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by purephase 3340 days ago
This is a crazy list. Great to see it all in one place though. I don't pay that much attention to the domain registration space any more, but has the explosion of TLDs achieved the goal of reducing .com cash runs?

It certainly seems like other TLDs have reached a level of acceptance, but my experience is not reflective of the majority of users.

Also, it's crazy to see TLDs with other languages. Very cool, and not surprising at all, but I've never seen that before.

3 comments

Same list with filtering and retail pricing from ~50 registrars: https://tld-list.com

Disclosure: I made tld-list.com, so this comment is a shameless plug.

If anything, the abundance of other options makes .com MORE valuable.
.com is still king. It's going to be a while until the others get real penetration. And some tld's are never going to take off. Either the pricing is completely unrealistic or the tld is so long you can achieve the same thing in a shorter tld.
Looking at you, yes you... .international

To me, the asinine part of these gTLDs is that companies can register their gTLD with sponsorship ($185K from when I last checked) yet they don't need to sell domains to the public. I understand the idea of exclusivity, but this simply shifts the profiteering racket from one set of players (domain squatters) to another (ICANN and big business).

I'm not happy with how they are doing it. I'd rather a business model be required to sell domains at $X/yr to the public (some reasonable rate), along with a yearly sponsorship instead of one-time. That would put the focus on maintaining a business capable of supporting the cost of the gTLD instead of a digital billboard and bragging rights. Maybe if that was in place, we wouldn't have stupid ones like .northwesternmutual

My info may be outdated but what I originally understood was an application for sponsorship had to include details on plans for the gTLD which were subject to approval.

The idea was name brands like .microsoft could be kept private for trademark-protection but other gTLDs like .professional would go to applicants that intended to resell.

Not sure how this ended up in practice though.

I do see a business case for not selling. .canon for example - you could provide every device with its own domain ie xhshe3u45.canon etc. So there are some cases where it does make sense.
You can do that already with uuid.cam.canon.com. At best you save a few characters.
Never co-host real applications and user controlled sites on the same root domain. You're just asking for a neverending stream of problems. (This is why everything ends up on googleusercontent.com and friends instead of google.com)
Can you go into more detail why? I'm curious.