161–170 of 186 posts
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I have a .horse domain - I tried every permutation horse puns and in-jokes (my.lovely.horse, etc) but they were all taken by squatters or reserved for stupid prices. Eventually I settled for sheep.horse, which is easy to remember but not much else.
When I was first building m.reddit.com, I put it under `reddit.horse`, mostly because I found it hilarious that `.horse` existed.
I've also got stood up with fashion.blog. Full refund and no invitation to auction. I haven't even bothered to ask for details, because that was their way of assessing and freezing the domain names that people would be interested in buying.
> because that was their way of assessing and freezing the domain names that people would be interested in buying. Indeed. Seems like it would be easy for them to use the auction to automatically see "300 people tried to claim this domain, it must be a good one, let's make it premium." They wouldn't need to spend a penny doing market research to select the premium names themselves.
Maybe one way you could do it is create a tiny subsidiary to manage the reservations/registration. The subsidiary can be created under the pretenses of shielding the parent company from legal liability so you can both limit the team size, the scope of their purpose and isolate them from the parent company.
Build the backend to provide information on reservations but accessible only to subsidiary financial management/officers and parent company employees whose wealth is tied to the success of shares in the company. Officially only share the total number of reservations and financials with the parent company via something documented like email. Then the backend reporting is decoupled from the reservations that come in for early access. If you setup a distinct founder program and establish enough time between the reservation announcement and when you give normal employees early access you don't even have to worry about your employees snatching up the most profitable ones.
The first the CS reps hear about it is when a reply/complaint comes in from one of the cancellations. When asked their supervisor only knows that the name came over as one of the early access reservations from the parent company. The CS reps don't have enough information to draw conclusions because they don't get access to numbers and an early access employee program provides plausible deniability if the reps start asking questions.
That was kind of a fun mental exercise. I've seen some real cloak and dagger stuff from people but those were always at small companies. I have no idea how plausible any of that would be, especially in companies this big. But it would be interesting to see what would happen if we had a fairly unique but uninteresting domain that wasn't obviously gibberish and a a lot of us put in a reservation for it at random intervals to create a perception of interest and popularity.
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Start a business with your name, trademark it in a certain domain, file a claim with ICANN. Long process, but might be cheaper. :)
Almost as expensive (UDRP claims start around $1500), and more importantly, it'll fail. WIPO isn't that dumb -- they can look up the registration date of your trademark, check WHOIS, and determine that the domain was registered before your trademark existed.
It's a shame they don't determine that the domain was squatted before your trademark existed. But it seems in their interest to give the benefit of the doubt to the one buying many, many domains yearly.
I've never understood why some random company is allowed to arbitrate the domain registration and make $$$ out of it. Feels like it's kinda not in the spirit of the internet.
It is a complete state-sponsored racket. There's no way around it. You pay an upfront fee to ICANN and probably some kind of recurring tax and you get to create a TLD. You then sell this TLD for higher prices than ICANN and run a very simple service that processes the transactions. You then take anything lower than a 5 or 6 letter domain that is a word in the english language and define it as a "premium" domain and c…
Sounds great to me.
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Basically, it'd mean the (virtually impossible) task of deprecating the non-country TLDs with X years before they stop working, and saying: "Okay, .us is managed by whatever infrastructure the USA sets up, and .uk is managed by whatever the UK sets up, etc." So the US might choose to allow cocacola.us, while the UK might have on a grouping scheme like cocacola.co.uk, and meanwhile North Korea refuses outright or insi…
Countries can break up, dissolve, or form too. I'm not sure that making all domains depend on things that exist in the real world is a good idea. They should depend on abstract ideas that are less liable to change and can be resold easily to different operators.
Not that often, and even when they do it often means very real issues in terms of governance of internet infrastructure.
> I'm not sure that making all domains depend on things that exist in the real world is a good idea.
But domains already depend on things which exist in the real world! Not only are they leased by real-world entities, but even the names of domains already refer to countries, companies, brands, products, activities, clubs, and people.
The real difference with what we have now is that it's a weird global monopoly that has shown it's willing to erode organizational principles in order to make a buck.
Splitting it up by sovereign nations is actually moving back closer to the decentralized principles of the internet, avoiding a single point of (political) failure, and creating subsections which can evolve separately and cover for one another.
Ex: Turkey's emerging dictatorship refuses to let anyone register erdogansucks.net.tr ? Fine, go register erdogansucks.net.de , and advertise with that instead.
This is very common with these new TLD's. At least they didn't give it to you for a year then jack up the price. I had jacki.party as a fun domain for my wife that she didn't end up using, but after a year the price went from like $29/yr to $2,495/yr. because they decided it was "premium." There was nothing my registrar could do because it was the domain registry who decided that, so I just let it lapse. Why is a ver…
The ICANN whois also does not give any information, there is just a copyright message from Nominet UK https://whois.icann.org/en/lookup?name=chris.blog Maybe the domain got bought during the sunrise period by a copyright holder!? https://my.blog/launch-plan/
The reply I received from get.blog support (last image in the post) stated that "chris.blog ended up being part of the list of reserved domains that are not available for registration". So I imagine they'll either keep it internal or sell it as a premium domain.
https://whois.icann.org/en/lookup?name=matt.blog https://whois.icann.org/en/lookup?name=dave.blog
So yes it seems it got reserved. I wonder why too.
P.S. I'm a chris too ;) that's why im so interested in this, I own chris.lu but as it is a country tld this is not so good from a SEO point of view. I want to change if I find a better one, but haven't found one yet. Have fun with your new chris.lol :)