Someone just dropped their registration for that today!?
Namecheap...
Hurry...
Login, come on...
TOTP, uagh...
Come on, come on... register, register...
...
$39,000.00 !??!
"Premium" name?!
What is this garbage?
Registries realized they can capture the value from premium domains rather than letting domain speculators profit.
I once snagged a 4 letter .net address that was the last 3 letters of my first name with the first initial of my last name as the last character.
I thought I was so clever. I had the shortest email address you could ever imagine and it was basically just my first name and last initial. Amazing!
Nobody got it. It was confusing. I got blank stares and confused looks. People basically refused to email me at my new address.
Sometimes long is better, and sometimes unique and easy to spell is better, too.
Examples like Pinterest or Expedia are good demonstrators. They are easy to spell when you hear the word, and they were unique words that at the time were obviously going be available. Sure, Expedia is a very old domain, but if the company didn’t exist today I’d almost guarantee you a new company looking to buy the domain would be able to find it in 2026.
I have actually needed to use it, because my cell provider (Visible) has absolutely moronic form validation that doesn't recognize a hyphen as a valid character in an email address, even though it very much is. (My main .net domain has a hyphen in it)
They tend to really just be suitable as a supplementary domain for short links and the like (youtu.be, goo.gl, etc.)
I can see why many companies end up paying lots of money to transition over to .com when they get to a certain size.
it would be a global first come first serve namespace. Everything conceivable would be registered. Only the diversity of TLDs and SLDs saves the current DNS from this. In fact ICANN's money-grubbing TLD spam actually improved this, since there are now far too many TLDs to squat them all.
As an aside (I’m also annoyed by domain squatters etc), it is a fascinating market study how domains are artificially scarce the way they are when everyone can easily and cheaply buy them. I am not sure there is any reasonable solution to it.
I would actually prefer for the ICANN to have even less power and for the whole system to be even more distributed
It seems like it just matches a list of precomputed entries, but does no actual operation of the user input.
for my little NFT project
Maybe it's a good thing we are all afraid to visit any other tld other than dotCom.
Regardless, it's usually politically safest to put your domains under your own country's ccTLD. That way, you're exposed to one fewer country's dumb politics.
That would be .co.uk, so, jail time for hosting memes.
browsers hiding most of the URL also negated much of the importance and was a nail
QR codes on everything and all phones in everyone's hands all the time was another nail
You just don't want a scammy TLD but not even sure what those are these days anymore
The problem is the US is grandfathered in without staying inside its TLD. This was manageable when it was just .com .org .net etc. but now ICANN has abused this position to mint thousands of new US TLDs outside of .us. If they were inside .us this would only be a problem for whoever runs .us but because they are top-level it makes it difficult to have a decentralised root zone and not just rely on what ICANN publishes. Which is part of the point I'm sure.
You either use taxes from everyone to pay for it or you take money from the people using the thing.
Don't give them money until they stop wasting what they have, and chastise them for begging so hard.
One solution is running your own DNS servers. This way you can list your own TLD's. However good luck in convincing others to change their DNS.
It does make me wonder if I hosted my own root servers for a new dotCom tld would I get chased down by the internet police?
It's a bit like signing your website certificate with your own root certificate. The protocol itself is agnostic to who issues the root certificates, but good luck convincing distros to install yours by default, so your website will only be accessible by people who go far out of their way to install it.
It's a shame, because ICANN being under US jurisdiction is effectively an attack against the DNS.
Agreed. At least in 2016 we got the US to give up its veto power to the PTI which has global oversight. Still ofc the ICANN is just another company based in Los Angeles and falls under California and US legal jurisdiction. I would much prefer control be transferred to the UN ITU