[halfmatthalfcat]

The whole domain market experience is utter crap. Commoditizing domain names has created such an unbalanced power dynamic between buyers and sellers where the sellers hold all the power. Gatekeeping at it's finest.

Contrast this with acquiring a business name through any Department of State/Division of Corporations.

I shouldn't have to name my company some contorted bastardization to successfully enter the market.

[belorn]

Registering a trademark is generally more expensive than a domain name, and trademarks don't compete on the same namespace and is split depending on industry. The biggest difference to the domain market is that with domain names everyone is clogging the same namespace. If people just spread out based on nationality and industry it would be easy and cheap.

To make a direct example, if I talked about Abba here in Sweden, most people think about the music band. But if I talk about Abba in the context of food, people will instead think of Abba seafood that make Kalles Kaviar and pickled herring. Abba.se as a domain is thus very ambiguous as it doesn't specify if it about food or music, and abba.com is likely to surprise people as it has nothing to do with either.

To make matter worse, companies that want to protect their trademark or work actively at preventing fake shops will often buy several hundred versions of their domain names under different name spaces. It is seen as best practice, especially for online shops.

[bin0]

But at the same time, I think we might be a bit to far with the current setup of the web to change this. Not saying it can't be redesigned better, though. I can't see everyone moving to "abba.food.se" or "abba.music.se", especially as domain length is at a serious premium (though my information is old and it's just a correlation, it's the best factual support I could find short-notice for what is commonly known). [0]

There's a fine line between "clogging the namespace" and commoditizing something. I like being able to have my own domain - I can host stuff, run a web site, access services with a friendly name, attach friendly names to my internal IPs, etc. Why should I have to be a legally-registered something-or-other to do that? And if I'm not, why should I have to settle for something three times as long? Most of the pollution is from squatters, who are cancerous to the internet.

[0] http://www.gaebler.com/Domain-Length-Research.htm

[3xblah]

I actually did a "side project" to fix this about 10 years ago.

Never "released" it; I just wanted to see if it would work. I still think it could.

Imagine being being able to get a copy of a zone file and that file reliably revealing something about what was being served from the associated IP address. Where each name was by the nature of its tld disambiguated from any other name. "Collision-proof" naming. Arguably, it already exists IRL.

As a member of the public I can get a list, or search a database, of trademarks that reveals exactly what type of goods or services each mark ("name") covers. I do not need to submit each name/good/service I am interested in to a gatekeeper advertising company who will try to guess what it is I want based on other people's searches or personal information gathered about me.

OTOH, if, for example, a trademark office started running an authoritative nameserver, serving its own zone with its own descriptive tlds and giving trademark registrants a matching domain name within a class-specific tld, I would not hesistate to add those tlds to the custom root.zone I use.

It stands to reason that a business owner should trust a government entity with some accountability more than it trusts a made-up "authority" like ICANN.

The "organisation of the world's information" should not be controlled by a private company.

Any such company would obviously stand to benefit from the continued disorganisation of information on the web. A lack of organisation that only they have the "expertise" necessary to rectify. The ambiguity of ICANN domain names is one contributor to the ongoing state of disorganisation.

Nor should the control of domain names be entrusted to a private company. They, too, benefit from the ambiguity. The profits from selling (through contractors) dispute resolution services and then new tlds to trademark holders are only possible when the ambiguity continues to exist.

[will_brown]

>Contrast this with acquiring a business name through any Department of State/Division of Corporations.

What do you mean by this?

Generally if a corporate name is registered (example: ABC, INC.) most states will not allow another “ABC” to be registered (even if ending in another suffix like “Corp” or even if another type of entity like an LLC).

I had a client in a certain state who registered their entity name as MSG HOLDINGS and wouldn’t you know I got a call from General Counsel of Madison Square Garden one day making an offer to purchase my clients entity solely for the name.

[halfmatthalfcat]

I mean if a name is available to use, you can just use it. There's no negotiation, no price barrier, nothing.

I think most of my frustration is toward the domain squatting/reselling industry.

[lunchables]

>I mean if a name is available to use, you can just use it. There's no negotiation, no price barrier, nothing.

How is that different in domain names? If the name is available, you buy it and use it. And the "price barrier" for domain names was less than filing incorporation paperwork, in my state anyway.

>I think most of my frustration is toward the domain squatting/reselling industry.

At least with domain names you can negotiate with someone. If someone else registers a company name before you, good luck. Same situation, look up the registered members and try to talk them into giving it to you, I guess?

[eridius]

> How is that different in domain names? If the name is available, you buy it and use it.

Because in the absence of price caps the registrar can choose to increase the price on "valuable" domain names (for whatever arbitrary criteria it decides means a domain is "valuable").

[lunchables]

He wasn't speaking about .org domains specifically:

>The whole domain market experience is utter crap. Commoditizing domain names has created such an unbalanced power dynamic between buyers and sellers where the sellers hold all the power. Gatekeeping at it's finest.

He's speaking in the present/past tense, so obviously he can't be referring to what may happen in the future with .org domain names.

So I'm comparing incorporating a business purchasing a domain name, today.

[gist]

All .org and .info domains will be priced the same. Not more valuable ones can be at a higher cost.

[dgellow]

Not anymore, that's exactly what the article is about.

> ICANN has agreed to remove price restrictions on .org domain names, letting the domain’s manager, Public Interest Registry, charge as much as it wants for the domains. (It also agreed to let .info manager Afilias charge whatever it wants for .info.)

[walshemj]

Isn't starting a company rather expensive in the USA compared to say in the UK

[dboreham]

No.

[mc32]

I don’t like it either. But the diametrical solution of a DMV-styled org would also have problems, though different in nature perhaps.