Do a ctrl+f for "ICANN" and you'll see how well-networked the Donuts.co team is. Can't be sure if this is true cronyism, or whether they just really know how to play the game. Not sure it's terribly different either way.
--Edit--
per chrisacky's link above (http://money.cnn.com/2012/06/05/technology/donuts-domains-fu...), it looks like Donuts.co submitted 307 applications at $185k/per, for a total of $56.8 million. That's a hell of a way to earn favors with ICANN while ostensibly just trying to get more picks.
I was a little disappointed to learn that NameCoin domains are so cheap (0.001 NMC), and therefore rampant with squatters. I suppose there will always be an incentive to create a market and seek rents no matter what the domain system. Nonetheless, I hope NameCoin or something like it gains greater traction.
I found myself wondering the other day how long it will be before we see an attempted disruption of Google by a search crypto-currency.
They're currently 0.01NMC to register/update actually. Which is quite cheap, but trying to mine 0.01NMC isn't as easy as it used to be. It is the second most difficult to mine coin that exists in the world.
It would take somebody ~3 days of mining with a basic multi-GPU mining rig just to acquire the 0.01 NMC to register a domain name.
Thanks for the correction. NMC is still cheap in the secondary market, though; the current price puts it around a penny per domain.
Don't get me wrong, I'm still rooting for NameCoin, and I think distributed DNS is sorely needed. I just think it faces an uphill climb for adoption by users, browsers, and OS vendors.
It could create a market system for search terms, similar to NameCoin; it could allow "mining" by providing rewards for validated indexing. I could see there being huge incentives for a 51% attack, though.
Alas, I'm more of a UX guy than a crypto hacker, so such things are out of my ken. But I definitely see a market for a Distributed Autonomous Corporation that provides search, and it would have a much easier on-ramp with users compared to competing with DNS.
It can't, really. There's nothing remotely like web indexing in a crypto currency. Indexing websites is massively storage and bandwidth intensive, something which a distributed blockchain is not designed for. It's a nice idea to make a distributes search engine, but has nothing to do with Bitcoin.
Yeah, I wasn't implying that the specifics of BitCoin would work well for a hypothetical SearchCoin. NameCoin is feasible because the volume of data is much smaller, both for keys and values, and updated infrequently.
I think it's super suspect that ICANN, a non-profit organization with a purpose to maintain "the stable and secure operation" of the Internet (as described by Wikipedia), can allow this to happen.
Do these additional generic top-level domains bring any benefits - beyond being a license to print money for the tld sponsor®istrars?
One pretty big cost is the risk of confusion when visiting "somebrandname.sometld", especially if it's a different entity from the ".com" domain.
It can also be a cost (both moneywise and as a time sink) for brands wishing to protect their identify, if the number of tlds increases with a magnitude. (Multiplied by the number of misspellings and hyphenations etc).
It's probably likely to break a lot of (buggy) software (just try entering an @example.museum email around the web today).
Non-technical people are likely to be confused (so increased support costs, re-education, etc).
What happens to a gTLD and all the registered subdomains, when its sponsoring corporation goes under?
The DNS root zone grows, which may have undesirable costs for caching nameservers and DNS traffic.
It feels like a waste of energy and time that a non-profit like ICANN could have used for more constructive work.
In terms of the semantics: in the end it's up to people using it. I'm more worried about profiteering than confusion. But it's for the market to figure it out.
I don't think the traffic is significant. caching is very easy - you don't need to have all 10^12 - 10^15 domains on disk and even if the size per record is tiny.
Bugs are less significant than possible collisions and fraud.
Definitely agree with the sentiment that ICANN is broken.
It's interesting to see a lot of the domain endings are longer than the standard domains today. It'll be interesting to see what they do with them. Some of the choices seem a little odd considering the price to pay, such as .bike, .guru, or .tips.
I don't like that people (with money) will start buying up these generic top level domains and have complete control over who uses them. I would rather see a non-profit registrar of sorts but I know that would probably never happen.
Do we know yet how browsers will be treating these tlds? Eg if I type "diamonds" into the Chrome omnibar will it take me to a Google search for "diamonds" or to http://diamonds
The most prominent example is the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) to deliver electronic mail. It
requires at least two labels in the FQDN of a mail address. Thus standard-compliant mail servers would reject emails to addresses such as user@brand.
