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Beware cutesy two-letter TLDs for your domain name

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Re: Beware cutesy two-letter TLDs for your domain name

#31

Post by thristian »

skeletonjelly wrote: post #24
seanconaty wrote: post #19

No matter what happens .com will always be King.

There's going to be a point where it'll be impossible for new businesses to choose a domain name that isn't abstracted so far away from their business name as all the domains are taken. I'm curious as to the what the system will be like in 5 years. Surely .com can't be king forever?

We already thought of this problem - we said "hey, there'll be different companies with the same name; we should introduce different namespaces so that, say, a company in Australia and a company in Austria don't clash.

Turns out, end-users want a flat namespace, so everybody has to buy names in that namespace. Until ICANN opens up the top-level domain space to arbitrary registrations (instead of the current 'you have to spend $150,000 and run a registrar' deal), that flat namespace is probably going to be .com.

Re: Beware cutesy two-letter TLDs for your domain name

#32

Post by bigiain »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #8
lotyrin wrote: post #6

Yeah. Also, if your TLD belongs to somewhere with a less than stable government, who knows if they'll just stop caring about you. And, a portion of your users will always try to go to whatever.com instead of whatev.er, the worst part is you have no idea how many, but the guy that's parked the domain probably does. As you grow your business, traffic to the .com domain will only increase, you'll eventually want to buy…

E.g.: bit.ly became bitly.com, although that seems like a branding decision (with the whole "social link discovery site" thing)

Does anyone know what sort of money that cost them?

I suspect some domaineer was very happy that day…

(we blew $11k for the .com version of a .com.au domain we'd started to succeed with 6 or 7 years back. Ultimately futile, but not really related to that expense…)

Re: Beware cutesy two-letter TLDs for your domain name

#33

Post by bigiain »

thristian wrote: post #31
skeletonjelly wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's going to be a point where it'll be impossible for new businesses to choose a domain name that isn't abstracted so far away from their business name as all the domains are taken. I'm curious as to the what the system will be like in 5 years. Surely .com can't be king forever?

We already thought of this problem - we said "hey, there'll be different companies with the same name; we should introduce different namespaces so that, say, a company in Australia and a company in Austria don't clash. Turns out, end-users want a flat namespace, so everybody has to buy names in that namespace. Until ICANN opens up the top-level domain space to arbitrary registrations (instead of the current 'you have…

End-users only want that while it's easiest and it works.

I'd argue that both of those conditions are no longer unambiguously true.

Re: Beware cutesy two-letter TLDs for your domain name

#34

Post by stickfigure »

FuzzyDunlop wrote: post #28

As a complete aside, is 'discuss this on Hacker News' a new offshoot social network link to pin to your tech blog? If you're writing an HN-centric post, it surely stands to reason it should be an Ask-HN article, right?

"Ask HN" means no links, no images, no formatting. Good for a quick question, bad for exposition.

I think the "Discuss this on Hacker News" phenomenon reflects that while HN is a great community and discussion forum, it's a terrible publishing medium. Probably by design.

Re: Beware cutesy two-letter TLDs for your domain name

#36

Post by Thrymr »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #7

Depends which. My site's at .me, which, being well hyped and having over 100,000 domains, is probably not going to go down soon.

Sure. It's at least as stable as Montenegro, a country that has only been independent for 6 years, in the least stable corner of Europe.

Re: Beware cutesy two-letter TLDs for your domain name

#40

Post by cfront »

There is no quality control in the ICANN root. You grease some palms and you're in. .pw?

The situation will get much worse if the new gtld program is allowed to proceed.

Read up on the lawsuit that ICANN is in with Manwin, a porn company. The courts are getting closer to lifting the veil on ICANN, who has long claimed they cannot be sued as a commercial entity.

Considering they just banked over 350 million for giving people the right to be reviewed by ICANN (for what?), this idea of being a "non-profit" organization and immune from any commercial liability is becoming a bit of a farce, even to the most naive observer.

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