | see that it was only invalidating hostnames in these ICANN-
      | giveaway new "TLDs". Traditional domains would remain
      | unchanged. Trustees of traditional domains would still
      | continue their corruption (as was narrowly avoided for .org
      | a few months ago), but that's probably inevitable.
      | Meanwhile we'd preserve the root namespace for the adoption
      | of better technologies (eg .onion).
      | 
      | And honestly we need better mechanics for machine-intended
      | references regardless. It's ridiculous that you resolve and
      | load a webpage, only for that webpage to require you to
      | resolve a bunch more human readable (ie non-decentralized)
      | names for loading subresources. For example, going to a
      | bookmarked page shouldn't result in any DNS queries for
      | human readable names.
 
  | bobbob1921 wrote:
  | I agree with this. I feel it takes away from the
  | standardization or uniformity 2 and 3 char TLDs bring to
  | domains. Also it does feel like a bait and switch- where for so
  | many years three character tlds (and then 2 char tlds) were so
  | valuable and sought after, only to have these >3 char tlds come
  | along and change the landscape/market.
  | 
  | Additionally, I always found it interesting how the .xxx TLD
  | never took off (was essentially DOA), even after they were so
  | popular and valueable in the pre-sale auctions icann and others
  | conducted b4 their introduction/release several years ago.
 
  | collegeburner wrote:
  | No there just shouldn't be a thing as a "TLD". I should be able
  | to register abc.ou8hurbaskjdbflubsaduf if I want to. Or just
  | 8huasidvbsd with no domain. Only way to fight domain squatting
  | and the stupidly overpriced domain hacks.
 
  | acheron wrote:
  | I'm never going to remember a domain with a silly tld. I don't
  | necessarily think badly of the company when I see a link to one
  | (I mostly think "fuck you ICANN") but it is anti-memorable.
 
    | sofixa wrote:
    | Oh please. A Cloud Guru's acloud.guru is awesome and easy to
    | remember, and there are probably tons of other examples.
 
      | marc_io wrote:
      | Notion.so is another example. The gTLD in this case could
      | even be considered part or the brand, as notion.com points
      | to it.
 
        | easrng wrote:
        | .so is a ccTLD, not a gTLD.
 
      | dqv wrote:
      | And a lot of the .com domain space is polluted either with
      | people sitting on domains and wanting to sell them for
      | thousands or just leaving it unregisterable. So you have
      | this choice of either creating a really long .com, or a
      | shorter .other
      | 
      | Granted, the domain name system is not ideal, but adding
      | new TLDs, however long, is a better solution than dealing
      | with having to name your company so you can get a .com that
      | matches it.
 
  | unbanned wrote:
 
  | pm90 wrote:
  | What's the problem with longer length tlds?
 
    | paulryanrogers wrote:
    | In practice URLs often cannot be more than 2K characters.
    | It's also more work to type and bytes to transmit and harder
    | to see on small screens. For many use cases these are
    | irreverent, but they do matter to some.
 
      | jefftk wrote:
      | Where is 2K a limit these days?
 
        | 7steps2much wrote:
        | Chromium based browsers!
        | 
        | > The Google Chrome browser supports a maximum length of
        | a web page URL of 2 MB (2048 characters) in size.
        | 
        | taken from [0]. Do note that this is a restriction
        | created by the browser developers. In theory a URL can be
        | of arbitrary length. Some browsers (like Firefox) do
        | comply with this, though they might now show the full URL
        | to the user, cutting it off after a certain number of
        | characters.
        | 
        | [0]: https://mywebshosting.com/what-is-the-maximum-url-
        | length-lim...
 
        | sokoloff wrote:
        | That would be 2KB (the error is in the reference
        | material; you cited it faithfully).
 
