Mixed views on new DNS top level domains(utcc.utoronto.ca)
utcc.utoronto.ca
Mixed views on new DNS top level domains
https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/tech/NewTLDsMyMixedViews
41 comments
Was it {firstname}{lastname}.gtld or only one of those?
It was just my last name. So in a way surprising it wasn't classified as premium to begin with. But the fact such a concept exists at all, and the goalposts can move at any time, is the troubling part.
I was looking at gTLDs when getting my own domain. I think I got lucky with the timing because all the desirable ones had already classified the name I wanted as being premium. Around the same price you're saying your renewal would have been. I ended up going with firstnamelastname.net.
I don't thing it's a good idea for anyone to use a gTLD for anything serious. Even without the prices being uncapped, there's no guarantee that a gTLD will stick around. Would be crappy to lose a domain because the company who owns the gTLD went out of business or just didn't want to deal with handling domains anymore.
I don't thing it's a good idea for anyone to use a gTLD for anything serious. Even without the prices being uncapped, there's no guarantee that a gTLD will stick around. Would be crappy to lose a domain because the company who owns the gTLD went out of business or just didn't want to deal with handling domains anymore.
> Even without the prices being uncapped, there's no guarantee that a gTLD will stick around.
Actually, there is a guarantee that a gTLD will stick around. ICANN correctly determined that this would be ruinous to the health of the Internet as a whole if entire TLD's worth of domains could simply disappear, hence they set up procedures to guard against it, including a required daily data escrow deposit from all TLD operators that can be used to spin up the TLD by another registry operator if the worst catastrophe were to happen (which, it should be pointed out, has never happened). For more info see:
https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/ebero-2013-04-02-en https://newgtlds.icann.org/en/applicants/data-escrow
The only TLDs that have ever ceased operation entirely, like .xperia in the linked articles, are closed brand TLDs that were never used for anything, were never available for external registration, and that the company in question (Sony here) simply got tired of paying the annual fees on given their lack of use of it. These TLD discontinuations don't threaten anything.
Actually, there is a guarantee that a gTLD will stick around. ICANN correctly determined that this would be ruinous to the health of the Internet as a whole if entire TLD's worth of domains could simply disappear, hence they set up procedures to guard against it, including a required daily data escrow deposit from all TLD operators that can be used to spin up the TLD by another registry operator if the worst catastrophe were to happen (which, it should be pointed out, has never happened). For more info see:
https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/ebero-2013-04-02-en https://newgtlds.icann.org/en/applicants/data-escrow
The only TLDs that have ever ceased operation entirely, like .xperia in the linked articles, are closed brand TLDs that were never used for anything, were never available for external registration, and that the company in question (Sony here) simply got tired of paying the annual fees on given their lack of use of it. These TLD discontinuations don't threaten anything.
That's good to know! Still worried about the prices getting out of control if someone thinks you have a valuable name, but at least it's not too easy to nuke an entire TLD.
Oh good, it will remain available at the low, low price of half a million per year. That soothes my worries entirely.
You're painting a very broad brush with that one extreme outlier. Most registries don't operate like that; stay away from the few that do.
Isn't the problem that there's nothing preventing all of the registries of new gTLDs from suddenly starting to operate like that tomorrow?
How does one know if they are picking a registry that doesn't operate like that?
I have a benign gTLD that went from $10 -> $30 next year... I shudder to think what it will be in 5.
EDIT: Also I just looked, and most are doing a thing were the y will let you get the first year for $12 or so, and then every year after is $25+.
I have a benign gTLD that went from $10 -> $30 next year... I shudder to think what it will be in 5.
EDIT: Also I just looked, and most are doing a thing were the y will let you get the first year for $12 or so, and then every year after is $25+.
I'm still waiting on them to say which TLD this was. The big operators don't randomly make drastic price changes like that. This bizarre incident is getting outsized attention that I don't think it merits. Frankly, a premium price of hundreds of thousands per year sounds like an out-and-out mistake somewhere; no one is paying that, certainly not on a random first name on a random nTLD. That's simply not a successful business strategy; you'd lose all your registrations by doing it.
Which TLD went from $10 to $30/yr? There's a lot of missing info in these comments!
