Slashdot Mirror
Forget Dot Com, 2019 Will Finally be the Year of Weird Domain Names (wired.co.uk)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Latest registration figures released by Verisign, an internet network company that oversees some domain name endings, seem to indicate that after a rocky few years, new gTLDs may finally be finding their niche in the marketplace. 2019 could be the year of the obscure domain name. Registrations for new gTLDs rose by nearly 11 per cent in the last year, compared to an average 3.5 per cent increase across the entire domain landscape, according to Verisign. One in five domain name registrations in the last year were on new gTLDs.
"The numbers are picking up as well as the usage," says Thomas Keller of 1&1 IONOS, a German web hosting company. In part that's down to saturation in more traditional domain name endings like dot-com, and country code TLDs (such as .uk, .tk and .cn). It's difficult to get good, precise and short dot-com domain names now, but hyper-specific and new gTLDs still have plenty of choice. Around ten per cent of new URLs registered through 1&1 IONOS were for new gTLds, Keller says.
"The numbers are picking up as well as the usage," says Thomas Keller of 1&1 IONOS, a German web hosting company. In part that's down to saturation in more traditional domain name endings like dot-com, and country code TLDs (such as .uk, .tk and .cn). It's difficult to get good, precise and short dot-com domain names now, but hyper-specific and new gTLDs still have plenty of choice. Around ten per cent of new URLs registered through 1&1 IONOS were for new gTLds, Keller says.
i own it, bitches!
For intellectual property reasons you will still want to own the .com or risk confusing your customers forever. Sure there are some people using a few things like .io, but that is going to be rare for a long time for larger corporations.
ugh.
They made a terrible, terrible decision with selling gTLDs. They'll be happy when the money is coming in but the wheels will come off on this con and we will all be stuck holding the bag. The sale of gTLDs is the ultimate win for global spamming and phishing operations as they will be able to start an arbitrary number of obfuscated domains and as the owner of their own gTLD they will be accountable to exactly nobody. They'll be able to negotiate with each other for more registrations, making the currently hopeless game of whac-a-mole we're playing look structured and logical.
Thanks a lot ICANN. I hope you money grubbing assholes rot in hell, and soon. We can't put this genie back in the bottle.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
What value is there in owning Slash Dot Dot?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I think the new gTDLs are dumb. I know why they did it amd why they think this time it will work: barrier of entry. Look at .biz: intended to alleviate the .com shortage, but buying one is cheap and as such everyone could buy one including for very shady studf. Not so gTDLs. No way I could even dream of getting one. I believe it's a minimum of $35k to apply for one, basically limiting the audience to companies and eccentric millionaires.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
Beware of incompatibilities due to assumptions that domain names have no more than a 3-letter TLD.
The company I work for has a .education domain. They were not able to open a bank account at a certain bank, because their system does not permit an email address with a TLD > 3 characters.
Although I HATE the practice of multiple domains to "brand" different functionalities or marketing channels (example.com, example-mail.com, example-cloud.com, myexample.com (I especially hate the "my" prefix...)) I had proactively set up .net for our backend API (our company name includes the word "education" at the end). Multiple domains with similar names confuse consumers, leaving them uncertain if an auxiliary domain is really associated with the main one. And then it slowly entrains them to automatically trust, which they shouldn't. IBM is currently going through a painful rebranding of bluemix.net to cloud.ibm.com. Which is what it should have been in the first place. (They are also rebranding softlayer.com/net at the same time, not avoidable by thinking ahead, since it was an acquisition.)
So anyhoo, then I had to set up .com so that we could open a bank account at the bank that only takes 3-letter TLDs. That's probably what we should have had in the first place. Thankfully, the company name is long enough that .com and .net were available, so long as we used the full company name with "education" included.
prison terms starting for the Fraud family.
Yep, the walls are closing in on the Clintons now!
Is that what you tell your sister to get her horny while you're plowing her?
Stop using clearnet for hosting your websites or running your services.
Does that sound insane? The internet has gone insane.
If you want to regain control, start moving your web access to overlay networks like Tor, I2P, CJDNS, etc. The ones that have DNS namespaces only have one (Tor is strictly their onion v2/v3 keys, while I2P supports key names as well as DNS style aliases looked up via the router and public/private addressbooks. Hell to avoid ICANN while still having immutable domain names, you can run that blockchain domain service atop it and have it resolve to .i2p, .onion, etc domains.)
What is the added benefit of all this hassle? You're not trapped by what is accessable from a particular region of the world. You can provide web services even from inside a NAT or firewall. Having your web address doesn't magically let people guess who you are.
Following this path will just throw you back into the 1990s of internet access. Eventually the governments and the plebs will flood it and it will become institutionalized in the same way that the internet has been. But for now it paves the way to keep your services running, provides the same protection from spam as this gTLD mess, saves you on bills for IP addresses and domain names (since they only cost as much as it takes your cpu to generate them, or the time to register in an addressbook on I2P.) Even without the claimed anonymity benefits of I2P or Tor (which may not exist with modern CPUs, Spectre, and Management Engines), the benefits of address portability and independence, and inability for a DDoS to reach your node with the level of traffic requiring you to hire Cloudflare or Akamai to front your website, will save you in the long run and help push back against the sicknesses sweeping the clearnet.
As a final note: there are inproxies to I2P and Tor (I haven't heard of one for CJDNS), so even users from the clear web can gain access, although SSL keys may throw warnings.
So, for those of us keeping score, we've already tried giving alternatives to .com, .org, and .net, but they haven't picked up.
