<story><title>South American nations open fire on ICANN for &apos;illegal&apos; sale of .amazon</title><url>https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/01/21/amazonb_icann_spat/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>saalweachter</author><text>I personally blame ICANN more than the corporations here.&lt;p&gt;No individual entity -- person, place or corporation -- needs a TLD.  They&amp;#x27;re TLDs, they&amp;#x27;re for giant collections of people, places and things.&lt;p&gt;But once ICANN says, &amp;quot;Hey, would you like to buy &amp;lt;.YOURCOMPANY&amp;gt;?  It&amp;#x27;d be a shame if someone else did.&amp;quot;, most any company is going to say, &amp;quot;Goddammit, fine&amp;quot;, and then once you&amp;#x27;ve spent the money on it, you might as well start using it, with store.YOURCOMPANY and about.YOURCOMPANY and mail.YOURCOMPANY, and now the conventions of hierarchical domains and the very notion of URLs is meaningless.&lt;p&gt;I do blame all of us webdevs for getting cutesy with with making the TLD part of your company&amp;#x2F;domain name.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sedachv</author><text>ICANN selling corporate TLDs is something akin to the Library of Congress trying to sell Subject Headings. Not content with spamming everything else on the Internet, some people now want to spam root name servers.</text></comment>
<story><title>South American nations open fire on ICANN for &apos;illegal&apos; sale of .amazon</title><url>https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/01/21/amazonb_icann_spat/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>saalweachter</author><text>I personally blame ICANN more than the corporations here.&lt;p&gt;No individual entity -- person, place or corporation -- needs a TLD.  They&amp;#x27;re TLDs, they&amp;#x27;re for giant collections of people, places and things.&lt;p&gt;But once ICANN says, &amp;quot;Hey, would you like to buy &amp;lt;.YOURCOMPANY&amp;gt;?  It&amp;#x27;d be a shame if someone else did.&amp;quot;, most any company is going to say, &amp;quot;Goddammit, fine&amp;quot;, and then once you&amp;#x27;ve spent the money on it, you might as well start using it, with store.YOURCOMPANY and about.YOURCOMPANY and mail.YOURCOMPANY, and now the conventions of hierarchical domains and the very notion of URLs is meaningless.&lt;p&gt;I do blame all of us webdevs for getting cutesy with with making the TLD part of your company&amp;#x2F;domain name.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gist</author><text>&amp;gt; No individual entity -- person, place or corporation -- needs a TLD.&lt;p&gt;The &amp;#x27;nobody needs&amp;#x27; standard? That is what and how we think of things? Does anyone &amp;#x27;need&amp;#x27; beer or football or 100,000 other things?&lt;p&gt;In a market system if you have money and if you have made money you can use that money to do things and buy things. It&amp;#x27;s not up to someone else (you, me or comments on HN) to determine that what we want to buy that we can legitimately buy is &amp;#x27;needed&amp;#x27; or not.&lt;p&gt;Football is of ZERO interest or need to me. But I do recognize that others get pleasure from watching it.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; They&amp;#x27;re TLDs, they&amp;#x27;re for giant collections of people, places and things.&lt;p&gt;According to who exactly?</text></comment>