Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Google Applies For Dot-LOL Domain

Posted by timothy on from the binary-code-of-ells-and-zeroes dept.

judgecorp writes "Google has applied for the .lol domain in ICANN's sale of generic top level domains (gTLDs). Google also asked for .google, .docs, and .youtube at a cost of $185,000 each, in the round of applications which has finally closed. A glitch in the application system may have leaked some of the applicants' data to other applicants."

34 of 125 comments (clear)

  1. the problem is by tian2992 · · Score: 5, Funny

    cats.lol does not have the same ring to it sadly...

    1. Re:the problem is by rrohbeck · · Score: 3, Funny

      So who has the .cats domain?

      --
      thegodmovie.com - watch it
    2. Re:the problem is by mattiaza · · Score: 5, Informative

      .cat is the regional TLD for Catalonia. Unfortunately, lol.cat is already taken.

  2. 185k Quid, not dollars by AlabamaMike · · Score: 4, Informative

    Thus making it a bit more expensive (although not to Google!)

    --
    Pimpin' all the Karma Hoes!
  3. I hope they don't get it by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I'm one of those people who is sorry to see the erosion of the TLD. It's bad enough that individuals are shut out of the process by the rules and absurd fees. But under the new rules Google has zero right to it. I hope they don't get it.

    1. Re:I hope they don't get it by Amouth · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Agreed the rules/absurd fees associated with these are meant to force the smaller crowd out. the company i work for is small, but we are among the top in our field and i could see a TLD for several processes and standards that we have created and consult on over the years, but at 200k a pop we can't justify even one.

      --
      '...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
    2. Re:I hope they don't get it by Daniel+Dvorkin · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Honestly, the TLD system has been broken for a long time. There should probably never have been TLDs without country codes, for one thing. And enforcement on TLDs that were supposed to be reserved for specific purposes was always lousy -- I remember seeing clearly commercial sites with .net TLDs popping up in the mid-90's.

      --
      The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
    3. Re:I hope they don't get it by Ihmhi · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It'll just turn out to be a massive waste of money.

      Hell, you can even take your average user and have them look at a website... almost no one takes .biz, .info, .us seriously. .com, .net, and .org is where it's at.

      --
      Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
    4. Re:I hope they don't get it by TubeSteak · · Score: 3, Insightful

      It may have been broken, but at least it was understandable.
      Between url shorteners and (now) vanity domains, who the fuck will really know where a link is taking them?

      --
      [Fuck Beta]
      o0t!
    5. Re:I hope they don't get it by Samantha+Wright · · Score: 2

      I'm pretty sure this is like when Google bid pi billion dollars for Nortel's patents. It looks to me like agree with you that the TLD namespace is being polluted. If they get .lol, it'll prove the system is stupid, if not outright broken.

      --
      Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
    6. Re:I hope they don't get it by swalve · · Score: 2

      Yeah, some organization has my lastname.name domain, and I thought it would be a slam dunk to challenge it. Fax them a copy of my driver's license where it shows that my name is lastname, and that the org is an organization and not an individual, and done. But no. I'd have to come up with multiple thousands of dollars to pay off some arbitrator.

  4. Great... by Dexter+Herbivore · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This just goes to show how flawed this system is. When a for profit corporation can "own" a non-trademark general use term as a TLD, it's a clear sign that the system is open to abuse.

    1. Re:Great... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Is it really any different than granting full operation of .com to Verisign?

    2. Re:Great... by a+whoabot · · Score: 3, Interesting

      They don't own it; they don't even "own" it. Edit /etc/hosts and point "google.docs" whithersoever you wish. ICANN just own a list to which people subscribe. If you don't like their list, don't subscribe to it. They control nothing of importance in that capacity except what you let them control.

    3. Re:Great... by cultiv8 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      If lol was used historically on usenet, and Google owns Usenet, then couldn't Google claim ownership of it? Interestingly, AOL tried to trademarke LOL in 2003 but never filed a use statement...

      --
      sysadmins and parents of newborns get the same amount of sleep.
    4. Re:Great... by mounthood · · Score: 3, Interesting

      This just goes to show how flawed this system is. When a for profit corporation can "own" a non-trademark general use term as a TLD, it's a clear sign that the system is open to abuse.

      Money and lawyers are the traditional tools for dealing with contention. Would it be better if we pushed all DNS disputes through the (US?) trademark system? It would be great if there were a technical solution but that doesn't seem to exist. If we use IP addresses without DNS names it would only make memorable/easy IP ranges the issue of contention (and 42.42.42.42 is already taken.) So, just like email addresses, the naming scheme won't change until we completely replace the system with something new -- and maybe not even then.

