The Problem with Vanity TLDs (2011)

The real issue with the vanity TLDs, and many of the newer ones in general, is that they have zero recognition. They are most worthless.<p>You can slap a joehardware.com on the back of your van, or a local TLD, and people will know that it&#x27;s the address of your website. Now do the same with joehardware.builders, people have no glue as to what that might be. It doesn&#x27;t even help to write www.joehardware.builders, that somehow more confusing.<p>No, the issue with the new&#x2F;generic&#x2F;vanity TLDs is that they&#x27;ve lost all meaning. They lack context.

There&#x27;s a legitimate engineering issue here too that bears mentioning.<p>Your marketing team will charge ahead with migrating all your product.business.com sites to just product.business<p>You&#x27;ll get half a year into that migration before someone asks about shared domain cookies. Oh, login.business.com dropped an SSO cookie on business.com?<p>After that you&#x27;ll get the lovely request - you work with the browser people, can&#x27;t we just edit the standard to drop a cookie on a TLD?

&gt; It creates a three-tier world. The big boys who have TLDs, the cheaper boys who have .com<p>The prophecy didn&#x27;t come true. Granted the big boys got their .googles and .amazons, but good old .coms are still a thing and not considered &quot;cheaper&quot;.

Needs (2011):<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20110321001950&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.templetons.com&#x2F;brad&#x2F;dns&#x2F;vanity-tld.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20110321001950&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.temple...</a>

I would tolerate the ICANN TLD money-grabbing scheme, but the &quot;new&quot; TLDs are a little more than an indication of bad taste. I can&#x27;t be the only one to dislike anything more than 3 characters in a TLD, like .cloud or .engineering.

Who’s the joker who bought <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bad.coffee" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bad.coffee</a>?

I don&#x27;t understand why people are interested in keeping the implementation details of the internet exposed. There was a reason we came up with TLDs and such, and you had to type in http vs ftp vs https etc. But there&#x27;s no reason to be constrained by these detalis. If the computer can figure it out? good.

Whoever invented selling 1 row in a database for massive amounts of money per year was a genius

I mean, all domains are really vanity domains. This just gives people more ways to be vain, which is all anyone really wants.

There is already <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;microsoft.bing" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;microsoft.bing</a>. See <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_Internet_top-level_domains" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_Internet_top-level_dom...</a>.

I am reminded that Alphabet&#x27;s Google&#x27;s Charleston Road Registry acquired .foo with the promise of sharing it with the community, only to pull a 180 post-grant and keep it to themselves. FeelsBadMan

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;.sucks_(registry)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;.sucks_(registry)</a>

Sorry, but *looks at my nails* .com is a boomer TLD, it&#x27;s passé. Do you really want a domain from last century? Or do you want an exotic .asia? A cool .club? A forward looking .future? Or even joining the ranks of the celebrity media with a stylish... .xn--45q11c?<p>The answer is clear, if you want to stay in the past, then go with .com, but the .future is in vanity TLDs. For more information, check out my website <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ok.boomer" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ok.boomer</a> and considering buying a .boomer domain today!

I bought a LOT of .biz domains, turns out carriers often block people from receiving SMS messages containing email addresses at these TLDs, without notifying me or them.<p>Probably because they&#x27;re often used for spam? (I bought em because they were cheap.)

OMG what if someone buys .thinkdifferent!!!