News - ICANN approves generic top-level domain expansion

[HEXUS]

The start of a new cyber-squatting land-grab?

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[kingpotnoodle]

So not for the whole of human imagination then, just for those with £185,000... so big brands, which have already been long imagined.

Bothered? Not really.

[aidanjt]

Hurrah for yet more DNS abuse.

[oolon]

Hopefully supply and demand will drive down prices for second teir users. The artificial restriction of generic TLDs, keeps prices up.

[Scott B]

So not for the whole of human imagination then, just for those with £185,000... so big brands, which have already been long imagined.

Bothered? Not really.

I got the currency wrong - now corrected - still a lot of money though.

[miniyazz]

But what's wrong with www.canon.com/powershot instead of www.powershot.canon? It's just weird and I don't like it
It's a useful indication if a website is the UK or the US version for starters.

[oolon]

But what's wrong with www.canon.com/powershot instead of www.powershot.canon? It's just weird and I don't like it
It's a useful indication if a website is the UK or the US version for starters.

Its only because you are not used to it. I notice you added "www" no reason why the machine needs to be called www it does not reflect what protocol the computer uses it could as well be called fred, perhaps "powershot.canon" would be a better example of this brave new world.

[Saracen]

....
It's a useful indication if a website is the UK or the US version for starters.

Not really. It can be misleading assuming whether a site is US or not, and besides, what about :-

powershot.us.canon
powershot.uk.canon
powershot.jp.canon
powershot.de.canon .... etc.

Once you get used to it, it should be fine, IMHO.

Though, I'm not sure it'll make much difference, as you'll need to be either very wealthy as an individual, or a fairly wealthy company to justify the cost, so doing it will be fairly niche. And I'll bet it won't mean that Canon (and others) won't still want canon.com, canon.co.uk, etc. So they'll end up sitting on both formats, if for no other reason than to deny them to others, and to park a redirect on them.

In fact, it just looks like a great wheeze for prising a significant chunk of cash out of big companies and brand names, to me. ICANN should make millions from it.

[aidanjt]

It's still retarded. Products don't need their own vhost. A page or two is more than sufficient, hell, maybe a whole subdirectory. If every brand gets their own TLD then you're going to start having collisions with localdomain hosts and heavier loads on the root nameservers.

[aidanjt]

Not really. It can be misleading assuming whether a site is US or not, and besides, what about :-

powershot.us.canon
powershot.uk.canon
powershot.jp.canon
powershot.de.canon .... etc.

And even that is pointless. You can just get the user's locale from the browser and redirect to canon.com/{tld}/{product} or make the webapp load the string tables for that locale and just make it a sensible canon.com/{product}.

[crossy]

It can be misleading assuming whether a site is US or not, and besides, what about :-

powershot.us.canon
powershot.uk.canon
powershot.jp.canon
powershot.de.canon .... etc.

Once you get used to it, it should be fine, IMHO.

I would (politely of course) suggest that "uk.powershot.canon" would make more sense. In fact, although I was going to disagree that the new layout is more confusing initially, now I'm not so sure. Country.Product.Company as a domain - if used widely - might make things a lot easier. Certainly better than guessing which one of:

www.whizzyproduct.co.uk
www.whizzyproduct.com
www.whizzyproduct.com/uk
www.whizzyproduct.com/country=uk&something-else-goes-here...

should be chosen. (Apologies for the code block, but it was the only way I could see to stop my URL-like text being converted into - invalid - URLs)

In fact, it just looks like a great wheeze for prising a significant chunk of cash out of big companies and brand names, to me. ICANN should make millions from it.

Totally agreed. I'd also be very wary that the system - unless there's more checks and balances in it than the widely-despised US patent one - would be easily abused. For example, a certain fruit-related company grabs the .tablet and .phone TLDs for itself, Microsoft grabs .office, etc.

That said, it also occurs to me that there's some scope for some good innovations. E.g. Oxfam, Greenpeace, WWF, joining together to get a .charity TLD. Or Apache, FSF getting a .foss TLD. Although the flipside of that is more confusion - having to guess what extension is in use. (I still occasionally type "hexus.com" rather than the correct version - "hexus.net")

As the owner/registrar of a .com domain, does this mean that I can "look forward" (sarcasm=11) to getting offers of a whole plethora of new variations on my basic name?

[Saracen]

And even that is pointless. You can just get the user's locale from the browser and redirect to canon.com/{tld}/{product} or make the webapp load the string tables for that locale and just make it a sensible canon.com/{product}.

That rather assumes that the user wants the local company, if the browser does it for you based on location, and that isn't always the case. It isn't with me with the example used, Canon, because I often find material on the US and even on the Japanese site that isn't on the UK one. I regularly don't want the UK one, so would be rather irked if the browser assumes it knows best and forcibly redirects me there based on my location.

Browsers, or browser programmers, shouldn't just assume they know what the user wants, and "help" like that. .

[aidanjt]

That's more of a symptom of corporates fragmenting their information by abusing DNS and making pointless locale-specific vhosts. If everything is on the same host then all information for all regions should be available to all locales. Localisation is suppose to make it easier to understand information, not more difficult to access.

[Saracen]

True enough.

In that specific case, it seems to be because the technical info (and initial product info) comes out of Japan. I'd also guess (or actually, it's not entirely a guess) that the marketing department in the US is a lot bigger than the marketing department for Canon here. I get a lot of info (and product) from the UK press office but it's good to get the real skinny from Japan too. I can often learn more from half an hour with a product manager in Japan than I do from a whole day press event here.

And it's sometimes surprising what ends up in the public domain, not always intentionally, on the Japanese site.


Of course, it can also be that the actual products are regionalised, and that material for the US or Far East markets aren't quite the same as the UK/EU ones. Many Canon products have different naming conventions, for instance, and market positioning may vary too. So it's not as simple as abusing DNS, but quite possibly, adapting marketing methodologies, or even product details, for localised markets.

And that's another reason for programmers not making assumptions about how people want their international website structures to work

[aidanjt]

All you'd have to do is put a small set of region tabs for such products or some such. It's a minor problem.

[miniyazz]

Its only because you are not used to it. I notice you added "www" no reason why the machine needs to be called www it does not reflect what protocol the computer uses it could as well be called fred, perhaps "powershot.canon" would be a better example of this brave new world.

True.