People don't care about domains. They put "facebook" and even "google" in Google and click on whatever comes up on top.
Nobody goes to books.com to buy books, nobody goes to albums.com to buy music albums, it's all irrelevant.
It's not OK for people to not know how to use the internet.
If you want people to move away from middle-man, domains are certainly not the solutions, and the new TLDs will not change that for better nor for worse.
We had domains before Google. People switched because they suck as an human interface.
It's not OK for people to not know how to use the internet.
It's not only about that. I know perfectly well how it works, but I still use Google all the time for finding company websites, because it'd be incredibly stupid to spend 10m guessing the domain instead of making a 300ms request to a search engine.
Domains are great for decoupling URLs, configuration files, etc. from IP changes. They're certainly not a good mechanism for website discovery.
[1] It is a problem because it allows people not to understand the basics of how the internet works. I don't expect people to understand protocols and stuff like that. People don't want to understand technology, they only want to benefit from it. I don't know 80% of the features my TV provides but I don't care - I can still watch TV. People feel the same about the Internet - they know they don't understand it but they don't care because they can still log in to facebook and watch videos on youtube. But using a middle man (call it Google, Yahoo, or even Facebook) to do these things undermines the nature of the internet as we know it and allowing this trend to continue will most likely lead to problems that we will have to resolve. (Not exactly similar, but when MS decided that browsers don't matter it was our job to tell people to stop using IE6 and switch to Firefox. I wouldn't want to be the guy that tells people don't use Google for this, use ____ instead).
As a knowledgeable programmer, your internet experience with DNS and browsers is very different from others, because you know what you're doing. Many people do not.
Should we teach them? Or should we try to control them by controlling "default behavior"?
Many people reading HN are probably too young to remember the browser wars and the battle over the "default browser" setting. This is why IE triumphed over Mozilla. And as any web developer knows, the web has suffered for it. Users who knew what they were doing could change the default settings. But that did not make the difference. Chrome is highly configurable. But that will not make the difference. Default settings are what matter the most.
The success of ICANN relies on a default setting. It's called "root.hints" or something similar. If a person running a DNS server (that could be anyone, including the end user) changes this setting, they can bypass ICANN and these landgrab gtlds.
In the distant past, "alternate roots", an early reaction ICANN's abuse of power, failed because they were trying to do what ICANN is now doing: make money by selling registrations in additional, redundant gtlds. Perhaps the "alternate roots" of the future will be noncommercial ones that subtract gtld's, not add them. For example, maybe we as smart users will choose to use a "pre-landgrab" root that does not have all these silly redundant gltd's that try to capture whatever unorthodox string a novice user might type in a browser.
Domain names are important, but always remember that those who seek to control the browser can easily subvert DNS. Given this decision from ICANN to sell out (which others, not just Google and Amazon, are following: e.g., the founder of BlackHat is running the newgtld program for ICANN; the author of BIND is partnering with a domainer to run a registry), we're going to see some aggressive moves from commercial authors of browsers to control type-in navigation. Of that you can be sure.
Again, the question is whether we want to teach users how things work, or whether we want to let them remain ignorant so we can control them. In the big picture, ignorance does not help the web. Though it may benefit certain vendors.
Who's "we"? I'm not a browser programmer and I have no ability to do that. Frankly, I dislike this common idea that we all part of this common team just because we happen to know something more about computers than the average schmoe. I certainly don't have the power to control any important defaults and therefore people, do you?
And while I can understand the goal, frankly I'm rather skeptical of our ability to teach most people, or of their willingness to be taught, which comes to much about the same. And I'm not sure if they're wrong in not wanting to waste valuable hours of life learning about a bunch of technical stuff that they don't really have much control over.
If a person running a DNS server (that could be anyone, including the end user) changes this setting, they can bypass ICANN and these landgrab gtlds.
But why should we do that? Why do you care? So some companies get shorter domains, so what? We don't even know if those generic TLDs will be accepted. Much ado about nothing, really.
And if you lose because the other guy had better lawyers, costs you $10,000? Plus the lawyers.
Scammy McScam of Scamsville called, he wants his cut.
You could argue ICANN extorts money here by putting pressure on companies to apply for gtld's in order to protect their marks. Many companies do not want to apply. For example, the world's most valuable trademark is missing from this applicant pool: Coke. There's no reason ICANN has to create gtld's that match trademarks by putting them in the ICANN root zone. It is domainers that want new gtld's the most. (For the simple reason why, see below.) How hard is it to do 2000 trademark searches? Essentially ICANN is profiting (they get a small fee for every domain name registration that is later sold) by selling the rights to use someone else's trademark.
Then there is the extortion that is carried out by the registries and registrars and domainers. Companies are forced to purchase and renew registrations for direct matches and typos of their trademarks in many different gtlds. More tld's equals more money. Also companies register and renew names in the form [companyname]sucks.tld. That is why you see some applications for a .sucks gtld. These defensive registrations are the bread and butter of the domain name "business". Again, they have no right to sell use of these trademarks. But they do. And they make a handsome profit from the "protection money" that must be spent by companies as a result.
