I'm more concerned about TLDs like:

    .ACCENTURE
    .AIRBUS
    .AMERICANEXPRESS
    .AMERICANFAMILY
    .AVIANCA
    .BAIDU
    .BARCLAYCARD
    .BARCLAYS
    .BENTLEY
    .BESTBUY
    .BLOOMBERG
    .BNPPARIBAS
    .BOEHRINGER
    .BUGATTI
    .CALVINKLEIN
    .CAPITALONE
    .CITI
    .EPSON
    .ERICSSON
    .FERRARI
    .FUJITSU
    .GMAIL
    .GODADDY
    .HDFC
    .HDFCBANK
    .HITACHI
    .HYATT
    .HYUNDAI
    .JAGUAR
    .JEEP
    .JPMORGAN
    .JUNIPER
    .KERRYHOTELS
    .KERRYLOGISTICS
    .KERRYPROPERTIES
    .LACAIXA
    .LAMBORGHINI
    .LANDROVER
    .LANXESS
    .LPLFINANCIAL
    .MASERATI
    .MATTEL
    .MCKINSEY
    .MICROSOFT
    .MITSUBISHI
    .NETFLIX
    .NORTHWESTERNMUTUAL
    .OLAYANGROUP
    .PANASONIC
    .PRAMERICA
    .SAMSUNG
    .SCHAEFFLER
    .SCJOHNSON
    .SONY
    .STCGROUP
    .SUZUKI
    .SWATCH
    .TIFFANY
    .TOSHIBA
    .VIRGIN
    .VOLKSWAGEN

It's disgusting.

If those TLDs were actually useful, then the domain name system would be in much better shape than it actually is.

In reality, you have .gov for government, .com for business, .org for organisations who don’t care how much traffic they get, local country TLDs for if you operate a service for one country only, and tons and tons of garbage.

com is the only TLD that has any value for international commerce. It doesn’t matter that .netflix exists, because it will never be used for anything productive. The problem is that you can only ever count on a person knowing .com and their local TLD. Everything else either won’t register with people as being an actual domain name, or will look like a scam to most people.

The internet is locked into this system, and it’s one that cannot possibly scale. The explosion in new TLDs is an attempt to address that. But we don’t need to worry about how disgusting it is, because it’s an attempt that has failed.

I would suggest two issues that are more concerning is that there is nothing that seems to be a realistic alternative or solution, and that the way this problem has played out has diminished the actual usefulness of domain names, with that gap being filled by the google search engine.

> In reality, you have .gov for government

Only for the US government.

There were plans on potentially allowing https://netflix/

I can't recall the technical term for it though, and my search engine couldn't help me find it within a few minutes.

It appears to be called dotless domains: https://www.icann.org/news/announcement-2013-08-30-en

That would ruin local host names

Local hostnames have never been supported by the IANA or anyone else as far as I know. Using them is risky because they usually work, but the specs say they shouldn't.

Local domains are easy to implement right by registering any domain name (even a free one) and setting that as your local DNS domain. If you register pantalaimon.gq and set that as your local DNS suffix, any non-FQDN hostname should be resolved to host.pantalaimon.gq. Entering http://netflix/ will resolve to http://netflix.pantalaimon.gq/. Such a system also gives you more control over your local DNS, as you can do more than A and AAAA records now. Only http://netflix./ would that actually constitute as a FQDN and bypass the local domain.

I used to use internal DNS infrastructure without a domain until I realised all DNS queries were being sent to DNS because the DNS suffix my ISP appended (something like example.com), resulting in occasional queries to servername.example.com that failed.

If you use domains to refer to localhost, just use .localhost as the TLD: it's been reserved for that exact use.

In fact they are somewhat "supported" as there are some reserved domains that you can use as they won't have an external meaning.

https://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-chapin-rfc2606bis-00.html#ne...

Consider putting your "local" hostnames under .localdomain .domain .lan .home .host or .corp

Personally I think .lan and .corp are the best options.

Not if the final dot to denote the root zone were to be brought back, i.e. https://netflix./

Brought back? It's still a thing and required.. your OS's DNS implementation might not handle it in the way you expect though ;)

Already works, doesn't need bringing back!

Maybe local hosts would shadow it, or you'd have to use some prefix.

It does feel a touch dystopian though.

How could it be stopped if the company owns the TLD? Do you mean bureaucratically (inside Netflix) allowing it?

A/AAAA records on gTLD level are not allowed by ICANN. ccTLDs may have these records (probably just an oversight from the past) and some do (http://ai. for example)

Maybe not as much as an oversight but (as I understood) mostly due the fact that most ccTLD registries predate the existence of ICANN. As the ccTLDs as such weren't issued by ICANN, there's no ICANN policy that would apply to them for stuff like this.

Not oversight nor historical: political.

Countries view ccTLDs as their sovereign property and territory on the Internet, and refuse to be (involuntarily) bound to any rules or requirements as a matter of sovereignty. It’s a huge source of geopolitical conflict within the IANA/ICANN split (and with DNS in general).

A number of countries have _voluntarily_ agreed to follow ICANN’s principles for good management and interoperability [1], but jurisdictions gonna jurisdict I guess.

[1] https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/cctlds/cctlds-en

Thanks, this makes sense

>.org for organisations who don’t care how much traffic they get

Why is this?

It’s supposed to be the non-profit TLD. While I’m sure plenty of them need to market themselves, org domains tend to be more focused on providing services to existing users than marketing services to new users. Things like schools, churches, open source projects...

The good news is that a lot of those have started shutting down. For example, .SYMANTEC was terminated earlier this year.

For anyone else interested in terminating TLDs: https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/gtld-registry-agreemen...

JC Penny, Intel, Esurance, Vistaprint among companies terminating their TLDs.

It's cute. It's nice that they make them so easy to block!

This is such a gross misuse of power honestly.

Yep. The custom TLD thing is an abomination. Many of us said at the time that we'd get the proliferation of stupid that you highlight. ICANN said it wouldn't happen, because economics or good faith or something. Who was right?

The "anything marketing people touch will almost-instantly turn to shit" theory still hasn't been disproved.

Marketing people actually know & plan for this. Check out this blog post about "The Lifecycle of Lead Generation Channels" [0].

It basically says, that any given channel starts out small and high-quality, so engaging is easy and credible. As it grows marketers have to be smarter and larger to stand out. Read it as a consumer, and they're basically talking about a scorched-earth loudness war for your attention.

[0] https://medium.com/point-nine-news/the-lifecycle-of-lead-gen...

What's the downside of these TLD's? I love the idea of a site's tld referencing what the site is about.

I can agree that .com is cluttered (with non-companies, even), and that a wider and semantic namespace could be a good thing.

But in my example -- I can't imagine a site that belongs under exactly one of these TLDs. So any site that falls under one of them, conflicts mentally with a site of the same name under at least one of the others. So this hasn't expanded the namespace at all.

Instead, it has poisoned the namespace. Did you want joe.photo or joe.photos? I literally just made up that example, and oh look, it's the same site. Of course it is; the moneygrab was successful. Because otherwise, users will not remember which one was right, and the two sites are competing for the same name with the same meaning.