I registered my own name under one of the new gTLDs because it was $10 for a year and I thought, "why not?". I didn't do anything with it, partly because I remained sceptical of the new gTLDs so didn't want to switch anything critical over to it, like my email address.<p>That is probably just as well, because a year later, it had been reclassified as a "premium" name. The renewal fee was over $400,000.<p>The fact that the owners of gTLDs can set pricing arbitrarily is the biggest problem in all this. A given domain name usually has no intrinsic value. What gives it value is the effort someone puts into marketing it.<p>With the new gTLDs, the domain operators are free to offer useful names that aren't trademarks, but are unavailable as .com or similar. Then should anyone build a successful business on that name, they are free to seek arbitrarily high rents.<p>There is no sense in which you can buy a domain name outright. Nor do the new gTLDs have any form of rent control. That is a fundamental problem with the system as it stands.
My view, as someone who did a lot of work around it:<p>Purely a money grab by everyone involved. In what I'd consider a more normal fashion, ICANN could have slowly picked and rolled out sensible new TLDs to operators interested.<p>Instead, it was a free for all where you had to pay an insane fee to ICANN mafia to even apply, and get in bidding wars if multiple applications existed.<p>If you won, you had to go find and pay your own registry, too. So, you had registries preemptively spamming local businesses convincing them to buy a tld and use that registry.<p>Many thought they were gonna make a fortune. The only one who made a fortune was ICANN and to some extent, registries. That's probably why owners keep trying to jack up prices, they still want their windfall.<p>Don't even get me started on how terrible ICANN is organized. The whole digital archery fiasco should be enough for nobody to ever put any faith in them. Anyone with a quarter of brain function would realize how terrible that idea is.
TLDs are like neighborhoods or ZIP codes, you will be judged for being in a bad one even if you are a good person. That's why I suggest consulting this site before you register anything to make sure you don't accidentally get a TLD that is used mostly for abuse, which many of the newer ones are.<p><a href="https://www.spamhaus.org/statistics/tlds/" rel="nofollow">https://www.spamhaus.org/statistics/tlds/</a>
I do have a complaint about relatively new TLDs. Did you know .forum domains are $500 to $2000 per year?<p>We live in a world where everybody is complaining about censorship and nazis, but one of the best new TLDs for an independent forum is prices out 99% of the market!<p>Of course, there are plenty of TLDs in the $5-$20 range, which are great, but this will cause cheap TLDs to become crowded and .forum will be a ghost town.<p>Forums generally don't make money. Any forum making money, probably isn't making enough to budget $500 extra in another domain. Any company that would say "wow, $2000/year is acceptable" would already have something like {forum,community}.acme.com.
I don't like the fact that the prices can wildly differ between different TLDs.<p>I think it was nice that it was easy to recognise website.com was a website too, whereas website.wtf is less easy to identify, but then now there are more available to makes it easier to get a shorter, better name and can make the pricing more competitive, hopefully driving it lower for everyone.
The worse thing with generic tld is that before tld were attributed on a kind of merit or usefulness (countries, com, org), but now it is only based on money considerations.<p>At the beginning internet was based on a kind of democracy or gentlemen's agreements. Now, the one that has the most cash to spend, like Google or Apple or Amazon or some scammer, ça. Grave what you want. Like if it was their internet.<p>The example of the ".dev" is good. Google can easily unilaterally decide to take over a domain that was used largely and internationally by individuals. And they are allowed to do that because they can afford it, but you, the individual, you are considered like horse shit in this system. And so you are not allowed to complain.
The entire canned TLD system (and ICANN't) is a scam. TLDs should be abolished (except for the ones that are still enforced, like edu, mil, and gov), and you should be able to register anything.anythingelse.<p>Trademark violations would be handled as they are today.<p>The current mess is an embarrassment.