      A tangent: a co-op style domain system would be interesting. Buy a TLD like "*.commons" to run it. Let anyone in and have a member voting system to resolve disputes (think ugly-but-functional Wikipedia politics). Give the names away free, with the use of a TLD wide SSL cert, or setup self-signing for name holders. A network effect could make it viable, and donations could pay for root servers.

      --
      tomorrow who's gonna fuss
    5. Re:Great... by ZeroSumHappiness · · Score: 2

      You could move to namecoin. (Not trolling, I swear.)

    6. Re:Great... by fbjon · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Controlling the defaults is a lot of control, even if it is nothing like complete control. Internet Explorer tells the story.

      --
      True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
    7. Re:Great... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

      If lol was used historically on usenet, and Google owns Usenet, then couldn't Google claim ownership of it? Interestingly, AOL tried to trademarke LOL in 2003 but never filed a use statement...

      Google doesn't own Usenet, they bought Deja News (a Usenet provider). No one can own Usenet, any more than one can own the Internet. It's a decentralized service, and functions almost exactly like the Internet in general, with peers sharing posts between eachother... That's why I can subscribe to a giganews account and my posts still show up in Google's usenet service.

    8. Re:Great... by nmb3000 · · Score: 2

      I have windows. What is /etc/hosts?

      C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts

      Unfortunately that is also the arcane spell to summon APK -- get away while you still can!

      --
      "What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
      /)
  5. League of Legends by Muramas95 · · Score: 2, Funny

    Google is buying the league of legends domain, awesome.

  6. Do not evil... by gmuslera · · Score: 3, Funny

    and then they say "all your jokes are belong to us"

  7. So who has applied for by rossdee · · Score: 4, Funny

    .WTF and .OMG

    1. Re:So who has applied for by thegarbz · · Score: 4, Funny

      .FAIL

      ICANN has reserved that one for personal use.

  8. Re:.docs? by Daniel+Dvorkin · · Score: 4, Funny

    Microsoft should be perfectly happy with their ownership of .crash, .virus, and .bsod.

    --
    The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
  9. Redundant by Hentes · · Score: 4, Funny

    Changing their address to google.google is a bit redundant.

    1. Re:Redundant by rgbrenner · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Changing their address to google.google is a bit redundant.

      well, yes,.. that would be stupid. But luckily there are other words in the dictionary

      search.google
      docs.google
      shopping.google
      mail.google
      images.google

    2. Re:Redundant by icebraining · · Score: 4, Informative

      Why not just "google"? Like "uz": http://uz/

      --
      Dilbert RSS feed
    3. Re:Redundant by houghi · · Score: 4, Informative

      Or just gooogle. Once you own the TLD, you do not have to use domains. You just use the TLD.

      Just like they now use google.com and www.google.com

      --
      Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
    4. Re:Redundant by Phroggy · · Score: 2

      Wow, you can actually do this?

      Yep. The root servers point the zone to whichever nameservers are authoritative for that ccTLD, and those nameservers are free to serve up whatever they like, including A records for the uz domain itself.

      However, since it is generally expected that nobody does this, you can't expect all clients to do what you want them to. For example, when you type "uz" into Safari's address bar, it doesn't recognize this pattern as an FQDN so it tries a couple of other behaviors - first appending your search domain, then if that doesn't resolve, appending the .com TLD and taking you to http://www.uz.com/ which is not the same site at all. You can override this behavior by adding a dot at the end of the FQDN.

      --
      $x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
      $x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
  10. I think someone should apply for .sucks by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Could be a best-selling TLD

  11. Goodbye, useful metadata by Narrowband · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I wonder at what point gTLDs are going to make it harder to recognize a URL when it comes up in text. Right now, I expect it's not too hard to write code that identifies a URL as a URL and sets up a link. But when my website name can be AUTOEXEC.BAT, things might get a bit different.

  12. Re:Too bad they didn't apply for .cheezburger.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    ICANN.has.cheezburger

    FTFY

  13. Chrome search queries as frontend to Google TLD by mattr · · Score: 2

    I don't know about you but I have seriously gotten used to asking questions / searching google by just typing into the location bar (on Mac Chrome and on Android).

    Google could semantically reorganize the words in all queries and put them into the .google name space that would be cool.

    So popular searches like "dyi projects for home" (which I discovered by just typing the words in and seeing autocomplete suggestions) might be mapped by google into:
    http://results.home.dyi.projects.google/
    and then google could automatically create:
    http://community.home.dyi.projects.google/livechat/channelnumber
    http://market.home.dyi.projects.google/yourbrandname
    http://users.dyi.projects.google/yourgoogleaccountname
    http://projects.google/yoursourceforgeprojectname
    http://videos.home.dyi.projects.google/ -> maps to youtube
    etc.