"Perhaps it's not fair to call this bait & switch. Really it was bait & refund"
The .blog Bait and Switch
51–60 of 186 posts
Re: The .blog Bait and Switch
#52I was keeping a close eye on .family for quite a while - I'm getting married next year, so mysurname.family would have been a good domain to have both for wedding planning and personal email accounts. When it finally came out, I eagerly went to my favourite registrar to try and buy it, and found that it's listed at over £1000. It's not a particularly common name either. Out of interest, I tried a few other surnames o…
My family name is $20/year!! Now I need to decide if it's worth supporting this cartel...
Re: The .blog Bait and Switch
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Create more, to open up the domain space... Adding TLDs doesn't open up the domain space; it closes it. The domain name system was designed to expand downwards, by adding more hierarchies. Downwards is where the space is. Expanding upwards is limited. The racket ran out of space selling keywords inside .com, where this was originally meant to be confined. Once they finish selling keywords at the root, that'll be it…
I don't know. I don't think nested hierarchies is a thing. I mean, I guess you have the "Go Network" go.com example (disney.go.com). But I think the ship has sailed for deeper hierarchies. I really don't want an email address that is: taftster@foo.bar.baz.example.com
I didn't make any judgement on whether it is a good or bad thing. The fact remains: don't delude yourself into thinking that adding a TLD free-for-all opens up the space. It doesn't. It closes it.
The current "problem" stems from the fact that .coms are full. Once the TLD space is full, the same problem will remain. Everyone who wants one cannot have a memorable name in a flat namespace. There are too many people and there is too little room.
Re: The .blog Bait and Switch
#54I'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.
Because running a global TLD is a non-trivial and costly public service to provide, so the TLD sponsor is allowed to monetize it.
Re: The .blog Bait and Switch
#55This seems to have become the de facto pattern with the new gTLD system. A company swoops in and buys a namespace for $200k (or more if there is a competitive bid), and they effectively turn into the cartel equivalent of the domain squatter. You can register your new gTLD for anywhere between $1 and $100, depending on what I suppose they expect their target demographic to be willing to pay. Dot horse is more expensiv…
I was trying to get internet.party for a browser extension I'm working on and I discovered that any gTLD with internet in the name is like $60,000. Absurd.
Re: The .blog Bait and Switch
#56This seems to have become the de facto pattern with the new gTLD system. A company swoops in and buys a namespace for $200k (or more if there is a competitive bid), and they effectively turn into the cartel equivalent of the domain squatter. You can register your new gTLD for anywhere between $1 and $100, depending on what I suppose they expect their target demographic to be willing to pay. Dot horse is more expensiv…
I wonder how much to buy "my.horse". Then I can setup a sole mailbox "look", and have it auto respond to any messages with "my horse is amazing". I wonder how may will get the joke.
I think you'll find that the universe pretty much covers everything.
Re: The .blog Bait and Switch
#57In 2011 I paid for and registered o1.io (I really wanted 01.io, but back then it was not available to register domains containing only numbers on .io).
The .io NIC web interface is really horrible and I ended up in an inconsistent state after making the "horrible" mistake of clicking the back button. Even though my Paypal account got charged, I received an email confirming I was the owner of the domain, and so on, I couldn't access my account.
Next step I took was contacting them. I got ignored and after 7 days later they made a transaction reversal on Paypal and I never heard a word back from them, even though I have tried to contact.
Some time later they made the o1.io domain a reserved one and so if I wanted it now I would have to pay thousands. What a shame.
Re: The .blog Bait and Switch
#58At this point, this looks ever more akin to charging people to have their phone numbers listed in a phone book. If you don't know what a phone book is, it was the DNS-equivalent of the 1960s. You know those plastic-wrapped bricks of yellow paper that sometimes appear on your doorstep, that you just drop right into the recycling bin? Those things are actually phone books.
The phone book is rather simple. Your individual given name or your business dba name is the dictionary key, and the phone number is the dictionary value. Your dictionary entry is automatically included, unless you paid to be "unlisted". That would keep your phone service provider from printing your name-number pair in their phone books.
This approach is still viable. Every state has a database of corporate names and dba registrations. The secretary of state for Illinois, as an example, could make aaa-plumbing.corp.il.us resolve to the server address for "AAA Plumbing, Inc.", if that business chose to disclose it, or to a landing page otherwise. Likewise, zzz-towing.llc.il.us could resolve to the address for "ZZZ Towing, LLC".
The US Patent and Trademark Office could do the same. Let lego.028.tm.us (and lego.009.tm.us, lego.041.tm.us, etc.) resolve to LEGO Juris A/S Corp's servers, so you can see a site about plastic building blocks, and let lego.005.tm.us resolve to American Lego Group Inc's server, so you can see a site about soy protein supplements.
If you are Foobar LLC, you really shouldn't have to register "foobar.com" and "foobar.net" and "foobar.cc" and "foobar.co.uk" and "foobar.biz" and "foobar.info" and "foobar.sucks" and "foobar.pooky" and "foobar.booger". It isn't really elucidative, and does not help discoverability to have so many TLDs. The problem is that all the simple names have been mined out of the original TLDs, and there is no mechanism to resolve name collisions between Foobar LLC out of the US and Foobar GmbH in Germany. Whoever grabs "foobar.com" first gets to keep it, and the other is stuck trying to make some DNS entry that somehow relates to the company name.
Adding a bunch of niche TLDs helps a bit, but not if the registrar can charge $1k/year for names. That's just ridiculous. You're not going to end up with all the Johns on the Internet getting their own john.something domain name that way. You just let the richest John on the Internet to have all the john.anything domain names.
Re: The .blog Bait and Switch
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I'm glad that someone snagged hoarse.horse and is doing more with it than I would have. not.horse is available, too, if someone wants to tell that joke via a TLD. And of course, bad.horse is exactly what you expect it to be.
Let's also note that dead.horse exists, though I'm ambivalent as to whether it's as good as bad.horse.
Re: The .blog Bait and Switch
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
> So why not just register a .com Because the name you wish to register is not available as .com domain. > Nobody is going to remember or type in such a domain I don't think this is true, I live in Europe and we have tons of country tlds, people use and remember them. Also is chris.blog really so much longer to type then chris.com or a lot harder to remember? I don't agree. At first it might feel strange to type some…
> Also is chris.blog really so much longer to type then chris.com or a lot harder to remember? I don't agree. It depends on the audience. If you have a non-technical audience or you are e-commerce a .com is basically a necessity still.
Also in Europe, but I've seen adverts using .travel domains (which are a bit older than most), like egypt.travel and ecuador.travel.
City domains, like sadiq.london.
Admittedly, I can't remember any publicity of the weirder ones, like .lol or .xyz.