The problem, ultimately, is twofold. First, people don't associate anything other than the big three (and maybe .gov) with websites at all. So, people will likely do something like "okay, so i typed in slashdot.cc.com, and it's not loading..." - though, to be fair, it's been a while since I've come across a user who understands the difference between an address bar and a search bar, so Google would end up resolving it most of the time anyway.
More to the point, can you think of an established company or brand whose primary website is any of these other TLDs? Of the top 50 sites globally, only Twitch.tv doesn't end in .com, .org, .net, or a country's TLD. Even the porn industry couldn't make ".xxx" take off. If you're handing out business cards with something else, you're going to be seen as 'too small to get a .com', and spend lots of your time figuring out that people are e-mailing 'foobar.com' instead of 'foobar.vodka'; it saves everyone time to register 'foobarGA.com' or something else that ultimately ends in a recognizable TLD.
The issue is human nature, and the fact that custom TLDs don't translate to websites for most people...and there is neither a principle nor a profit motivation for using anything other than the TLDs that already do their job well.
FALSE.
2019 will finally be The Year Of Linux On The Desktop (tm)
Your point is valid. Just FYI:
> Even the porn industry couldn't make ".xxx" take off.
The porn industry fought against .xxx. .xxx was a scumbag who bought the TLD, then lobbied government to *force* all adult sites to buy from him, and only him. Much like .net was originally for networks and .org was for non-profits, he wanted to legally force all adult sites to .xxx, while he rolled in the dough. The porn industry saw him for the scum bag he was, and also saw the writing all on the wall - after government forces any content that isn't kid-friendly onto .xxx, what would be the next step in censorship? Most didn't want to go down that path.
The scum bag would have happened better luck if he added another step to his plan. He should have first become a senator, then sponsored the bill to legally force everyone to buy carbon credits^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H domain names from him.
When do I use one instead of the other?
If you want to use those TLDs you make that choice for yourself, you don't make it for me.
This is no different than blocking IP spaces from Trashcanistan.
FALSE.
2019 will finally be The Year Of Linux On The Desktop (tm)
No, no, the Paperless Office(R) !
When?
Have gnu, will travel.
Least it isn't a laptop. Linus is a bit heavy to sit on one of those.
Nazi homosexual recruiter RAY MORRIS pushing debunked Nazi propaganda even after corrected, #ROPE
The evaluation fee is US$185,000. Applicants will be required to pay a US$5,000 deposit fee per requested application slot when registering. The deposit will be credited against the evaluation fee. Other fees may apply depending on the specific application path.
I too would like it to be easier. Unfortunately, I can't have a bureaucrat or politician deciding what is to be censored and what isn't. The phrase used in the most similar laws is "not appropriate for children". Well, Slashdot is often not appropriate for young children. In fact many of the posts are just simply inappropriate - for anyone. So the censor decides Slashdot goes on the bad list, on .xxx.
There were a couple of voluntary self-labeling efforts that got some traction, but there are so many amateur-made porn sites run by people who don't know what they're doing that coverage would never approach 100%.
Many years ago I started a project that would have had sites appropriately labeled as a side effect, but it got really big, with multiple multi-millionaires involved, and I chickened out. At the time, in the 1990s, there were perhaps a few hundred people who ran most of the porn sites. They were mostly hosted by about four hosting companies, and used one of three payment processors (two of which were called "AVS" systems).
Anyway the idea was if a site owner joined our club, they'd agree to follow the peofessional code of ethics and they get a small discount on web hosting, buying content, etc. Offering the discount would benefit hosting companies and others in two ways. First, we'd tell all of our members "buy from this hosting company and get a discount" - it's marketing. Secondly, hosting companies, programmers, and others spend an inordinate amount of time dealing with customers who send spam and otherwise cause problems. Guild members, who don't send spam and do pay their bills, would be good customers.
It would cost the web site owners nothing, or almost nothing, and they'd get benefits, so most would join. With most of the web sites being members, service companies such as hosting companies, designers, ans payment processors would want to be a part of it in order to market to the member web sites.
One item in the professional ethics would have been using the appropriate machine-readable label that makes it easy for parents to control access to such sites.
I kick myself for bailing out on that because it likely would have made me rich. Membership might have saved webmasters 10% or more on their expenses vs non-members, so the club ownership (me) could have drawn off fees, advertising to member webmasters, or other revenue equal to 0.1% - 1% of the members expenses no problem. That's revenue for the club (me) equal to say 0.5% of the entire online adult industry. That industry is billions of dollars per year. Even 0.1% would be millions of dollars every year. I had it lined up, then got scared and ran away when big wigs I was working with starting talking about a million dollars here, a million dollars there.
I won't buy domains where they can change the fee from $9 per year to $9 thousand per year just for fun. With com/net/org and some other there are regulations in place to protect the pricing.
Website Just Down For Me? Find out
Now that is a gTLD which we will all love
Kim Dotcom going to have to update his name for 2019
Yo dawg, I heard you like dots in your slashdot, so I got a slashdot dot so you can dot your slashdot when your slash dotting!
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
I have my .ninja domain...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Some gTLDs were commonly used internally to organizations. Included are things like .test, .dev, etc. Well, Google bought .dev. I'm sure there are other examples.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
email@bigfat.jobby
Most other country are far more flexible. We have in addition the country own TLD, zone TLD (think .eu) and some of the longer tld are picking up (I keep seeing travelagency or similar domain being used).
Yes, there's a whole RFC series for Unicode labels in domain names, including advice to registrars for how to mitigate that problem. The ".com" domain itself is managed by Verisign, and they have a policy to address exactly that problem.