I'm the lead engineer of the Google Registry, which runs .google as well as the other dozens of TLDs that we run. Feel free to ask any questions. Our site is https://www.registry.google/ and our code is released as Free/Open Source Software at https://nomulus.foo (another one of our TLDs).
> I'm the lead engineer of the Google Registry ... Feel free to ask any questions
Oooh, oooh. I got a bunch. I have no idea if you can answer any of them though.
- Why aren't you using the .google tld more? Only place I ever saw it is registry., domains. and blog..
- I was going to ask why com.google doesn't resolve, but I see you fixed that since I last checked! How about google.google now? Why aren't you guys having more fun with this? :)
- Why is Google Domains still not available in 98% of the world's countries?
- Is owning .app and .foo part of some kind of evil master plan or are you guys just buying TLDs for fun? Because they're two fantastic TLDs and making both of them available for purchase would certainly be nice.
- ... and, uh, can you guys buy .cdn and make it available for purchase, too?
Domain names are sticky. It tends not to be worth it to change the domain name for sites that have already existed for a long time. For new sites, when you're choosing a new domain name anyway, it's easier to make it be on a new TLD.
com.google was used for an April Fools joke in 2015. We redirected it to the main homepage after that ended because it was widely linked from news articles and social media, and we didn't want to create a bunch of dead links. I'd love to have more fun with this stuff, and believe me, on the registry team we've had all sorts of fun ideas for sites like google.google and others.
There's no evil master plan; we're still trying to figure out the gTLD business just like all the other registry operators. Releasing them as generic strings is certainly the easiest thing that could be done, but maybe there's something cooler?
Who knows when the next round of gTLD expansion will occur. It'll probably be many years. Until then, no new gTLDs can be created. .cdn is one of the ones that, in hindsight, at least one person probably should've thought of to apply for back in 2012. And I'm sure someone will take it in the next round.
I don't think any of his reservations have to do with the technical aspects so much as ones which you'd likely be biased [1] against; and there's no point privileging a pro-corporate counterargument by bring them up here.
We could do that really easily, but what would the benefit be? Google Search already has a canonical domain name, google.com. Adding a less convenient redirect doesn't benefit anything, but would require us to host that site indefinitely, as once released and linked to, we would never take it down lest we'd break existing links.
It's not the initial rollout that's problematic, it's committing ourselves to indefinitely maintaining it for value that is questionable at best.
Companies shouldn't have ownership of TLDs, so why did you register so many TLDs that have nothing to do with Google, and which you don't allow to be used freely? Profits?
This is disgusting. The fact that corporations can control TLDs in the first place is disgusting, and I'd by far prefer if every TLD would have to be controlled by cooperatives (like denic) or other kinds of nonprofits, completely independent of everything else.
Especially in the current situation, where Google is cybersquatting on entire TLDs, just because they can. And while domains are frequently removed for squatting, nothing’s done with TLDs. Open the TLD for everyone, and use it, or get rid of it. But the current situation is disgusting. (I fundamentally disagree with companies controlling any kind of infrastructure)
That's the way it's been since the earliest days of the World Wide Web. You can read the history of .com here https://icannwiki.org/.com , but the TL;DR is that it was run by a private company as early as 1991, then acquired by Network Solutions in 1993, which was acquired by Verisign in 2000 who still run it to this day. .net has a similar history. I don't see any a priori reason why profit-driven companies should be excluded, and as you point out, there are plenty of non-profit registry operators to choose from (including Public Interest Registry, the non-profit that runs .org), if you care strongly about that.
denic is a ccTLD operator, whereas what we're discussing here are all gTLDs.
My issue is that there’s corporations squatting on TLDs, which no normal person can afford.
Not only does this increase the advantages an established corporation can have over individuals or startups, it also ends up with Google literally domainsquatting entire TLDs just because they can.
And there’s no registrar above them that could simply revoke their domains for squatting.
And de is as much a ccTLD as .io – it’s not really the actual case anymore. DE is one of the largest domains overall, even counting gTLDs.
And we could simply solve this – use the power of democracy (aka, governments) to force TLD ownership to be entirely non-profit.
I don’t want to see large corporations buy massive amounts of TLDs (as google has done) and then sit on them. In addition to the antitrust issues that can appear with this.
How should a startup ever be able to compete in a reasonable timeframe with Google if we allow these corporations to grow ever further, and gain ever more power?
I can't really comment on the rest of it, for obvious reasons, but this part is not accurate:
> And de is as much a ccTLD as .io – it’s not really the actual case anymore.
.de is clearly still the ccTLD for Germany. It's not at all like the situation of .io, which is run by a British company as, effectively, a two-letter generic TLD that has nothing to do with the actual Indian Ocean territories. .de clearly has a lot to do with Germany, including being widely used there (but not anywhere else), and also being run by denic, a German company headquartered in Frankfurt. I was just in Frankfurt last week talking with a bunch of denic people, actually. They absolutely do consider it a country code TLD, proudly and unapologetically.
kuschku's comment makes it sound like he was unaware of what happened in 2012, and he is fundamentally misunderstanding the current state of gTLDs, so I was informing him.
Furthermore, the ship has sailed on the debate of whether these expanded TLDs are a good thing, so it's not a productive discussion. We might as well talk about whether commerce should be banned on the internet - that was a raging debate in the early/mid 90s, and that debate is over.
No, we couldn't. That would break the Internet in a large variety of horrible ways. You can't remove entire TLDs once delegated and widely linked to. That's closing the barn door after the horse has escaped.
TLDs are qualitatively quite different than second-level domain names.
Do you have a link to the .eu actions you're referring to?
