More than 10 years here. I agree with you, except I would go further and simply recommend against any other weird gTLDs at all. Stick with your national ccTLD unless it is managed by utter incompetents, in which case you have fallbacks like .eu for EU nationals, and .com, .net, .org and .info for the rest.
Going back to the original question, .info seems cheapest of the reasonable TLDs (when registering for 10 years).
Disregarding the price factor for a moment, would you still prioritize "your own country's ccTLD" over .com, when registering web presence for a company with no particular local presence in its home country? I.e. should a Canadian-based company that mostly serves the US still prefer .ca to .com?
For that matter, does your advice apply to .us?
1. Yes. It’s also a matter of marketing, of course, where the desire to have a .com might trump all other consideration.
2. If a company has no particular local presence in it’s home country, what would the concept of “home” country even mean?
The reason to prefer your own local ccTLD is to have an easier time dealing with any disputes or questions from your TLD registry. I.e. would the registry assume that they can simply contact you (and speak the local language) if anything should arise, then you will have an easier time dealing with that. If you were to be technically registered somewhere, but have no local people and no local presence, or even if your company merely seems to be of foreign origin, the TLD registry (and legal officials in general) might not deal with you very favorably.
First example that comes to mind: many of those shady crypto companies that did "ICOs" in 2017, were based in the US; but the US has regulations that block non-accredited US customers from investing in things like this. So these companies generally just ignored the US market — even blocking US visitors on their website — and instead marketed to people in every other country.
In this case it doesn't matter in terms of reliability. If you target the US, maybe go with .com, unless .ca brings something (if it's a pun, or if you want to highlight the fact you're a Canadian company).
Also consider the fact that the country's ccTLD is not popular in every country. In France the .fr is very popular for example, but it's not the case everywhere. I'm not sure the .us is very popular in the us for example, is it?
To be honest you're probably right, but considering it can be hard to find a good .com nowadays, I think going for a somewhat well managed newGTLD is a good option.
HOWEVER, doing the work of knowing which registry is reliable can be a bit hard when you're not in the industry yourself.
2. The rules can change somewhat arbitrarily. Or the rules might not change, but their enforcement might.
3. The registries have no incentive to treat their TLD management as a stewardship of a public good; they are in it for the money, and might de-prioritize technical development and/or support to arbitrarily low levels.
Further, TLDs are bought and sold periodically. I haven't seen any gTLDs go away. Is that something you've seen?
Otherwise, the concerns listed seem like FUD with no evidence so far.
.info feels like the most benign above.
But when I read them out, www and .com just feel like some relic from yester-year. But we have gotten used to them to the point we don't necessarily notice.
But British people were in the EU when they bought their domains. More generally, even if you pick a ccTLD of a country that you live in, how are you supposed to predict whether your specific area will split off and become a separate country?
I think ideally in those cases the people running the Internet infrastructure should be compassionate rather than spiteful, and just let you keep your old domain even if they won't let you register new ones. But that's obviously not what happens.
A year's grace was pretty generous, and has the domains been transferred to an EEA-based entity (such as a subsidiary based in the EEA or an EEA-based proxy, which is a service some .EU registrars provide), then they could keep them.
If it's not actively "spiteful" to impair stability, when the only cost is an ever-so-modest impact to brand purity, then at the very least it's a short-sighted way to cause a deadweight economic loss to humanity.
I guess that's just what rule-by-bureaucracy does, though, including EU bureaucracy: every day, they make decisions that affect people, always bringing the greatest possible reverence for the rules, and paying as little regard as possible to the price of the consequences of their decisions, which are fundamentally someone else's problem.
Amazing how you would think that your particular field of work would be excepted.
I guess the point is that one should only go with commercial domain names, and never with political ones (which all country code TLDs are by definition).
The nature of democracy is that you don't always get your way.
Barnier kept the door open for all kinds of intermediate levels of association, but the British delegation kept saying no and pushing for hard Brexit. Well, that's what they got.
a couple of opinionated words there that you didn't support.
drastic for sure is false as it took quite awhile to go through, much longer than the merger in fact.
For my opinionated sentence I will say... Britain is better off, the EU is an abomination.
The definition of 'drastic' does not necessarily mean quick (although it can). Definitions of drastic include (collected variously from Oxford, Cambridge, and Merriam-Webster dictionaries): 'having very noticeable effects', 'likely to have a strong or far-reaching effect', and 'extreme in effect [...]'.
I think Brexit fits this definition.
With regards to your opinionated sentence, you are entitled to your opinion that the EU is an 'abomination', although it is just an opinion without any support, and it's provably incorrect that Britain 'IS' better off (although an argument can be made that the potential long term benefits of Brexit may outweigh the current short term negative impact, it's far from being certain, and definitely should not be discussed in the present tense).
The UK government fucked everyone over with Brexit, largely because they didn't care to think about the consequences.
Yes! A visa! Thank you! The strident heart and soul of the inhuman, inhumane, soulless bureaucracy. It is exactly like that.
