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Say Hello To Branded Internet Addresses (cnet.com)
On September 29, Google published a new blog which uses .google domain rather the standard .com. It seems the company may have inspired other companies to tout their brand names in the digital realm as well. According to a report on CNET, we have since seen requests for domain names such as .kindle, .apple, .ibm, .canon, and .samsung. And it's not just tech companies that are finding this very attractive, other domain requests include .ford, .delta, .hbo, .mcdonalds, and .nike. From the report: Approval, of course, is just a first step. It's not clear how enthusiastic most companies will be about the new names. So far, Google is the eager beaver. What's fun for Google is a daunting financial commitment to others. A $185,000 application fee and annual $30,000 operation fee will keep mom-and-pop shops away from their own domains. Still, plenty of businesses other than Google see the new domain names as a good investment. Branded domains can add distinction to an internet address, and renting out generic top-level domain (GTLD) names can potentially be a lucrative business. At a January auction, GMO Registry bid $41.5 million to win rights to sell .shop domain names. And in July, Nu Dot Co won .web with a bid of $135 million. Hundreds of new top-level domain names are approved. The single most popular in use is .xyz. Hundreds of new top-level domain names are approved. The single most popular in use is .xyz. Where does all the money go? To a nonprofit organization called ICANN -- the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. The organization oversees internet plumbing on behalf of companies, governments and universities, as well as the general public.
Just people some idiot paid that much to run that name, it doesn't mean that's what it's worth (except to that one seller, that one time).
How do you profit from, say .xyz? By selling domains at .xyz. If those domains are expensive, nobody will touch them. If they are cheap, you'll never make your money back.
You would need to sell tens of millions of TLD addresses to recoup the money invested, even over a ten year period. That's unlikely. Hell, by that time, TLD's might be entirely dead and we've all moved on to something else.
It actually makes sense for banks or other highly-phishable companies; if you control your own TLD, verifying valid domainnames becomes a lot easier.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
About half the users in my network just go to Google and type "youtube" anyways. When I say, "Go to the address bar, and...", it's a foreign language to them. And mobile devices now hide the address bar, sometimes making it incredibly frustrating and difficult trying to locate it. With half of all users just Google the link, and the other half expect it to be a .com, why pay that much money for a specialized web address?
I've been using the internet for a long time but help me out here. What is the goal here?
www.ibm.ibm? or just www.ibm?
ford.ford? www.cars.ford? drive.a.ford?
gmail.google instead of gmail.google.com?
You can mark me down as a firm "whatever".
I'm a 2000 man.
Don't mention that they gave away hundreds of thousands of .xyz domains for free to people who didn't even ask for them to get there.
Which has, incidentally, given it a reputation of being 99.9% spam, just like .biz. I visited abc.xyz the day Google announced its reorg, and that remains the only legitimate domain I've ever seen in that TLD. I have postfix rejecting anything with a .xyz "From" header, and it looks like I'm about to add .shop to the list.
IMO the only thing these new TLDs are accomplishing is fracturing the namespace into ever more useless niches that will never be widely accepted or compatible. Oh well, it's their money, if they want to waste it.
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
DNS is fine. Some applications, however, require an public domain on the Internet to have '.' inside... A regex that requires a '.'!
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
DNS is fine. Some applications, however, require an public domain on the Internet to have '.' inside... A regex that requires a '.'!
Most applications I've run across that do email validation are way too restrictive. If you have a 4 letter or longer top level domain, many will reject your email address and more exotics like a plus in your email, a percent in your email, etc... will almost certainly be rejected.
This is going to create a TON of unnecessary subdomains just to get catchphrase addresses like Drive.A.Ford as someone else mentioned. This plays right into java's hands as an easy obfuscation techniques for links. You won't be able to easily tell if it's a object, reference, string, or an actual url. ICANN just gave virus writers a whole new avenue of creative obfuscation. Throw in a bunch of unicode % characters like XSS kids love to do and you'll get an obscenely long url that most admins won't care to decipher.
not.a.string(",xyz");
Imagine.a.command.and.control.subdomain.chain.for.a.botnet.embedded.in.java.that.is.actually.a.link.and.not.a.string
Just a stupid example why this could be a bad idea if subdomain chaining for cheesy catchphrase addresses becomes the norm.
Yes it's a good idea in order to open up the address space a lot but everything has a pro and con. I'm sure ICANN thought this issue through long and hard before lining their pockets with billions (sarcasm).
