Quote:
Originally Posted by Frank777
Why is this a thing? Who asked for this?
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Well, a cynic might say it's a corporate win-win. ICANN makes a lot of money because TLDs are costly to approve ($120k just for the registration, I believe?), and those who register, if they're clever and made a good name choice, also stand to make money over the years.
The non-cynical answer is a lot more complicated.
In some cases, it's outright stupid (why is .google a TLD?). I don't think .computer is one of those cases.
Would it have been great if the original set of TLDs had been enough? …maybe? But they were never actually used fairly. .edu, .gov, and .mil weren't "for education, for the government, for the military", but rather "for
US-based education institutions, for the
US government, for the
US military". Which in turn led to .us barely being used at all, whereas other countries had to silo themselves to their own country code TLDs. .com and .org? Can most people figure out the difference (it's commercial vs. non-commercial), and is that a useful distinction? .net? Isn't all of this .net? Etc.
Not to mention that they were never localized. It's ".gov" whether you speak English, French, Farsi, or Mandarin. Not a great design.
There are historical reasons for all that (the US military set up many of the early cornerstones of the Internet in the first place; see DARPAnet), but that was half a century ago, and while I'm not happy with some of the choices of this new era of TLDs in particular, I do think the traditional model wasn't quite working right.