This isn't exactly something to be lauded or celebrated! Have you ever dealt with having a visa? Have you ever been impacted by the uncertainty and confusion of the nation you are living in, changing its rules about your visa? Do you have any concept at all of the economic and the humanitarian impact of the bureaucracy's machinations around and involving visas? Even aside from the worst of that, have you ever abandoned a job and friends and the life you were trying to build somewhere, because someone changed the rules about visas? I liked that job, sir.
Oh, let me tell you about visas! I will tell you about them all day long. But, ah — I think it was a more flattering to the decision-makers when we were just talking about the cost of broken URLs and email addresses.
And then yes, like visa recognition agreements, if your country withdraws from a visa accord or economic region, the host country has no obligation to keep you credentialed, or domained. If unhappy about such thing, a more effective path is to activate compatriots against the withdrawal, rather than fuss at the host zone.
My friend, if these systems were just about aligning the incentives for workers and benefits and taxes, and otherwise tried to be understanding about human foibles, then people wouldn't point to immigration systems around the world as a Kafkaesque nightmare.
Just to pick an example — chosen for my familiarity, wholly outside of and unrelated to Brexit — the UK's Windrush scandal involved the bureaucracy actively destroying old records of immigration from British overseas possessions (particularly the Caribbean), then deciding years later to go after people who had been living in the country for decades — demanding they supply exhaustive documentation of their legal immigration, and their life and activities in the intervening time. Rest assured that this was a fully adversarial process! They did not offer to help anyone so affected gather these documents, or to make their case.
And later, in another unrelated scandal, the Home Office decided to react to an English-examination cheating scandal by analyzing everyone's examination results with some opaque computerized process, using the results to declare something like 97% of them as invalid cheaters — and sending nastygrams to about 9,700 university students, calling them dirty cheaters and demanding they leave country. Many of them did, and they forcibly removed others. Notably, they did not ask for them to re-sit the exam. They did not care about the lives ruined.
Of course the matter of the .eu domain is absolutely nothing compared to the daily nightmare that is "visas," but the same devotion to rules and insensitivity to the costs of policy runs through the matter. They could have grandfathered in existing domains, at least a little bit longer. I know that if I had a website and I had to move domains, I would want to run web and email forwarding for more than one year. If they wanted to be particular about just having the forwarding, they could have audited the sites to make sure that they were just redirects, and charged for the privilege. They didn't. There's no sane reason that couldn't happen except to preserve The Rules — but these rules simply are not a valuable end in and of themselves, despite the laud and honor they have received in this thread.
Funny how applying the eligibility the rules to you as they do to everyone else in the world who is not a member of the EU is seen as spiteful by you.
So I wish you all the best of luck as your continent, now deprived of the economic impulse of cheap Russian gas, discovers the true weight of its overbearing and inflexible regulatory state, and deindustrializes with a scale and speed never seen before in human history (already ArcelorMittal is importing iron from the US rust belt, of all places!!!). And I'm actually, legitimately, genuinely sorry for everything the populist backlash is going to do as things fall apart, because I expect it to be very ugly.
Visas are an imperfect tool for whatever they are designed to do, and any sufficiently advanced bureaucracy will develop ways to misuse such a gift.
They are a complete mess, especially so from the EU countries. US and UK have been more reasonable (no hard requirements of what documentation is needed, as long as you can prove that you are travelling with an actual purpose, and once granted, it's for at least 6 months for UK or 3 years in case of the US), but luckily we've entered the Schengen whitelist since.
Ah yes. Because the UK isn't planning on sending refugees in Rwanda. /s
You're expecting the UK to be treated specially.
That logic defies description. If you are not a member of a certain country or economic zone, you cannot get and keep that zone's exclusive domains. Thats law. What you are saying is that the Eu should have made an exception for the Brits and allowed them to keep doing what others are not allowed. That sounds like too much exceptionalist entitlement.
In 2010, nearly 10% of the revenue of the Government of Tuvalu came from royalties from .tv addresses.
> You may register a .eu, .ею or .ευ domain name if you fulfil the following criteria:
> You represent an organisation established in one of the European Union Member States; or Iceland, Liechtenstein or Norway. You are an individual residing in one of the European Union Member States, Iceland, Liechtenstein, or Norway, or a citizen of one of the European Union Member States, Iceland, Liechtenstein, or Norway (as of 2 August 2021).
There's nothing which requires the EU to impose that law, but it is law nevertheless.
It would be different if the parent had written "If you are not a member of the EU. . ." but that was not what was written.
Likewise, an EU law that governs only EU assets isn't transnational. For example, Poland doesn't have eligibility criteria [0] but French ccTLDs like .pm do [1]. As I read the restriction text I detect a touch of the spite referred to elsewhere as it has exceptions for other non-EU-member European countries: "Switzerland, Norway, Iceland, and Liechtenstein"
I don't know how useful that is in practise, but it's not the only CCTLD with this restriction.
