[logfromblammo]

At this point, this looks ever more akin to charging people to have their phone numbers listed in a phone book. If you don't know what a phone book is, it was the DNS-equivalent of the 1960s. You know those plastic-wrapped bricks of yellow paper that sometimes appear on your doorstep, that you just drop right into the recycling bin? Those things are actually phone books.

The phone book is rather simple. Your individual given name or your business dba name is the dictionary key, and the phone number is the dictionary value. Your dictionary entry is automatically included, unless you paid to be "unlisted". That would keep your phone service provider from printing your name-number pair in their phone books.

This approach is still viable. Every state has a database of corporate names and dba registrations. The secretary of state for Illinois, as an example, could make aaa-plumbing.corp.il.us resolve to the server address for "AAA Plumbing, Inc.", if that business chose to disclose it, or to a landing page otherwise. Likewise, zzz-towing.llc.il.us could resolve to the address for "ZZZ Towing, LLC".

The US Patent and Trademark Office could do the same. Let lego.028.tm.us (and lego.009.tm.us, lego.041.tm.us, etc.) resolve to LEGO Juris A/S Corp's servers, so you can see a site about plastic building blocks, and let lego.005.tm.us resolve to American Lego Group Inc's server, so you can see a site about soy protein supplements.

If you are Foobar LLC, you really shouldn't have to register "foobar.com" and "foobar.net" and "foobar.cc" and "foobar.co.uk" and "foobar.biz" and "foobar.info" and "foobar.sucks" and "foobar.pooky" and "foobar.booger". It isn't really elucidative, and does not help discoverability to have so many TLDs. The problem is that all the simple names have been mined out of the original TLDs, and there is no mechanism to resolve name collisions between Foobar LLC out of the US and Foobar GmbH in Germany. Whoever grabs "foobar.com" first gets to keep it, and the other is stuck trying to make some DNS entry that somehow relates to the company name.

Adding a bunch of niche TLDs helps a bit, but not if the registrar can charge $1k/year for names. That's just ridiculous. You're not going to end up with all the Johns on the Internet getting their own john.something domain name that way. You just let the richest John on the Internet to have all the john.anything domain names.

[mcguire]

"If you don't know what a phone book is, it was the DNS-equivalent of the 1960s. You know those plastic-wrapped bricks of yellow paper that sometimes appear on your doorstep, that you just drop right into the recycling bin?"

You mean monitor stands?

[logfromblammo]

To sum up, the .com TLD should likely be split up into separate TLDs, corresponding to the Nice classes for international trademarks.

   1 .chem     16 .book     31 .farm
   2 .paint    17 .flex     32 .bev
   3 .clean    18 .skin     33 .booze
   4 .oil      19 .build    34 .smoke
   5 .drug     20 .home     35 .ads / .biz
   6 .metal    21 .ware     36 .fin
   7 .mech     22 .rope     37 .con
   8 .tool     23 .yarn     38 .tel
   9 .sci      24 .tex      39 .mov
  10 .med      25 .cloth    40 .mat
  11 .env      26 .lace     41 .edu / .fun
  12 .wheel    27 .floor    42 .tek / .law
  13 .gun      28 .toy      43 .hos
  14 .bling    29 .meat     44 .doc / .eco
  15 .music    30 .food     45 .soc / .sec

The clear correspondence between domain and Nice category would make it easier to evict name-squatters that are not engaged in the relevant type of business.

[andrewaylett]

Look up the rules for `.ltd.uk` :).

Also, for that matter, .plc.uk, .ac.uk, .sch.uk, .nhs.uk, .police.uk and .gov.uk. All of them are available only to organisations that already exist in a particular context, and only with their 'real' name.

That doesn't prevent some collisions around characters that are legal in business names but not in DNS, of course, and it also doesn't mean that anyone actually uses the .ltd.uk and .plc.uk domains: I don't think I've actually ever seen one in the wild. I've seen all the others, though.