        | eat_veggies wrote:
        | What's interesting is how 2048 characters is 2 KB (a
        | factor of 1000 difference) but this conversion of 2 MB =
        | 2048 characters seems to have been copy-pasted around the
        | web
 
        | hackerbee wrote:
        | 2MB would be 2 million characters - if using ASCII
        | characters, a bit less for special characters in UTF-8
 
        | TheDong wrote:
        | Experimentally, you can easily verify that 2MB is the
        | actual limit, not 2048 characters.
        | 
        | For example, the following domain renders just fine,
        | despite being ~2076 characters long: https://postman-
        | echo.com/get?foo1=aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa...
        | 
        | See the upstream chromium docs: https://chromium.googleso
        | urce.com/chromium/src/+/refs/heads/...
        | 
        | I don't think adding ~10 or so characters to the TLD
        | meaningfully impacts this limit.
 
    | gray_-_wolf wrote:
    | As non-native speaker, I always have to google how to spell
    | `engineering`. And you can't really auto-correct domain name.
 
  | spcebar wrote:
  | I think that as more and more companies and individuals get
  | online there's absolutely a use for more TLDs, and having more
  | descriptive ones doesn't hurt anyone. I do think TLDs like
  | .sucks are a flagrant display of ICANN's greed and corruption.
 
  | dqv wrote:
  | I have to disagree. I mean, yes, the money-grabbing scheme is
  | probably true, but I don't agree with the part about them being
  | bad taste or too long. I will probably lose at most one hour of
  | my total life having to spend extra time typing > 3 characters.
  | And that's a purposeful overestimation. We have browser history
  | and bookmarks. As far as bad taste, I don't know, I'm not
  | really comfortable with creating this "legitimacy" for .com
  | domains or any 3-letter domain over any of the others.
 
| Croftengea wrote:
| > It creates a three-tier world. The big boys who have TLDs, the
| cheaper boys who have .com
| 
| The prophecy didn't come true. Granted the big boys got their
| .googles and .amazons, but good old .coms are still a thing and
| not considered "cheaper".
 
| [deleted]
 
| lolinder wrote:
| Needs (2011):
| 
| http://web.archive.org/web/20110321001950/https://www.temple...
 
  | gnabgib wrote:
  | It might even be older according to the main page ("mostly
  | written in 2001")[0]. Sure would be helpful if the author
  | included a publish date. Many blog entries (and stack overflow
  | type solutions) need time context (it may have been the
  | solution/a reasonable position _at the time_ )
  | 
  | https://www.templetons.com/brad/dns/
 
    | dredmorbius wrote:
    | Given the reference "I wrote a satire of issues around this
    | some years ago" for a piece posted in 2005, I suspect the
    | 2010 / 2011 year is reasonably accurate.
    | 
    | https://ideas.4brad.com/node/221
    | 
    | https://www.templetons.com/brad/dns/sell-english.html
 
    | lolinder wrote:
    | You're right, it could be much older. I thought 2011 seemed
    | likely because that's the earliest the web archive has and
    | that's the year that the new gTLD program really got rolling.
    | However, it looks from some of his other content that he
    | might have been referring to discussions that were started in
    | 2000 and 2001:
    | 
    | http://archive.icann.org/en/tlds/
 
    | Croftengea wrote:
    | You can tell the writing is very old because it mentions .ibm
    | as an example of super well-known and wealthy corporation. No
    | mention of Google nor Amazon.
 
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.sucks_(registry)
 
| hirsin wrote:
| There's a legitimate engineering issue here too that bears
| mentioning.
| 
| Your marketing team will charge ahead with migrating all your
| product.business.com sites to just product.business
| 
| You'll get half a year into that migration before someone asks
| about shared domain cookies. Oh, login.business.com dropped an
| SSO cookie on business.com?
| 
| After that you'll get the lovely request - you work with the
| browser people, can't we just edit the standard to drop a cookie
| on a TLD?
 
  | mjevans wrote:
  | Discussion on stack overflow...
  | https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3342140/cross-domain-coo...
  | 
  | I would really like a better solution; but that appears to live
  | solidly within a successor to current HTML pages, something
  | designed from inception with security contexts in mind. Maybe
  | they can fix login / logout / credential management too; I
  | really hope they just use kerberos.
 
