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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.
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.
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.
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.