On the other hand, first year discounting is (as you're seeing) quite common. So just treat the 2nd year price as the actual price for the purpose of deciding whether you're willing to pay it. The key difference here is that you know the price schedule up front.
Which TLD went from $10 to $30/yr? There's a lot of missing info in these comments!
On the other hand, first year discounting is (as you're seeing) quite common. So just treat the 2nd year price as the actual price for the purpose of deciding whether you're willing to pay it. The key difference here is that you know the price schedule up front.
Actually that’s not true. In 2017 .wed (with real customers) gTLD ceased operation and was taken over by ICANN under the EBERO program. http://domainincite.com/22372-as-wed-goes-ebero-did-the-firs...
Ah interesting, I'd forgotten about that. A grand total of 40 domains were transferred through the EBERO process (note: they didn't experience interruption).
I do like this quote from the article:
> In this case, ICANN said that Atgron had failed to provide Whois services as required by contract. The threshold for Whois triggering EBERO is 24 hours downtime over a week.
> However, the situation looks to me a lot more like a business failure than a technical failure.
> Multiple sources with knowledge of the transition tell me that the Whois was turned off deliberately, purely to provide a triggering event for the EBERO failover system, after Atgron’s back-end contract with CoCCA expired.
> The logic was that turning off Whois would be far less disruptive for registrants and internet users than losing DNS resolution, DNSSEC, data escrow or EPP.
It sounds like they creatively used EBERO as the most expedient method to be able to cease hosting .wed, which they had been unprofitable to them owing to the mere 40 total registrations that they had. And they did so in a way that would minimally disrupt their users.
Overall, seeing that EBERO was successfully used strengthens my confidence in the overall safety of new gTLDs. There's way too many of them out there, and they're way too important now as a whole, for anyone to simply just let them vanish out from underneath their users.
I do like this quote from the article:
> In this case, ICANN said that Atgron had failed to provide Whois services as required by contract. The threshold for Whois triggering EBERO is 24 hours downtime over a week.
> However, the situation looks to me a lot more like a business failure than a technical failure.
> Multiple sources with knowledge of the transition tell me that the Whois was turned off deliberately, purely to provide a triggering event for the EBERO failover system, after Atgron’s back-end contract with CoCCA expired.
> The logic was that turning off Whois would be far less disruptive for registrants and internet users than losing DNS resolution, DNSSEC, data escrow or EPP.
It sounds like they creatively used EBERO as the most expedient method to be able to cease hosting .wed, which they had been unprofitable to them owing to the mere 40 total registrations that they had. And they did so in a way that would minimally disrupt their users.
Overall, seeing that EBERO was successfully used strengthens my confidence in the overall safety of new gTLDs. There's way too many of them out there, and they're way too important now as a whole, for anyone to simply just let them vanish out from underneath their users.
.coms are cheaper now anyways with cloudflare. 8 years pre-purchased for $60.
> That is probably just as well, because a year later, it had been reclassified as a "premium" name. The renewal fee was over $400,000.
At that price it may be cheaper to simply create your own TLD.
At that price it may be cheaper to simply create your own TLD.
Indeed; registration fees are about $100k, and infrastructure costs a similar amount.
Specifically this link shows $185,000 and $6,250 per calendar quarter: https://newgtlds.icann.org/en/applicants/global-support/faqs...
For infrastructure, I can imagine this being a case a single colocated server rack would work great, especially if you don't expect your TLD to be super popular among other people (SaaS likely wouldn't be suitable due to the high industry bandwidth costs).
For infrastructure, I can imagine this being a case a single colocated server rack would work great, especially if you don't expect your TLD to be super popular among other people (SaaS likely wouldn't be suitable due to the high industry bandwidth costs).
DNS doesn't use a lot of bandwidth, and has built-in caching.
The bandwidth usage is low unless you're DDoSed.
It may be prudent to have some of your own distributed servers act as hidden masters, and then use a DNS anycast service for the publicly listed servers.
It may be prudent to have some of your own distributed servers act as hidden masters, and then use a DNS anycast service for the publicly listed servers.
What was the TLD with the huge price hike?
Yikes. That’s very lousy behaviour of them.
Thanks for the warning.
