The whole environment of the newer gTLDs just feels… gross. I rarely find a reputable business that is using anything but .com or .co.XX as the primary domain.
Putting on my regular-person hat: When I see a billboard or print ad with e.g. `example.travel`, I read that as a social media handle and not a website address like `example.com` would convey. In public perception, dot com means websites. Always has.
(Tangentially, the `.sucks` TLD in particular should never have been allowed. How many brands out there have to maintain a perfunctory registration there just to prevent somebody else from doing so?)
>(Tangentially, the `.sucks` TLD in particular should never have been allowed. How many brands out there have to maintain a perfunctory registration there just to prevent somebody else from doing so?)
The entire reason for allowing that TLD is a presumption that brands are not entitled to prevent the registration of domains which exists specifically to criticize them.
> When I see a billboard or print ad with e.g. `example.travel`, I read that as a social media handle and not a website address like `example.com` would convey.
This is where I think the new gTLDs registries could do better. Using your domain as a handle on Bluesky is a perfect example of something they could push for to grow the industry, but they seem to think the status quo with a sprinkle of price discrimination is the winning formula.
Most of the new gTLDs work great as domain verified social media handles, but no one is going to use them for that if all the good keywords are classified as premium with $100+ annual renewal fees. However, if you make them too cheap and they get popularized, domain investors will register everything good and try to flip them.
I think first year premium pricing strikes a good balance that doesn't limit novel, non revenue generating use cases too much. Charging $100-200 for the first year causes a very large increase in the amount of capital domain flippers need to invest to acquire a large portfolio of good names.
If Bluesky catches on I think we could hit a point where non-technical people are suddenly shocked when the see someone "using their social media handle for a website." Getting back to having people understand there's more than just Facebook and Twitter would be a step in the right direction IMO, so it would be nice to see Bluesky continue to gain popularity.
I never deal with co.xx to be honest. Most websites I visit are on ccTLDs. Whenever I see a .com link to any local business, I start out by assuming it's a scam website.
That said, .app has found plenty of adoption. Tech companies absolutely love .io and .ai is now also gaining popularity. The good American URLs have all been bought years ago so people flock to ccTLDs and gTLDs for new products and businesses. Even .engineering has a few interesting businesses on it these days.
As for .sucks, it's clearly a cash grab, but banning it hardly solves a problem. ycombinatorsucks.com is a lot cheaper than ycombinator.sucks, and if ycombinator pre-emptively buys ycombinatorsucks.com, you could just buy ycombinatorisshit.com or ycombinatorisadoodoohead.com.
.co.xx is common in Britain (.co.uk), Japan (.co.jp), New Zealand (.co.nz) and probably others. It's perfectly legitimate for a site linked to those countries.
NZ didn't allow registration of raw .nz domains until 2014 so anything registered before that was a .co.nz or similar. It's still more common than .nz due to inertia / muscle memory I guess. I get weird looks when I give people my (name).nz email address - usually people ask if I meant .co.nZ
BR went the other way. Registration of raw .br domains used to be allowed for universities, but AFAIK other than grandfathered registrations it's no longer allowed (new registrations have to use .edu.br).
My suspicion is that it was due to abuse; a long time ago, I noticed some university had registered IIRC .co.br (our correct equivalent to the .com gTLD is .com.br; this is a notable exception to the assertion above that "I rarely find a reputable business that is using anything but .com or .co.XX as the primary domain", since plenty of reputable businesses use .com.br as their primary domain, not .co.br which doesn't exist).
.de domains require a German postal address, so I would actually trust them more than the .ru equivalent. Plenty of other ccTLDs have even stricter nationality requirements for registration.
I’m disappointed at the arbitrary decision-making that lets the registrars deem certain domains to automatically be “premium” and mark them up appropriately. It feels like that’s an additional layer of extortion on top (doubly so when the premium price carries into the full renewal price, too).
So, to be clear, the following tend to be seen as problems by their interested parties:
* withholding tons of domains to watch them go up in value means people can't get those domains (scammers, regular people)
* registries do not make a high price when they sell high-value domains (registries)
* there's only so many words / groups of words that are easily typeable (everyone)
* reducing scarcity reduces the value of digital real estate (domain squatters / traders)
Which of these issues / values / interested parties are more important to help than others, and what, if anything, should change?
I, personally, tend to be in favor of reducing the impact of scalpers by increasing total available volume. As a consequence, I'm also willing to accept some terms for the registries that they get to set higher prices for the most premium of their domains to:
* sweeten the pot for both registries and registrars to even support all these new domains
* reduce a squatter / trader / speculator / scalper's ability to sit on vast tracts of digital land.
I think first year premium pricing makes a lot of sense. I'm not sure what the average time to sell is for a domain investor, but say it's 10 years for an easy example.
If you go from a standard registration price of $12 / year to a first year premium of $132, you double the 10 year carrying cost of a domain. That, naively, means domain investors can only speculate on half as many domains.
By having a first year premium price and then dropping domains back into the 'standard' tier, you also leave registrants with a semblance of price protections via section 2.10c of the registry agreement. As-is, premium domains have zero guarantees when it comes to premium renewal pricing.
There's a lot of room between squeezing domain investors and asking registrants to pay $100-1000+ per year for premium domains.
It's the registries not the registrars that classify some domains as premium. I think they're a risky product because you don't even get the limited price protections provided by section 2.10c of the registry agreement, but there seems to be a market for them [1].
Putting on my regular-person hat: When I see a billboard or print ad with e.g. `example.travel`, I read that as a social media handle and not a website address like `example.com` would convey. In public perception, dot com means websites. Always has.
(Tangentially, the `.sucks` TLD in particular should never have been allowed. How many brands out there have to maintain a perfunctory registration there just to prevent somebody else from doing so?)