The UK helped to implement the following regulations on who can register for a .eu TLD at that time:
(i) undertaking having its registered office, central administration or principal place of business within the Community, or
(ii) organisation established within the Community without prejudice to the application of national law, or
(iii) natural person resident within the Community;
(Regulation (EC) No 733/2002 of the European Parliament and of the Council, Article 4 (2) (b))
There were some amendments in 2019, but the meaning is broadly the same as the original draft (at least in this context). The key relevant change is the addition an entitlement for EU citizens who are not resident in the EU (e.g.: those who live in the UK).
One of my domains uses the .ch TLD, from Switzerland, I use it for many account registrations via email. Should I be worried that I will lose access and proactively migrate away from this domain?
Realistically I think you're fine sticking with .ch, but consider one of the original gTLDs for future use (com, net, info, org)
If you trust them, it’s fine. I would guess they’ll be around for a while.
That's not entirely true. What happens for ccTLDs is that they're owned by the government, and administrative and technical management of the extension is delegated to a foundation/association. In the example of France (I'm French so I know it best), the .fr has been managed by the Afnic historically, but it's renewed every few years (5 I think?) by the government. Last time was 2021.
In the case of ccTLDs you need to trust the associated government no matter what, more than the delegated registry.
Google? Who has a grotesque history of shutting stuff down on people's faces because a collection of execs decided so?
Google Registry is not just any user facing product they can shutdown whenever they want. I have no issue renting a .app or a .dev, but I'd never use Google Domains for that.
Speaking specifically about .com/org/net/info I would not use either the word 'rent' or 'own' strictly but defacto you own the domain if you continue to pay the really nominal fees every year for renewal with the registrar you choose. That is an entire topic in itself because different registrars have different policies subject to (again for those tld's) ICANN rules.
As such you 'own' the rights to the domain name (same as google, amazon, tesla etc) in the sense that you can sell those rights to someone else if you want or transfer them.
You can think of domain ownership similar to physical real estate where there are property taxes you pay. There are a limited set of circumstances where you can lose the property (don't pay property tax, eminent domain etc) but you don't think you are renting (other than if you are renting).
Now for other things you own there is no annual fee you pay.
I’m from Canada, so I used the ccTLD for all of my non-public stuff. CIRA seems to be well run.
I was really frustrated by the trendy TLDs, especially the ccTLDs. I felt like I had to register those because anyone willing to use (ex:) .io probably has a high enough risk tolerance they’ll use the name without even considering existing trademarks, etc.. The .io and .co domains are the most frustrating because they’re more expensive than the others.
So I would say relying on .com, .net, and your ccTLD is great advice in terms of TLDs to use, but don’t hesitate to register some of the trendier ones for brand protection because it’s the cheapest thing you can do to discourage others from using the same name.
For weird newGTLD the worst that can happen is the registry goes bankrupt and their TLDs are not saved by the ICANN or bought by another registry. In this case you'd lose the domain. IMO it's unlikely to happen to Radix.
Can you speak more to this? I am using a free domain for my GitHub pages site. This is not an e-commerce site, it’s just some notes and random stuff. Are there any downsides to using a free domain in my case?
If you don't care about such things and you can easily move to another domain without any issues (people still accessing old domain, maybe finding a scammy website after domain is being taken from you, your mails no longer being delivered to you) then go for it.
"Google suspended our domain out of the blue – lyearn[.]com" -> https://twitter.com/shuchit_gandhi/status/156882926948860313...
I would personally never trust Google as a registrar because they have a horrible track record regarding customer support. As a gTLD registry though, they’re supervised by the ICANN and just cannot afford to make a shitty job there. Being a registry is also, IMHO, way easier than being a registrar, you obey ICANN rules, but you’re the one setting the rules for the registrars. Google as a registry is fine. You’re free to not trust them either as a registry, but that would be for personal convictions, not objective.
When I trust a company to be my gTLD registry, what am I trusting them with? Why is Google safer than e.g. the government of Tuvalu, or some private "speculator", if they all have to follow ICANN rules?
Google is safer because it only manages gTLDs. They can set part of the rules, but not all the rules. They have to follow ICANN’s rules. In particular, the dispute process goes through the ICANN which gives a somewhat neutral safety net. It’s far from perfectly, probably not even good enough, but still gives you more warranties than using a random ccTLD.
Speculators bought newGTLDs in the hope of selling tons of them but often dramatically failed. Registering a gTLD to the ICANN costs at least $400,000 if I remember well, so a lot of crappy newGTLDs are not profitable. When the registry goes bankrupt, I don’t know what happens to the customers. My guess is the ICANN tried to re-sell the TLD management on auction, and if they fail, then people would lose their domain. Very few newGTLDs succeeded, I’d stick with these and not try anything fun but too exotic.
Don't see much of a difference there.
The one I co-own is an old-school .com domain. Probably still the best. If costs are your critical issue, maybe you should re-think your plans for having any of it online. We are not talking about a lot of money in any case.
If you can, just stick to .com, .net, or the ccTLD of your country.