[edent]

There are lots of people called John Smith. They all want a domain name. There's only so many variations of jsmith, j-smith, etc you can squeeze into .com, .net, and a few others.

Why shouldn't they be able to buy a domain name which contains their name?

Is it useful to be able to differentiate between McDonald's the restaurant and McDonald's the legal firm and McDonald's garage?

Why shouldn't each of those industries get their own TLD?

The original list of TLDs aren't some platonic good written by ineffable sages. It's OK for things to change.

[gruez]

>There are lots of people called John Smith. They all want a domain name. There's only so many variations of jsmith, j-smith, etc you can squeeze into .com, .net, and a few others.

>Why shouldn't they be able to buy a domain name which contains their name?

I fail to see how johnsmith[insert number here].com is any worse than johnsmith.[insert TLD here]. If anything a number is less likely to get mixed up than tlds, which have confusing pairs like ".tech" and ".technology", or ".engineer" and ".engineering".

[edent]

Surely the number 14 is likely to get misheard as 40. And 13135432 is easily typo'd to 13134532.

[gruez]

It's not about typos or mishearing stuff, it's about words being jumbled in memory. Unlike a sequence of digits, people don't store words "engineering" in their head as a string (eg. "E-N-G-I-N-E-E-R-I-N-G"). It's stored as something like "[concept of engineer] + [present participle]". That's far more likely to get jumbled in people's head during recall.

[9dev]

The only actual answer would have been to drain the TLD swamp and open up the root zone. Give us john.smith, website.jsmith, and mc.donalds. It's just a label anyway, and one that normies don't pay any attention to—save that even if they did, it's hard not to fall for mc-donalds.com or mcdonalds-restaurant.com anyway.

If the whole EV certificates thing would have been set up in a way that it wasn't just a money extraction racket, that would be the way forward. Let user agents convey whether a site is trusthworthy, and what entity it is connected to.

[rhplus]

And… predictably, johnsmith.com ends up offering no utility to any of the John Smiths out there because it’s being held for ransom by a squatter:

https://www.afternic.com/forsale/johnsmith.com

[Joker_vD]

Please don't let the facts get in the way of an argument from principle.