And the simplest answer is contracts. Every operator of a new gTLD has paid ICANN a substantial amount of money, has a contract to operate the TLD, and thus has certain legal rights. The TLDs cannot be taken away without good cause. There is no language in the contracts requiring a certain number of domains be launched by a certain date, so that cannot be justification for removing the operation grant. And of course contracts cannot be unilaterally changed.
I am not a lawyer, this is my personal opinion and not my employer's, all other disclaimers, please consult your own lawyer or Wikipedia if you have questions about contract law, etc.
When people are arguing whether or not the ramifications would be significant, you can't point to ink and call it blood.
Laws can be overturned, the legality of contracts overruled, recompenses rewarded. There's nothing "irrevocable" here, aside from the dangerous precedents people try and establish and sit on ("it's always been this way!!1") hoping to "run out the clock" and get away with moves that would never have flown in a later world.
But EURid also de-registers almost all other domain squatters, as they actually wrote that into the contract.
> And the simplest answer is contracts.
Contracts are simply something enforced by law. Law can be changed. If not, law is simply something enforced by society and constitutions, constitutions can be changed.
The German constitution, for example, says that the right to own property only exists as long as that property is used for public good. In any other case, it can be seized.
Seizing the TLDs, or requiring DNS servers in your country to redirect the TLDs to other operators, would be an option.
And, as drastic as this sounds, it’s preferable over the current situation. Corporate squatting is inacceptable.
Yes, that case is an example of a qualitative difference between TLDs and SLDs. .eu, as a ccTLD for the European Union, has a TLD-wide policy that all registrants must be based in the European Economic Area. Those 10K domain names were all registered by a Chinese woman who used a fake address in London to register the domain names. So they are being fought over in court not because of "squatting", but because she violated the registry policy.
Note that it is up to the registry operator to set said policy (which ICANN must approve). So that mechanism does not even exist to take away a TLD.
Good luck in getting international law passed to take away TLDs from corporations. I just don't see it happening.
> Seizing the TLDs, or requiring DNS servers in your country to redirect the TLDs to other operators, would be an option.
This would break the Internet. Domain names have to work the same everywhere. You cannot have domain names pointing to different DNS zones entirely depending on where you access them from.
> This would break the Internet. Domain names have to work the same everywhere. You cannot have domain names pointing to different DNS zones entirely depending on where you access them from.
Domain names point to different DNS zones already today, everywhere.
First of all, anycast DNS is a common example.
Second, there’s massive government censorship in many countries, including the UK, and there’s also some US ISPs that modify any and all DNS queries for some domains (noticeable by the fact that DNSSEC-enabled domains are stripped of the signature, and return a false A record there).
> Good luck in getting international law passed to take away TLDs from corporations. I just don't see it happening.
Doesn’t have to be international
> This would break the Internet.
So? Giving corporations any control over the Internet has turnt out to be the far more breaking move already.
Google, for example, has recently massively destroyed support for IDN domains in Google Chrome – and no one bat an eye, despite it leading to billions in costs for many people and companies, some of which even had used an IDN domain in their trademark, and were now unable to use it.
> That would break the Internet in a large variety of horrible ways
Scare talk aside, no, it wouldn't. In most cases people would be unaffected; at worst people've dealt with broken links before and will continue to do so. It would only truly "break" anything for early adopters who dove in without thinking, and knew the risks of doing so.
Ask your bosses (the ones you cite here [1] as being the ones calling the actual shots) why everything isn't already .google etc. :)
The 2012 round of gTLDs aren't provisional and they aren't used by "early adopters". They are part of the Internet now. There are millions of sites using them now, and any business owner creating a new site on, e.g., .design, is simply buying a domain name through a registrar; they are not "diving in without thinking" or being "early adopters" or "taking risks".
There were many years of discussion prior to releasing the latest gTLDs. This is not a continually ongoing process; the discussion was completed, and the new gTLDs were released. That can't be gone back on, not without causing harm to millions of website owners and network operators. It's simply not ever going to happen, and trying to argue otherwise isn't a fruitful use of time. Though, by all means, your time is yours to do with what you will, and if you really want to start a movement to try to roll back all the new gTLDs, godspeed. It seems like tilting at windmills to me though.
I've already addressed why everything isn't on .google already -- domain names are sticky, and it takes a lot of work to change the domain name of an established product. It tends not to be worth it. For new webpages though, e.g. environment.google, you're starting to see it being used.
Correction: There are 27.4M domains on new gTLDs registered; full stats here: https://ntldstats.com/tld
The total economic cost of yanking all of those from the existing established sites would easily run into the billions of dollars. Those domain names are on business cards, on sides of vans, on buildings, on advertising, etc. Untold amounts of money have already been spent building up reputations for sites on these new gTLDs, much of which would be lost if the domain name were yanked. The economic damage would be massive. And of course all existing links in press, blogs, social media, etc., would all die. That's why it won't ever happen.
It's about keeping web users safe by preventing certain types of phishing attacks. Support isn't "yanked"; the affected domain names are simply rendered in punycode (which isn't nearly as bad as yanking said domain names from the Internet entirely). There are lots of very real security issues around IDNs.
For decades we've trained users to consider domains that look different as malware.
Several major domains that relied on IDN currently are having issues with exactly that.
Because they had the IDN even on their business card, and now users are calling their support because of malware.
We already gave one company control over a major part of internet infrastructure, they are destroying other businesses, and we want to allow their questionable management to control more of the internet?
Anyone can register a second level domain under .com or the other main TLDs.
This used to be the few main namespaces shared by everyone, at reasonable prices, and it went just fine.
ICANN made a de-facto distinction with the obscene pricing for top-level domains.
There's a new global namespace, but you can't afford to get into that one if you're not a big fish.
That seems to be what the landscape looks like nowadays.