Thanks for the warning.
Which TLD was it? I’ve been trying to find an example of a domain being reclassified as premium while registered for almost two years. Are you sure you didn’t let it expire?
That violates the registry agreement AFAIK. They’re not allowed to arbitrarily change the price for a registered domain. Can you give more detail?
That violates the registry agreement AFAIK. They’re not allowed to arbitrarily change the price for a registered domain. Can you give more detail?
My first thought, while I don't know the exact rights of the parties involved, they should have filed a complaint with ICANN regardless.
Which TLD is that? Because I never want to use that domain and I'm thinking about hacking my DNS to fake-NXDOMAIN it entirely.
My view, as someone who did a lot of work around it:
Purely a money grab by everyone involved. In what I'd consider a more normal fashion, ICANN could have slowly picked and rolled out sensible new TLDs to operators interested.
Instead, it was a free for all where you had to pay an insane fee to ICANN mafia to even apply, and get in bidding wars if multiple applications existed.
If you won, you had to go find and pay your own registry, too. So, you had registries preemptively spamming local businesses convincing them to buy a tld and use that registry.
Many thought they were gonna make a fortune. The only one who made a fortune was ICANN and to some extent, registries. That's probably why owners keep trying to jack up prices, they still want their windfall.
Don't even get me started on how terrible ICANN is organized. The whole digital archery fiasco should be enough for nobody to ever put any faith in them. Anyone with a quarter of brain function would realize how terrible that idea is.
Purely a money grab by everyone involved. In what I'd consider a more normal fashion, ICANN could have slowly picked and rolled out sensible new TLDs to operators interested.
Instead, it was a free for all where you had to pay an insane fee to ICANN mafia to even apply, and get in bidding wars if multiple applications existed.
If you won, you had to go find and pay your own registry, too. So, you had registries preemptively spamming local businesses convincing them to buy a tld and use that registry.
Many thought they were gonna make a fortune. The only one who made a fortune was ICANN and to some extent, registries. That's probably why owners keep trying to jack up prices, they still want their windfall.
Don't even get me started on how terrible ICANN is organized. The whole digital archery fiasco should be enough for nobody to ever put any faith in them. Anyone with a quarter of brain function would realize how terrible that idea is.
The .sucks TLD is one that comes to mind.
TLDs are like neighborhoods or ZIP codes, you will be judged for being in a bad one even if you are a good person. That's why I suggest consulting this site before you register anything to make sure you don't accidentally get a TLD that is used mostly for abuse, which many of the newer ones are.
https://www.spamhaus.org/statistics/tlds/
https://www.spamhaus.org/statistics/tlds/
I do have a complaint about relatively new TLDs. Did you know .forum domains are $500 to $2000 per year?
We live in a world where everybody is complaining about censorship and nazis, but one of the best new TLDs for an independent forum is prices out 99% of the market!
Of course, there are plenty of TLDs in the $5-$20 range, which are great, but this will cause cheap TLDs to become crowded and .forum will be a ghost town.
Forums generally don't make money. Any forum making money, probably isn't making enough to budget $500 extra in another domain. Any company that would say "wow, $2000/year is acceptable" would already have something like {forum,community}.acme.com.
We live in a world where everybody is complaining about censorship and nazis, but one of the best new TLDs for an independent forum is prices out 99% of the market!
Of course, there are plenty of TLDs in the $5-$20 range, which are great, but this will cause cheap TLDs to become crowded and .forum will be a ghost town.
Forums generally don't make money. Any forum making money, probably isn't making enough to budget $500 extra in another domain. Any company that would say "wow, $2000/year is acceptable" would already have something like {forum,community}.acme.com.
Is it the best TLD for in independent forum? It could be completely irrational on my part but I'd be hesitant to click a search result that would bring me to a .forum domain.
Well, to be fair, censorship and fascism are worse things than extortionate domain name prices. Though both are bad.
While true, a free and open web is generally desirable, and we'd like to keep the barriers of entry for federation to a minimum. If someone was ready to start mycool.forum, but doesn't have $500/yr to start a website, they must now wade through a garbage pile of "minimum $2,000 bid" squatted domains, weird TLDs that could declare your domain premium and charge $400,000/yr at any time, maybe even if the only thing "premium" about the name is that your website got popular, or buy a domain like themycoolforum50.com.
