Google owns TLDs: .web .meme and .lol (opens in new tab)

Right. And .lol is open for business. I was registering one yesterday.

Yes, ICANN planned to sell the Public Interest Registry, responsible for .org, to a private equity group.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethos_Capital

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fadi_Chehad%C3%A9

Note that the co-founder of Ethos was the former CEO of ICANN. The PIR sale was stopped but it looks like Ethos still ended up with the company actually contracted to operate the .org registry and the .org DNS provider. That whole sequence was and is outrageous.

Google will have paid ICANN $500k just to read the application for these TLD's ($185k * 3) and has paid them an additional $500k since then just to maintain them.

I'm not wholly convinced that ICANN is operating solely out of a sense of generosity. It sounds to me more like "pay me a lot of money and I will look after you" (i.e. a protection racket). I suspect ICANN is actually motivated to look after google as a high-paying customer and registrar, rather than be what they should be, which is acting independent, treating everyone the same, and not just using everything as an opportunity to cash-grab.

Please don't take HN threads on generic flamewar tangents. The last thing we need is to repeat that one over again.

That's not to say there can't be substantive discussion about Web3 but it would need to be seeded with interesting new information, not a throwaway one-liner.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Oh god, I don't need my domain to be another form of currency.

If Web3 ever becomes a thing I look forward to seeing the chaos that ensues when the inevitable happens, and a major domain name gets stolen with absolutely zero dispute resolution and where the attackers can also hijack all incoming traffic to steal credentials or install malware. Then it will be mathematically impossible to recover without paying whatever ransom the attackers like for the return (if the attackers even decide they want to sell!).

DNS Poisoning was bad enough, this would be a total wipeout.

Don't know if this is a joke. "Web3" makes problems like this even more complicated because domain name resolution needs a single central point of trust.

Yes! We could manage internet addressing on the blockchain instead!

DNS is quite distributed already but it’s far from “democratic”. Instead of domain squatting and hoarding through through multiple private companies, we could domain squat through… multiple _other_ private companies. That’s Real Democracy™.

We could even speculate with domain names and tlds and maybe steal them from each other in completely new and exciting ways.

Maybe we could make it so only the early adopters can afford these tlds or domain names for a reasonable price and then everyone else could prop up its price until a rug pull happens.

What if we we make this system consume an insane amount of energy? Our current solution is probably inefficient in certain ways, but we can always go further!

There’s lots of possibilities! #web3FixesThis

Web3 has been used to mean too many things (NFTs ETH crypto etc). Blockchains offer the ability to fix centralized choke points on the Internet, and some prefer Dweb (decentralized web) as a term to describe this.

These companies don't really "own" the names. They're paying $180k/yr for the privilege of ICANN delegating the responsibility of managing that gTLD to them. But this privilege isn't any kind of legal right; the company doesn't have a deed to or easement on that gTLD that would hold up in court. ICANN has just agreed, as their side of the contract, to 1. accept that company's zone-registration modifications vis-a-vis that gTLD; and 2. to not accept any other third-party entity's zone-registration modifications vis-a-vis the gTLD. But if ICANN don't like what's going on, they always have the right to just cancel the relationship (probably with a pro-rated refund for the rest of the contract period, but still) and then do what they like with the gTLD from there.

The thing I'd compare it most closely to, is an exclusive licensing of IP rights from a copyright-holder to another entity, where those rights include a sub-licensing right. While that contract pertains, the entity who licensed the rights can basically act as if they owned those rights; but the actual legal right-holder can always just revoke the licensing agreement — in the process, either "absorbing" the transitive license grants to themselves, anuling those transitive licenses, or finding a new contract-holder and transferring the "stewardship" of those transitive licenses to them.

Because gTLDs were sold to the highest bidder; there’s no requirement for them to be sold for the good of humanity. For-profit companies like Verisign own .com and donuts owns a few hundred https://donuts.domains/what-we-do/top-level-domain-portfolio...

It may seem like a pedantic point, but these top-level domains are not owned. They currently have registry operation rights which does not confer permanent ownership.

(Living in Europe)

I think most countries have already have their own TLD under their control anyway (or under an organisation that they control), and I find a lot of companies for the services I use already using a domain under the country level TLD. In addition, since Europe was mentioned, the .eu TLD is already run by a non-profit appointed by the EU commission.

I'm not really sure what doing a hard fork of DNS would achieve? I wouldn't want the rest of the internet being cut off from me. It would also be incredibly confusing which DNS system is being referred to when giving/receiving a URL.

That looks awful as a concept. I hope it doesn’t get any traction.

Before Reddit settled on the name "reddit", snew was one of their name ideas..as in "what'snew"...another was 360scope

I use it all the time. It's nothing you can see "in use" since it's just a shortcut for opening a new Google Spreadsheet, like an alias in your address bar.

If you were using .dev locally before then you almost certainly didn’t have TLS, since it’s usually local testing.

By making TLS mandatory you not only break local dev environments (that use that TLD which maybe have a legitimate domain outside of your network) you also make it so that it’s not even possible to run locally unless you do a lot of CA trickery to get a legit looking TLS cert.

My personal opinion was that this was a good move, as it forced developers to stop using .dev as soon as it was being used on the global internet- which avoided a lot of really awkward and annoying dual-home misconfigurations.

A lot of people had local domains (only entered in their hosts file or the router) on the dev TLD. Adding that domain to the hsts preload list not only broke their current setup, but also made it hard to bring it back to live - if you don't own the domain, the only option is to set up your own CA, with all included drawbacks.

And opennic.org

Well, there is the Wikipedia article [1] but even there most of what it mentions could be considered hearsay, so I'll go with a couple others:

- 4chan's /pol/ board straight up doesn't show up. It's easy to directly go to a board by writing "4chan" and the correspondent letters, /pol/ is censored from the results though, this is most probably political in nature since even /b/ shows up.

- The "substitute" for the r/The_Donald subreddit at communities.win is similarly unreachable.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_Google

Sadly you might be right, depending on where you live. In the US free speech is still supposed to be free, and Google blocks a subset of results it deems undesirable.

But they could be owned by a Google account if bought through the Google registrar.

What happens when that Google account gets locked or banned?