No One Wants The Not-Coms

angkor points to this Siliconvalley.com article about companies not jumping for the newfangled TLDs like dot-biz. "This is delicious revenge for all the spam I've gotten reminding me to reserve new domain names now before they're all gone ... ." Besides the nice sound of "dot com," perhaps the restrictions surrounding the new official TLDs help to prevent them selling like hotcakes. The world won't be fair until the LED museum and similar sites are offered -- No, given! -- .museum addresses.

Comments

It's easy to see why nobody is buying these

[Infonaut]

1) It's obviously just an excuse for the domain registrars to make more money.

2) Web users don't grok it. Let's face it, most Web users think AOL is the Web. They don't know about .gov or .org, they don't even know .mil exists, and if you throw a .ru or a .uk at them, they can't cope.

3) Would you want to have your company at: mygoofyasscompany.biz? It just sounds so.. so.. 1990s!

Re:It's easy to see why nobody is buying these

[4n0nym0u53 C0w4rd]

I think that, more importantly, these new domain names don't add anything. .biz provides no useful semantic information. It's not like someone would say, "hmm, I'm not looking for a (.)company, I'm looking for a (.)business." Moreover, since the target market is companies, they already are likely to have .com names, thus making this redundant.

This is the equivalent of adding .com2 and .com3 -- nothing useful.

.kids or .sex or .personal or .protest would be useful. These are categories that aren't simply mirrors of existing TLDs.

Re:It's easy to see why nobody is buying these

[Alan]

I mentioned that to someone at work and he said he didn't think it was a good idea, as that makes things easier to filter out (or attack). I'm not saying I want my kids looking at pr0n, but I don't want a university or cable company or library (places where information should flow freely, even if it is jiggly bits) just banning *.sex I also don't want the spammers targetting the *.kids domains as they are "easy" targets....

LED museum is much more interesting...

[Codeala]

Of course no one is buying those TLDs, haven't you heard the slow down of the .com bloom since last year? And with all those gloomy forecasts for the next few years, good luck trying to sell them off. Beside with the current laws most companies are probably automatically entitled to their tradenames. Want to bet how far you can go with amazon.biz before being sued?

I suspect timothy just want a chance to slip in that link to the LED museum, which is much more interesting than the main story ;-)

Not surprising..

[dregoth]

Right now basically the new .biz is just a tax on the successful .com companies that are having a hard enough time as it is. If they did get one, it would be to forward it to their .com address anyway. It might remove some of the cruft from .net though.

Perhaps in a few years when VC get eager to dump money around and new startups are made that will start with a .biz.

Look at the .tv that was bought for tv programs to use is basically a link to their .com if they have one at all.

not as sexy

[dun0s]

.biz .info .somemoneymakingtld will never, in the mind of the public, be as sexy as a .com. How can it be? .com is the internet to so many people the same way that if you don't start a web address with www. then they will put it on regardless.

Apart from the CC domains which are good for country specific sites these new tld's don't really trip off the tongue that easily either. .biz just sounds a bit unprofessional i guess. As for .museum and .coop why can't they use .info and .org seeing as that is what they are. and why is there a .pro when they could use the new .name for a personal site or .org/.com for a professional ORGanisation or commercial site. Ok, so .com is overloaded but thats just tough, come up with something origional damn you marketing people.

So, to summerise my post... .com is the only thing the masses recognise and these new tld's just sound a bit shoddy when you say them out loud.

ok. bad post but it is late here ok.

Re:not as sexy

[terri rolle]

.biz just sounds a bit unprofessional i guess.

You ain't kidding. I have an instant negative gut-level reaction to it. To me the name immediately conjures up images of multi-level marketing schemes, MAKE MONEY FAST scams, and other seedy to-good-to-be-true business ventures.

At this point it is difficult to imagine .biz being a favorite of anyone but infomercial producers and spamware dealers.

No Interest

[Fat Casper]

There isn't anything beyond .com. Look around you- the Post Office is usps.com (I know .gov works too, but they have .com painted on the sides of their trucks). The Army is a .com too, as is the National Guard. The Post Office is ahead of them- neither one of them has it wired to a .mil. I really like one of the police departments in my area.

If the .govs and .mils feel like they need to be .coms, why the hell does anyone think actual companies would want anything else? Does anyone here know of any .edus that use .com? I think the .orgs seem to stick to .org pretty well. Come on- if I want info on something, I'll find their site and look for info there, not do a separate .info search.

Re:Lets just give everyone a number..

[ackthpt]

How about your ssn? 123.45.6789 oh, wait, they're running out of these and can't wait to recycle the ones from persons deceased. Well, maybe the SSA will re-do those, too, and cause widespread confusion 8-)

Seriously, when I first started on the net I knew more sites by IP address than by name, now I can hardly remember any. The neat thing then was looking at an address and knowing it was where it was from. Don't have much of a clue anymore with the way .com can really be pretty much anywhere in the world. Same would happen with the new TLDs, too, I guess.

It would be pretty neat to see an ibm.museum site, but probably run by some pr0n twink, as all these new TLDs are really for, that and making $$$ money, because ABC, CBS, IBM, AMR, DOW, etc all would need to glom onto them before the pr0n twinks and scam artists.

Hello from the President of IBM.biz,
We are offering new systems, software, support and a lifetime guarantee, just like major corporations use all over the world, all for $1000. Please charge to VISA, MC, DISCOVER, AMEX, including your preferred shipping address.

Harrison Fnord, CEO IBM.biz

e.g. First National Pr0n of Nebraska, Cobbco Pointy Sticks of West Lompoc, Starch Pressed Sock Co. of Greater Milwaukee
Intergalactic Bizness Makers, co., PO BOX 2, Pilasand, UAE

Nobody knows them

[Kanasta]

No users know about these new TLDs or any businesses under them. No businesses will register any of these if they know no user is going to know where to find them.

Plus, no business would dare register under one of the new TLDs unless they owned the .com version. It's guaranteed they'd face a lawsuit from the .com owner, and we all know in these cases the money always wins.

To few undesirable TLD's, too late

[michaeldouma]

It is a shame there was so much bureaucratic delay, along with "Internet bubble" arrogance. The result was that too few domains have been released, with a confused public. Even /.ers, most of whom are pretty Internet savvy, probably do not know the exact details of the TLD offerings.

There should have been dozens of TLDs available last year. The old dot com, dot org, and dot net names simply do not sound "right" for many web sites. These measly new offerings are hardly useful.

Re:These could be useful

[J'raxis]

Actually it should be completely reversed into com.yahoo.www. Www is the name of a server at Yahoo, which is part of the com TLD. Writing it www.com.yahoo is as bad as the American MM/DD/YY date format (YYYY-MM-DD, the correct way [ISO8601], is in order largest-to-smallest).

Com.yahoo.www would then be in the same order as the directory structure (/dir/subdir/.../file.html); most general to most specific. Right now, hostnames are inverted relative to the directory tree.