These are fun but regular people have so much difficulty with them.
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.
Be wary of vanity TLDs and even some country codes, they may be available but once the renewal rolls around and you've invested time and effort into establishing a presence there, you may be in for a price shock.
It's always struck me as odd that TLDs are not just, well, freely configurable? Domains have always been subject to so much artificial scarcity for seemingly no reason. Why can't a DNS resolver handle .whatever?
The social fabric of the system would fall apart if people could trivially buy top level domains. Even the not so trivial buying that ICANN began in 2015 in order to profiteer was a serious mistake (to everyone besides ICANN).
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.
This wouldn’t really reduce the scarcity though. Right now everyone wants a “.com”, because it’s the convention. If you could buy the TLD “widget” for the same price as “widget.com”, then you would just move up one level in the domain hierarchy and have the same scarcity? If anything, the fact that there are several legitimate TLD options reduces the scarcity a tiny bit?
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.
Maybe it's useful for ICANN to delegate management to different orgs (mostly corporations) so they don't have to control every single website on earth directly
I would actually prefer for the ICANN to have even less power and for the whole system to be even more distributed
What we should have is a root zone consisting only of country codes, and technical TLDs like .arpa, and no central authority on this file. It should be reasonable enough to get consensus on who runs the DNS root for each country. These don't change too frequently. And then each country can do whatever it wants inside its own TLD.
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.
I never heard of OpenNIC before! Cool project. I wonder how complicated would it be for a layperson like me to have my website work on OpenNIC and regular DNS at the same time
Not sure it's possible because dotCom is owned by verisign and designated to the internet root servers. Your ISP, ISP Peering DNS, and any other DNS service would override any of your DNS zones.
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?
No, there's no internet police who would stop you from doing that. However you had better point your .com to Verisign's .com or so many things won't work when connected to your DNS server. Also you will never get IANA to recognise you as the new authority for .com which means people will need to go out of their way to use your root zone instead of the de-facto-standard one published by IANA.
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.
You could've found an EU person to hold the domains for you btw.
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.
dot org is right there and is at least run by a non profit. The SAVE .ORG campaign succeeded in preventing private equity from buying it out. Thanks to EFF, Wikipedia, NPR, Greenpeace, the YMCA, and even the Girl Scouts!
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.
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.
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
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.
It seems like it just matches a list of precomputed entries, but does no actual operation of the user input.
https://meltd.ooo/wn
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