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Dotless Domain Names Prohibited, ICANN Tells Google
New submitter gwstuff writes "Last year, Google filed applications for about 100 top level domains. These included .app, .cloud and .lol, but perhaps most prominently .search, which they had requested to operate as a 'dotless' domain. [Friday], ICANN gave their verdict on the idea that would make this URL valid : NO. Here is the formal announcement, and a related Slashdot story from last year. So that's that. But it may still be granted the rights for the remaining 100. Is prime dot-com real estate going to become a thing of the past?"
I'd like to have "dot". Can you imagine the confusion when people try to communicate what the URL is?
Or could you imagine some madman calling his site "slash" "dot", it would be twice as confusing.
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
doesn't matter what other TLDs are announced. .com is still king for consumers, anything else is a just a toy for the nerdy.
Your statement is correct but a bit too understated. I would add the following
.com or .other are hard won when trying to get them to change their defaults. If you tell someone to go to a website they either search, or type in the name and add .com (and an immense number of searchers type the .com part of the domain into the search box too).
.ME and .CO were probably two of the biggest recent TLD launches. You can still pick up a premium in either of these extensions for micro-pennies on the .com dollar, registrations are still less than .1 % of total .com, and the US by far outregisters more domains in all extensions than all other countries combined.
.com will be king, for 20 years at least. Yes you can launch "help.apple" or "game.app" and get some traction, but anything less than the uber-premium word is going to have much less draw for an exceptionally long time. If nothing else but due to the way US consumers are trained en masse. You need to start a whole new brainwashing program to rewire people and I don't see anyone coughing up a few billion for that ad campaign anytime soon.
It is very hard to get people to switch. Even the new internet generation that has no particular preference for
Everyone knows you could have another extension but it's not their first choice.
Lastly, consider that ICANN is definitely the most inept entity in existence. As long as they keep the US Govt happy, they will always continue to run the rest of their org as a stupendous dung heap. This whole game of rolling out new TLDs will take them at least 5 years, and that's not counting all the supreme screwups that are sure to make the process less and less tasteful for those inside and outside the market.
Given these factors, I would say that
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
For example, how many American companies apply for .us domain? The other side of the coin is that you are only talking about the English speaking world.
Heck he is probablly only talking about the USA
Over here in the uk .co.uk is pretty commonly used. Sometimes .com will take you to the right place too but other tines it will take you to a foreign company of the same name or for multinational companies to the american website of the company in question.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
E.g. http://uz
Will they have to disable it?
...Given these factors, I would say that .com will be king, for 20 years at least.
Trying to make predictions on human behavior on the internet is pointless and for fools. 20 years ago the masses all thought AOL keywords was the only way to search. We've come a LONG way since then, along with a few game-changers along the way (e.g. Twitter, Facebook, smartphones) that change how people act and interact completely with the internet.
All it would take is another game changer to nullify your statement completely to modify behavior like this. We already don't type FQDNs in favor of being lazy and typing a single word into the search bar that is (now) built into every browser instead of having to actually go to your favorite engine search page and type it in. Yet another example of how behavior has modified itself rather quickly. How long before voice commands take over completely? You really think it's going to be 20 years before I'm just speaking a single word into a smartphone to find something? Oh wait, I forgot, we also do that today.
You make bright, salient points, which in contrary to your statements, indirectly validate the concept of .com strength.
.COM to make their stand), tend to stake the same horse, you will have it this way for a long time.
.bit or .onion or even something far more interesting if it ever gets created.
When AOL was launched, it was "going to create a whole new internet". They had their own browser, interface, portals, etc.
Smartphones were going to replace all of that silly typing, Siri was the next generation's voice.
Facebook and Twitter did away with the need for any other way of communication, your profile was the place to be and eradicated the internet as a whole.
Every one of these were internet-killers. World changing, revolutionary, mind-numbing behavior modifiers. In the end they are all nothing next to the concept of free internet browsing, with your own browser, your own limitless mind and your exceptionally mindless searching which brings up whatever result has the most cash behind it. And since big companies (all of the examples above used
I am going to make one possible exception however. Govt spying on all fronts has the world incredibly nervous and with good reason. This could be the game changer behavior that drives people to use extensions that simply aren't traceable to a DNS query in the traditional way, or are simply part of a peer network like
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
DNS is delicate.
There was an issue a couple of years ago - I can't remember the details, but it involved printers ceasing to work suddenly without cause in some businesses. Offices where they just ceased to function.
Turned out that the printers had been running a check for firmware updates on boot - they tried to reach their manufacturer server each time, but only got a NXDOMAIN, as the model was no longer supported an the update server no longer maintained. Until the day one of the major ISPs decided to spoof non-existant domains to instead point to their own advert-laden 'helpful' search page. The printers thus tried to fetch their firmware update from that page and, getting a 400 response, tried to install it - but instead it just failed checksum, causing the printers to lock up in objection.
I can't recall the details any more, but you can probably look them up with enough googling. Easily fixed once you know the problem, but it shows just how delicate name lookup can be.
How many businesses have a server somewhere called 'search?' If a 'search' TLD were registered, queries would become ambiguous and traffic ends up going to the wrong place.
My bank is always sending me emails with attached statements and incredible offers. I just click on the links I. The emails.
-rd