If anyone wants to go ahead and register these please send me the $25 and we can have a five minute phone call in which all I do is insult and belittle you and we’ll call it even.
Who cares? Hate is part of being human and part of life, and people hate for many different reasons. Let them hate. As long as they’re not trying to hurt innocent people, who cares?
Aw man, that’s kinda mean. But I sort of get where you’re coming from. A company owns exclusive rights to the .sucks TLD, so I guess in a way they’re profiting off of hatred. I just don’t really think it’s that big of a deal. Like, if I’m angry at something I’m not gonna buy a domain for it… Especially since these are so expensive. Barely anyone buys domains. Seems like it’s more tailored to marketing campaigns than anything.
There was some intense controversy behind it, same thing with .exposed (for obvious reasons). It’s shitty because it’s extremely overpriced, like 200$ or so for a year of registration. The company behind is quite scummy and advertises it to companies to buy it for PR purposes, so some buy it and redirect to their feedback page.
Currently, to start a new top level domain, you apply to ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, pay a fee of something like $185,000, and then become the registrar for that TLD.
Very interesting thank you. Does it work similar to federation wherein if ICANN don’t recognise you you cannot be linked to? Or is this organisation where the buck stops with the internet.
That has to do with Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), run by ICANN, who oversee IP address allocation and root zone management of DNS. DNS is the database/system that maps domain names to IP addresses, if you’re not aware.
No, tor has nothing to do with regular domain names.
With few exceptions, this is where the buck stops with the internet. If ICANN doesn’t recognize you, “the world” can’t associate your IP address to a domain name. Some “alt dns root zones” exist, but they’re either rogue states, bad actors, or even in one case, a crypto grift.
If I’m understanding right, you can buy “twitter.sucks” for $200 and you own that, regardless of who owns .sucks as a TLD? Or is it a rental? You can separately purchase ALL “.sucks” for 185k? What happens if the owner of .sucks dies or goes to prison, do you also lose “twitter.sucks”?
Getting twitter.sucks is just leasing/buying a domain name, which is a lot more simple. Generally you pay for a set period, and have the option to renew it. I'm not sure what happens when a registrar closes down, other than it's likely someone else takes it over. The agreements linked below have sections describing what happens if a registrar closes down or gets shut down by ICANN for breaking the agreement... presumably someone else takes it over. There are surely other people who know more about this than I do.
You can start a new gTLD that nobody else has for $185,000, plus the cost of operating the registry. From what I understand it's basically a lease. As a registry, your job is to maintain a zone file for the TLD, and sell domains. (edit!) reading the contracts, you also pay them about $6,000 a quarter plus .25c for each registration for revenue over $50,000.
TLD, or top level domain, is the starting point of the domain name system. It’s what comes at the end of the URL, and it’s set up that way for very good reasons that I won’t get into, because it would be a very long discussion.
You can think of the TLD a bit like a country, and the primary domain name, eg: “Twitter” as the company name. While “Twitter” is a valid business in the .com “country”, it’s unfounded in many others. So to push the analogy, it would be like McDonald’s only having it’s business in the USA, and someone in England starts a business in the UK, calling it McDonald’s. This happens before McDonald’s (USA) starts making any inroads into the UK to expand there. So the UK McDonald’s owns the name and if McDonald’s USA wants to expand to the UK, they can either buy the existing McDonald’s company in the UK, or change their name for the UK. Same deal with domain names. If you own “Twitter” in the “country” (TLD) of .sucks, the owner of Twitter.com couldn’t really do shit about you owning it.
There’s the other obvious issue that if you’re making a site like “twitter.sucks” you will have to be very careful not to infringe on their copy rights for things like their logo, etc. Especially if the basis of the site is to mock the .com version of the same.
DNS is a very interesting part of the internet. You can get rather deep into the structure and systems in use and how subdomains work and how complex they can be. For now, the only interesting quirk of the internet that I want to touch on is that there’s technically a period at the end of every domain name (eg “twitter.com.”) which is almost always omitted. That period represents the root of DNS, which is a thing that actually exists.
DNS engineer here, got two corrections to make if you care:
the owner of Twitter.com couldn’t really do shit about you owning it.
That’s not entirely true. .sucks is walking an extremely fine line and if they ever grow big enough and piss off enough companies, they will be shut down. Larry Strickling, head of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration has spoken on multiple occasions about his concerns about gTLD (what people are calling “novelty” TLD’s) abuse to redirect users incorrectly (either for parody or for malicious purpose) Source. ICANN absolutely will crack down if they think a gTLD is acting rogue as they would be afraid of the NTIA cracking down on them. Passing the gTLD rules was already very contentious for many reasons. Defensive domain list expansion being one of the biggest.
There’s the other obvious issue that if you’re making a site like “twitter.sucks” you will have to be very careful not to infringe on their copy rights for things like their logo, etc. Especially if the basis of the site is to mock the .com version of the same.
Surprisingly, no. Copyright infringement doesn’t apply to parody. Unless twitter.sucks is a fully functional site that draws in revenue (and not just from the humor, but from actually having a directly competing product), then it’s mostly safe from a copyright claim.
Add comment