I remember some ccTLD had A records a while back (bs. was one), but they lacked MX. I think it would just cause lots of form validation errors if that suddenly changed, not to mention the confusion you'd cause with people expecting a suffix. I cause enough issues with not having a ".com" on my email address, people love adding a .com.
Well, I wonder how that affects mobile. Since there is a move to mobile app topology of information consumption, wonder if domain names will still be relevant 5 years from now.
On the same note why TLDs, not just have a 'name registry'. Seems like technical dictates what is not natural. Why I can't have website name for example "burger" or "pizza" I get that there are designations and control entities. But isn't it a bit contrived? I am not against dot notation but whole synthetic user facing naming system...
No - if pizza is owned by one TLD registrar www.pizza and great.pizza would be two separate subdomains under that TLD. I'm not sure there are limitations to the subdomain under the TLD (to prevent collision with www). Someone can register www under .com and make a www.www.com.
I wasn't saying they were interchangeable, just that on a technical levelhttp://www.pizza and http://great.pizza function in exactly the same way, as far as DNS is concerned.
Unfortunately, the same can't be said for most browsers, but that's another topic...
And I'm sure www is a reserved term under most of the new TLDs. Haven't checked though.
Looking at this, I see the reference to a couple of different dates. There's the "Sunrise Open" and the "Sunrise Close" dates, then there's the "General Availability" date. What does each mean?
Gandi does a pretty good job explaining this [1] as a 'trademark brand protection phase'. Basically, if you have a registered trademark and want to defend it from others registering <YourTrademark>.<NewTLD> your opportunity to do so is during this phase. The rest of us commoners get to by the leftovers starting on the General Availibility date.
Oh. no - not language specific TLDs! They wanted to introduce them like 7 years ago, and a lot of people agreed that it would just be a detriment to the Internet as we know it (freely accessible and global).
These are simple terms associated with the language of those who invented the net, so it's no more specific than asking us to call "feta" cheese by its real name, even though it's not in our language.
Yeah, Google will help, but if the trend continues, the Internet will become less global. One language is better in this case.
Imagine if programming languages were in different languages with their respective characters - everything would be harder and everyone would have a whole lot to lose.
Are you advocating that the entire world should speak one language - English?
How is typing an Arabic or Cyrillic domain disadvantageous to those that read and write Arabic or Cyrillic? Especially when the resulting site is very likely to contain content in that same language.
Your argument seems very self-centered, and quite exaggeratedly so: you'd prefer disadvantaging non-English speakers when accessing content you wouldn't ever consume, simply because you are more comfortable with Latin characters yourself.
Oh, not this again. I am not against other languages, people, races, or whatever.
It just makes A LOT of logical sense to use one goddamn language online.
It's not the offline world, it's been created from scratch, and English is already used in most (all?) programming languages, as well as most of the websites people actually use (although they do use region/country level translation).
Why screw that up?
It's a bit like if the US let Texas and California use Spanish as the official language, and the other states used English.
I don't want to seem condescending or sound like a jerk, but actually, yes I would.
That's because up until 10 years ago, I didn't speak English and it severely limited what I could do, both online and offline.
Actually I was of the impression that new gTLDs wouldn't be accepted unless they were generic enough and available to the public. (so no buying ".google")
I have brokered .com domains for many startups over the past few years, and I can say almost every time the domain was fairly priced and a deal was reached without too much negotiating or time wasted.
I really think a lot of startups shoot themselves in the foot by just saying "everything in .com is taken." Well maybe, but that doesn't mean you can't pay $2-5k and actually secure your domain.
What I am saying is shelling out a few grand now for the appropriate .com will save you loads of time and headaches than if you try to brand on non dot-com and eventually realize you can't live without it.
Apparently they raised $100M[2] back in 2012.
They have since agreed to distribute these domains through 19 registrars[3] (eNom, Name.com etc)...
Looking at their ICANN PIC submission[4] they have registered no fewer than 200-250 LLCs
[0] : https://gtldresult.icann.org/application-result/applications...
[1] : http://icannwiki.com/index.php/Donuts
[2] : http://money.cnn.com/2012/06/05/technology/donuts-domains-fu...
[3] : http://www.donuts.co/news/donuts-adds-another-seven-generic-...
[4] : https://gtldresult.icann.org/application-result/applications...