[mholt]

A great case study in "The Web is hard."

I stumbled on this earlier this week: https://twitter.com/mholt6/status/838504217731948544 and found it amusing but confusing in two ways:

1) The prompt is pointing to the "Secure" icon; I thought it was asking me if I wanted to downgrade my protocol to HTTP.

2) The domain "google" made me and several others wonder if there was a hosts file entry for "google", which turns out there isn't.

No, of course, the real problem is much more complicated; a strange twist of omnibar meets DNS meets HSTS. This is definitely an edge case, but might be a glimpse into the complicated future of gTLDs and the emergence of ever-more web standards...

[xg15]

> A great case study in "The Web is hard."

Or alternatively "the web is hard if you sacrifice any kind of structure to make a quick buck".

On the risk of sounding get-off-my-lawn-ish, but TLDs used to be assigned using some relatively simple, service-agnostic rules: A hierarchical system for ccTLDs, plus a small set of universal gTLDs plus some historic quirks. Nowadays assignment seems to be solely by who pays most.

[kogepathic]

> On the risk of sounding get-off-my-lawn-ish

You don't. At least not to me. The new gTLDs are clearly a money grab on the part of ICANN.

[seanp2k2]

I'm sure brands and attorneys love it. Now they have to defend Coke and Disney and their hundreds of associated domains across hundreds of TLDs. Think of the permutations.

[astrodust]

Twenty years ago it was utterly unthinkable that anyone would get a corporate TLD. Today it's like "Why doesn't Coke have one?"

The ICANN has really gone into dark territory with this decision to open things up. It's fitting that their wiki logo is some unruly weed taking over the world: https://icannwiki.org