That said, you do have a point: If you are a large company, $2000 and the fees to register domain names in lots of tld's, or to file UDRP's, are essentially nothing. It's easier for companies to just pay the fees rather than try to figure out how DNS actually works and how ICANN and their followers manage to pull off this scam.
You could, except I've shown that you don't have to register the mark to protect it.
Companies are forced to purchase and renew registrations for direct matches and typos of their trademarks in many different gtlds.
No, they aren't, Amazon doesn't own amazon.net and nobody gives a fuck, because people don't write domains, they write "amazon" and click on the first result of the search engine.
Companies buy other domains for irrational fears based on outdated assumptions from when dinosaurs roamed the Earth and search engines sucked.
You want to use Amazon as the example? It's a terrible example, because Amazon are savvy. And yet, it turns out, even they do own amazon.biz and amazon.info. The worthlessness of those namespaces is evident: it didn't even occur to you to check them!
Amazon didn't register those for the SEO; it's a pure defensive registration.
Feel free to write to Jeff, tell him to let those registrations lapse 'cos he doesn't need 'em.
There's money to be made by owning a domain like amazon.net. You would be amazed at how many people type searches and erroneous strings (e.g., .net when they mean .com) into the Address Bar.
Just because we can't imagine anyone doing this does not mean they don't. They do. That's why numerous domainers are millionaires, some of them a hundred times over, and that's why they are salivating at the thought of running a registry. Zappo's had shoes.com. Now it belongs to Amazon. Amazon knows the power of domain names. Users do type in the Address Bar. We might not know who these users are, but they exist. They have made a number of domainers very wealthy. And Amazon has paid millions to acquire domain names, no matter how ridiculous we may think domain names are, e.g., they paid a premium to acquire a.co
The way I see it, ICANN is selling google and amazon something that is worth about as much as a custom licence plate. (Until I sold it, the nameplate on my motorcycle read 'prgmr' - but I don't think I paid more than $40 a year for that.)
I mean, if amazon and google want to pay that much for something that useless... who am I to say what they should do with their money? I mean, this is certainly better for the company than pissing the money away on corporate jets. (That said, if I were a shareholder, I'd be kinda cheesed.)
ICANN is simultaneously conjuring an artificially scarce property and taking their cut of the proceeds of defensive registration, up front. These additional TLDs add little to zero actual value to the end-user, so any registrations therein are by definition a waste of money.
Being charged by someone to protect something and receiving nothing of value in return sounds like extortion to me. Many will register their names under these gTLDs, solely out of fear of SEO issues later. It's protection money, pure and simple.
Most of all this farce demonstrates that ICANN have abandoned even the pretence of good governance and conservative stewardship of a widely misunderstood technical resource.
How will increasing the namespace help? My hope is that it will divert the resources of people that buy a gazillion names into, you know, buying names in these new namespaces that nobody gives a shit about, leaving more of the dot-com for legitimate use.
I mean, I could be wrong, but I don't think it will decrease the dot-com namespace available for legitimate use.
Personally, I think that if they can take money away from the squatters (or the people that engage in "defensive registrations" or whatever they are calling squatting this week) without taking money from legitimate users, that is a net positive by itself. Squatters are not as bad as spammers; I'm not advocating public executions or anything, but I'm not going to cry that someone else has figured out a way to extract more money from them.
It isn't. It is when an existing holder, e.g. mystartup.com, additionally registers mystartup.biz and mystartup.co and other useless TLDs so that no-one else can have it, without having any intention of using it.
Your "hope" that people might use these other new TLDs instead of .com et al is entirely undermined by the evidence of .biz and .info.
Sorry, but fantasy land doesn't apply here, just economics.
NB: if you have some peculiar impression that defensive registration is a form of squatting, then, y'know, call it whatever you like, the outcome is the same.
If everyone registers their name in all namespaces, there aren't any more names to go around, just more fees for every name owner to pay.
The thing is, it's completely legitimate for prgmr.com, prgmr.net, and prgmr.org to be unrelated entities. It's also legitimate for prgmr.sux or whatever (assuming that top level domain is created) to be owned by someone that wants to say bad things about me. The only illegitimate use is attempting to deceive users in to thinking that you are me.
Though, I think I understand your point better now; You are saying that we really only have one namespace, and the "buy every variation of your name on all top level domains" ship has sailed.
If you hold that position, (and while I disagree, I see how you could hold that position) then yes, adding another top level domain does not expand the namespace, but it does mean that all name owners need to buy another name.
While I do agree that people have a strong preference for .com names, I think this means people are less likely to confuse a .com with a .biz or a .ly or what have you. In fact, almost the only uses I've seen of other than com/net/org and government sites have been for companies that integrated the top level domain into the name, like del.icio.us or what have you. I don't think the existence of prgmr.ly would cause any confusion.
This got me wondering what prgmr.net was (I mean, I am kinda a network, so prgmr.net is arguably more appropriate) - it looks like a Korean programmer's blog. I approve.
In the real world this would be construed as protection money.
No further semantic information is conveyed by another domain registration; there is no improvement whatsoever in resource discoverability.
The only winners are the name squatters, with Google and Amazon and every other applicant greedily lining up to be the slum landlords of their own worthless little namespace.
ICANN should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves for presiding over this farce.