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Berners-Lee on the TLD Explosion

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the good-intentions-and-human-nature dept.

kmccammon writes "Tim Berners-Lee recently released a white paper outlining a number of justifications for stalling (at least temporarily) the expansion of the top-level domains. Among the reasons cited: bad economics. As evidenced by the .biz and .info debacle, more top-levels does not necessarily mean more domain name availability. All it really means is that every .com/.net owner now needs to rush out and buy the same name under each new TLD. Thus, the 'value of one's original registration drops. At the same time, the cost of protecting one's brand goes up.'"

6 of 303 comments (clear)

  1. There are only a few that matter by MacFury · · Score: 5, Insightful

    .com .net and .org are really all that matter. The average joe equates .com with the internet.

  2. I'm sorry... by ericspinder · · Score: 3, Insightful

    but I don't believe that one needs to snap up every version of domains saying apple, home, or even localhost. More TDL's give more people the right to a short easy to remember name.

    --
    The grass is only greener, if you don't take care of your own lawn.
    1. Re:I'm sorry... by Carnildo · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Whitehouse.com, whitehouse.net, and whitehouse.org say otherwise.

      --
      "They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
  3. Re:Relative failure of new TLD's by Kozar_The_Malignant · · Score: 5, Insightful

    All mail from .biz domains goes straight into the dumpster 'round here.

    --
    Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
  4. The problem with new tlds is by Roland+Piquepaille · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Traditional TLDs have passed into everyday english. When you phone someone and say "hey here's my email: xyz at something dot com". People on the other end kind of expect a "dot com" to end the email. They can tolerate a "dot net" or "dot org" because they're very common (less so for emails). National TLDs are common too, for the nationals concerned, and other people in the world who see them regularly.

    But "john at cia dot info"? "robert at shackled dot mobi"? these extensions are so uncommon nobody wants them in their emails, or FQDNs, because almost invariably people go "uh?" hearing them. They just don't stick.

    New TLDs are a catch-22 problem: people won't use them because they sound alien, and they sound alien because people don't use them.

  5. The concept of TLDs by Marxist+Hacker+42 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Is rather outdated to me. I agree with the idea that the tree structure doesn't fit the net anymore. I'd say we should open it wide- with the new hard drives coming out, all top level DNS servers should have 10 TB of space- and anybody who wants to can start a new TLD company. That way, the price of registration will fall until registering any domain name is trivial- and we'll get human language based domain names as a big plus. Of course, I'm already doing this in the framework- my company, Information-R-Us (link not included in hopes of avoiding slashdoting, my DSL line can't take it) has a domain name that is just a rearrangement of the punctuation- in the .us TLD of course.

    --
    SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.