What do you guys think? Do they have any future? Can general public adapt to typing JohnDoe.photos instead of the traditional .com/.net/.org etc?
There's a major battle shaping up on TLDs like .health. The WHO wants it to be used like .gov and .edu, and others want it to be freely available for things like Snakeoil.health or Homeopathy.health. And this is the case for thousands of TLDs<p>And yes, once the dust settles, the public will be willing to type in any one of the thousands of new TLDs. The brokers are going to make their most money off people having to protect this huge market for trademark issues. Disney will have to buy every one. Disney.sexy, Disney.tips, Disney.guru, etc. etc.<p>(edit changed copyright to trademark.)
I think its going to be a big mess and the domain registrars are going to make boatloads of money. I don't want to imagine the number of phishing sites that are going to be made.
I think weird TLDs have already caught on. How many recent startups have there been where their name is some strange combination of an abbreviated/misspelled word, and an obscure TLD functioning as the word's suffix?<p>Names are a limited commodity, and short memorable names sell.
Slightly off-topic but what about the alternative of sub-domains?<p>For web sites I tend to use the www subdomain, because it offers convenience and flexibility with CNAMEing, but I absolutely loathe the www subdomain. Almost as much as 'com' as a tld. I assume com is an abbreviation of company. Many websites aren't companies so that doesn't make much sense to me.<p>Despite my personal gripes, it's mainly aesthetics, and these fall into the background, you fail to notice or care.<p>I rather a general identifier. Ambiguity isn't all that terrible: Apple Records and Apple Computers. Coke the drink, the drug, the fuel etc.<p>A name by itself doesn't always mean that much without context.
Less and less do I find myself typing in a URL, as opposed to clicking a link (via a DDG search or in an email etc). So I think it's fair to make a comparison to phone numbers - I know mine, my wife's, and the one I had as a kid growing up. I couldn't tell you my new home phone number if my life depended on it.<p>No doubt there will continue to be some confusion for a period (just ask the owners of www.utube.com). But as a URL becomes a link, as opposed to a discrete string of letters needing to be remembered, it will become less important. Interestingly, this will obviously reduce the value of the TLDs and specific URLs (though not entirely, because they will have some relevance to SEO).
Seeing as how .info, .mobi, .aero etc. never took off, I don't think these new TLDs are really likely to displace .com either. The thing about ".com" is that, to the average person, .com is <i>the</i> thing that makes a domain a domain, like a file extension. They may also recognize .org and .net as other extensions, like file formats. However, when you just start tacking on arbitrary words with pre-existing connotations, the domain-recognizability of them goes out the window: nobody would guess that "fast.bikes" is a domain rather than just a tagline that uses dots instead of spaces.