| Traster wrote:
| I don't understand why people are interested in keeping the
| implementation details of the internet exposed. There was a
| reason we came up with TLDs and such, and you had to type in http
| vs ftp vs https etc. But there's no reason to be constrained by
| these detalis. If the computer can figure it out? good.
 
| [deleted]
 
| mrweasel wrote:
| The real issue with the vanity TLDs, and many of the newer ones
| in general, is that they have zero recognition. They are most
| worthless.
| 
| You can slap a joehardware.com on the back of your van, or a
| local TLD, and people will know that it's the address of your
| website. Now do the same with joehardware.builders, people have
| no glue as to what that might be. It doesn't even help to write
| www.joehardware.builders, that somehow more confusing.
| 
| No, the issue with the new/generic/vanity TLDs is that they've
| lost all meaning. They lack context.
 
  | qbasic_forever wrote:
  | Paint a QR code on the side of the van instead, I bet it would
  | get more engagement even with a .com address.
 
    | andreareina wrote:
    | QR code requires you to scan it in that moment. A human-
    | readable (and -recognizable) URL stands a chance at being
    | remembered at a later date.
 
    | mrweasel wrote:
    | Sadly I have no way of tracking that, because I would make
    | the opposite bet. My guess is that 90+% of QR codes, that
    | people aren't forced to scan somehow, are never used.
 
      | zbrozek wrote:
      | Lots of restaurants are forcing this. I stop going to them.
      | I don't go to a coffee shop to spend 3-10 minutes futzing
      | with phones instead of talking to the person I'm meeting.
 
  | dqv wrote:
  | A remembering problem exists with the main TLDs though. Alice's
  | Home Cleaning Service needs a website, but the one she wants is
  | taken, so she starts doing weird things with the domain:
  | alicehomecleaning.com alice-homecleaning.com alice-home-
  | cleaning.com alicehc.com
  | 
  | These domains are also worthless. I can say I would find
  | something like alicehome.services a lot more memorable.
  | 
  | And with advertising, it's more about continuous exposure. So I
  | see the alicehome.services car around town for the third time
  | and say, "oh there's that weird domain again".
 
  | s_dev wrote:
  | You could write www.joehardware.builders to make it clearer.
 
    | mrweasel wrote:
    | I suggested that, but as I wrote, that's actually more
    | confusing if you don't know that there's a .builders TLD (in
    | fact there's also a .builder).
 
| togaen wrote:
| I mean, all domains are really vanity domains. This just gives
| people more ways to be vain, which is all anyone really wants.
 
| mixedbizness wrote:
| I bought a LOT of .biz domains, turns out carriers often block
| people from receiving SMS messages containing email addresses at
| these TLDs, without notifying me or them.
| 
| Probably because they're often used for spam? (I bought em
| because they were cheap.)
 
  | kijin wrote:
  | If they're cheap for you, they're cheap for spammers, too.
 
| digitaLandscape wrote:
 
| paulcole wrote:
| Who's the joker who bought http://bad.coffee?
 
| dqv wrote:
| Sorry, but *looks at my nails* .com is a boomer TLD, it's passe.
| Do you really want a domain from last century? Or do you want an
| exotic .asia? A cool .club? A forward looking .future? Or even
| joining the ranks of the celebrity media with a stylish... .xn--
| 45q11c?
| 
| The answer is clear, if you want to stay in the past, then go
| with .com, but the .future is in vanity TLDs. For more
| information, check out my website https://ok.boomer and
| considering buying a .boomer domain today!
 
  | easrng wrote:
  | .xn--45q11c is actually .Ba Gua  (According to Google
  | translate, it means Gossip)
 
    | dqv wrote:
    | Yes, a perfect TLD for the new Perez Hilton ;)
 
| mavhc wrote:
| Whoever invented selling 1 row in a database for massive amounts
| of money per year was a genius
 
  | meesterdude wrote:
  | it's better than that: they're RENTING database rows.
 
  | dredmorbius wrote:
  | Modern Papal indulgences.
 
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-01-01 23:01 UTC)