Yes, but it will redirect. It won't be canonical.

I see what you did there...

Looks like I accidentally ended up at Reddit...

There's nothing technical DNS-wise that would prevent the name 'canon' from resolving to an IP address, so http://canon could work. They could also add a MX record for the name 'canon' so @canon e-mail addresses would work too. Maybe ICANN has rules around gTLDs that would prevent this type of use?

I'm sure this will break a ridiculous number of regular expressions for email address validation.

Yes, but that is their own fault for trying to use a regex to validate email addresses. :)

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I wish people would stop posting that. Yes, that covers most (though not all) of the RFC definitions of what constitutes an email address, but in practice you only want to accept a tiny subset of those.

Curious: Why would you want to accept only a tiny subset of those? What do you gain by that?

Well, the really simple example is the string "postmaster". It is a perfectly legitimate email address, and almost always deliverable. But rarely something you want to actually accept.

regardless of the rules there are a few tlds that route mail and resolve to websites. http://to./ comes to mind, but there are a few others.

http://canon./, rather. Like http://to./

Most lesser-known TLDs with a central registrar already do this by giving themselves the www.TLD. record; for example http://www.tv/ or http://www.name/. When you try just "tv./" or "name./" in your browser, it'll try those as well, without having to muddy up the main record.

I thought the dot was a separator. Why do we have to have one at all? Why the canonical URL shouldn't be http://cannon/ ?

http://canon/ would refer to whatever canon was local to your gateway's DNS host record (I believe; I can't find the exact term for it.) For example, my computer is d207-6-247-238.bchsia.telus.net. If I type "canon" into anything that calls gethostbyname(), it assumes I mean canon.bchsia.telus.net. When that doesn't resolve, then it tries "canon."

http://canon./, on the other hand, refers to the "canon" that is located at the "root directory" of the internet—that is, ".". Most addresses don't need this, because once you specify any more than a host name, it assumes the rest of the domain "path" is a fully-qualified DNS record, and doesn't bother checking your local network for it.

I don't hate it, indeed I like the idea of.anigbrowl or so :-) I think domain names themselves are transient, in recent years I find myself doing things like searching for 'Canon camera' and letting Chrome and Google take care of the routing.

This post automatically generated by Google.com in response to inarticulate mumblings by user anigbrowl

Actually http://canon./ (http://canon/ would also work in rare cases (No DNS search domain set and the browser also doesn't try to interpret it as a keyword.))

Its a domain squatter's dream come true.

Or is the end (eventually) for the squatting game? When there are hundreds or thousands of alternatives for xyz.com, won't that seriously diminish the worth of any one in particular?

Doesn't matter. Most will be found by Google search.

it is not a domain squatter's dream come true, it is the DNS bureaucracy cabal's dream come true.

It has little value for users/consumers (i.e., won't remember if they want canon.com or canon.canon). It has little value for businesses, because it means more time and money monitoring for domain squatting and trademark infringement. It provides yet another playing field for scammers and other predators.

The only benefit is to the upper levels in the DNS hiearchy, gives them more revenue to perpetuate themselves and to come up with more user-hostile ideas.

I agree, and as I said, it really doesn't matter. The vast majority of people are going to get what they need through Google, and to a lessor extent, the other search engines.

You have to pay ICANN hundreds of thousands of dollars to get one of these new gTLD's. Domain squatters will not be allowed.

No you're not. I'm still getting over the trauma of .info, .tv et al.