New TLDs - Is There Any Real Benefit?

pigdawg writes "What is the purpose? What is the real benefit of new top level domains like .travel, .biz and .xxx? I don't believe these new TLDs will free up more names in .com or .org. Do they really think that orbitz.com will exchange their domain name to become orbitz.travel? Is the mostfrequenttypo.com porn site going to go legit and register under some new .xxx name? Again and again I keep coming to the same conclusion: given that many people/companies register their name in every TLD, it's all about generating more revenue for the registrars. What are your opinions on this subject?"

Comments

More revenue , more options

[FidelCatsro]

Definantly part of the idea was to up revenue , but they also did it to give people more options as to the domain name .
I dont really see all the scum sites (not that all porn is scum , only the typo sites etc) moving off to the .xxx , but it gives the big names ,well the more honest the chance .

I dont think there is anything wrong with them trying to drum up revenu ,but it would be nice if they could use that revenue to sort out many of the problems within the organisations

Confusing a "registry" with an "index"

[Bob_Robertson]

Nothing is gained by having many TLD (top level domains). The purpose of a TLD was to denote what registry to look in as a last resort when looking up a domain name that was otherwise not cached in any of the DNS servers querried.

Way Back When, When The Net Was Small, TLDs were used to distribute the load among the registries. With the advance of technology, there really isn't any functional reason to do so now.

In the mean time, the registry has been used like an index. Rather than look something up first, a person (machines don't care about DNS, just IP addresses) will type in a likely domain name and hope for the best. It is only after failure that they will go to the indexes like Yahoo and Google and look there for the address just like they would look in the phone book.

With the political forces already having created the country TLDs, there is no point at all to having, as you put it, "90's style suffixes appended to internet names".

What is surprising is the number of otherwise smart people who cannot grasp this. Since the DNS system is already difficult for humans to use by itself (eg. coke.com or coke.net or coke.int or coke.org or coke.ny.ny.us) because they are trying to use it like an index rather than a registry, they then advocate adding yet more TLDs. Yet it is the very use of TLDs that has confused the difference between an index and a registry in their minds in the first place, as well as caused the shell-game problem of which TLD to look under first.

Nothing I'm saying in any way reflects on the usefulness of the hierarchical system that is DNS. It is VERY useful to be able to separate www.whatever.the.heck from mx.whatever.the.heck from www.go.to.heck, etc.etc.etc.heck

The issue is TLDs, and TLDs have outlived their usefulness. At some point in the future, there will be a .earth appended after the country codes, but I doubt I'll have to worry about that.

Bob-