The reason why plus signs are rejected are for the same reason you found out they are rejected. Because Google ignores everything after the + in an email address - allowing you to sign up for multiple accounts with one email address. They don't want it to be easy...because reasons.
Sure - and if you're the only person on Name St, it's both a branded address and a branded street. Same thing applies.
Not allowed by ICANN rules, but technically it would work. There is nothing preventing a root nameserver for the TLD to return an A/AAAA record. Not all applications would handle it properly I would guess. If you have a search suffix set this will be queried first, eg http://samsung could be http://samsung.linksysrouter and then fail to resolve. http://samsung. is completely valid.
I received a letter from my bank and it had a "link" to their website, i bet 99% of the people who got that mail didn't realize banco.bradesco was actually a website. It didn't have a http or www that most people now are familiar with, it was just banco.bradesco, you could think they missed a space if you were not careful.
Years having to tell people they don't need to write http:/// now they "changed" it and people will begging to ask again - "banco.bradesco? So www.branco.bradesco? How about http, this one have that thing too? How do i open it? Oh just a regular site? " :-(
What does Icann do with all the money ?
It’s a non-profit. So in order to not make a profit they give it to their directors.
The U.S. government screwed this up royally when it put its site for people to get their free credit report on the domain annualcreditreport.com. The credit agencies all set up similar sites with similar domains, which would give you your credit report but require you to submit a credit card and would try to subscribe you to their credit monitoring services. For years, Google searches would return these spoofing sites instead of the real one as the top result, doubtless due to aggressive SEO. It seems to have stabilized on the real one as the top result now, though I don't know if that's due to Google clamping down on SEO exploits, or if they just hard-coded the government site as the top result. All of this could have been prevented if the government set it up as a .gov TLD, since companies can't set up sites under that domain.
.apple, .ibm, .canon, .samsung TLD would prevent spoofed sites. I tend to side with a strong hierarchical structure to domain names (company.com, organization.org, network.net, etc). But not everyone realized the importance of nabbing a .com domain early on, resulting in headaches which have done nothing but make lawyers rich. Granting an organizations-specific TLD if the organization is large enough may be a solution to this, provided you also prohibit said organization from taking over similarly named .com sites like applesucks.com. Once you own a TLD that only you can make sites on, it's clear whether or not a site is your "real" site, so name confusion and trademark dilution claims should no longer apply.
Likewise, a
Most applications I've run across that do email validation are way too restrictive. If you have a 4 letter or longer top level domain, many will reject your email address and more exotics like a plus in your email, a percent in your email, etc... will almost certainly be rejected.
Or they demand a @ and domain name. Try IP literals or bang paths, like:
[127.1.2.3]!somehost!someotherhost!user
Not a lot of sites still support them.
technically that's not a problem, but i have yet to see a browser that wouldn't shit itself over a real FQDN (i.e. one that ends in a period)
I cannot find a single one that doesn't work. Palemoon, Firefox, Midori, lynx and even good old NCSA Mosaic works just fine with a terminated FQDN.
Some of them might send the dot in the Host: header, and the remote web server might not handle that correctly. Most do, though.
And some might show unneccessary warnings for https, unless the CA has also put the name with the dot in the certificate.
But the browsers themselves work quite well. Which ones have you tried that don't?
Only to the extent that ".com" addresses verify validity.
Quick, is "https:\\logins.accounts.bankcfamerica\" valid and the genuine site?
I, for one, welcome our TLD typo-squatting overlords.
www.google.google
Stop domain grabbing and forbid to use domains, which do not match the purpose.
a .com domain should be commercial, some american site should use .us. Use other country codes for offers in the country (i.e. bmw.de for german BMW site, bmw.us for the american one linking to bmw.com for some online shop with car parts), restrict .info to non-affiliated information sites, etc.
With such a rule, people could finally get free TLDs again. Try to get a four letter domain. Everything already registered, mostly redirecting to the main domain. Let some organization with initials bmw have bmw.org! some person with initials BMW gets bmw.name and bmw.email is reserved for a mail provider.
TLDs have failed. People just use country codes or .com and redirect others. Only exceptions are people using cool domain hacks (think of del.icio.us) or nice domains in the new namespaces like hilbert.space. But that are mostly nerds, anyway.
The single most popular in use? It must not be .xyz, because that is apparently the dual most popular in use.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Word mean precisely what people agree them to mean, and that changes over time. Now go get grandpa his bourbon before he gets cranky.
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