This might be only one managable issue, but these things add up, and the more they add up, the more facebook becomes the only website people use.
This might be only one managable issue, but these things add up, and the more they add up, the more facebook becomes the only website people use.
Agreed, that's why I never use or recommend any else use any of the domains run by private operators, just asking for troubles like the above. The attempted sale of org was scary.
Which is all very unfortunate because some of those TLDs are quite nice, like .forum. What a mess we've gotten ourselves into.
Should have been kept as a public service, but no putting the genie back in the bottle now. Only way out of this mess is a distributed system, but I can't imagine what that would like without a massive proliferation of competing services.
Which is all very unfortunate because some of those TLDs are quite nice, like .forum. What a mess we've gotten ourselves into.
Should have been kept as a public service, but no putting the genie back in the bottle now. Only way out of this mess is a distributed system, but I can't imagine what that would like without a massive proliferation of competing services.
I don't like the fact that the prices can wildly differ between different TLDs.
I think it was nice that it was easy to recognise website.com was a website too, whereas website.wtf is less easy to identify, but then now there are more available to makes it easier to get a shorter, better name and can make the pricing more competitive, hopefully driving it lower for everyone.
I think it was nice that it was easy to recognise website.com was a website too, whereas website.wtf is less easy to identify, but then now there are more available to makes it easier to get a shorter, better name and can make the pricing more competitive, hopefully driving it lower for everyone.
There is barely any viewpoint argued in the article. So vanity tlds may be bad, why??
The worse thing with generic tld is that before tld were attributed on a kind of merit or usefulness (countries, com, org), but now it is only based on money considerations.
At the beginning internet was based on a kind of democracy or gentlemen's agreements. Now, the one that has the most cash to spend, like Google or Apple or Amazon or some scammer, ça. Grave what you want. Like if it was their internet.
The example of the ".dev" is good. Google can easily unilaterally decide to take over a domain that was used largely and internationally by individuals. And they are allowed to do that because they can afford it, but you, the individual, you are considered like horse shit in this system. And so you are not allowed to complain.
At the beginning internet was based on a kind of democracy or gentlemen's agreements. Now, the one that has the most cash to spend, like Google or Apple or Amazon or some scammer, ça. Grave what you want. Like if it was their internet.
The example of the ".dev" is good. Google can easily unilaterally decide to take over a domain that was used largely and internationally by individuals. And they are allowed to do that because they can afford it, but you, the individual, you are considered like horse shit in this system. And so you are not allowed to complain.
is there a list of the new ones?
There's a wikipedia entry--can't speak for its accuracy[0]. There's likely more official/accurate lists elsewhere that shouldn't be too hard to find if needed.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_dom...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_dom...
This is the list of all currently existing TLDs:
https://data.iana.org/TLD/tlds-alpha-by-domain.txt
Note that IDN TLDs are presented in punycode in that list (the XN-- ones), so you'd want to convert them to Unicode to see what they actually look like (e.g. many are Chinese characters).
Note that IDN TLDs are presented in punycode in that list (the XN-- ones), so you'd want to convert them to Unicode to see what they actually look like (e.g. many are Chinese characters).
The entire canned TLD system (and ICANN't) is a scam. TLDs should be abolished (except for the ones that are still enforced, like edu, mil, and gov), and you should be able to register anything.anythingelse.
Trademark violations would be handled as they are today.
The current mess is an embarrassment.
Trademark violations would be handled as they are today.
The current mess is an embarrassment.
That is probably just as well, because a year later, it had been reclassified as a "premium" name. The renewal fee was over $400,000.
The fact that the owners of gTLDs can set pricing arbitrarily is the biggest problem in all this. A given domain name usually has no intrinsic value. What gives it value is the effort someone puts into marketing it.
With the new gTLDs, the domain operators are free to offer useful names that aren't trademarks, but are unavailable as .com or similar. Then should anyone build a successful business on that name, they are free to seek arbitrarily high rents.
There is no sense in which you can buy a domain name outright. Nor do the new gTLDs have any form of rent control. That is a fundamental problem with the system as it stands.