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Comment by netsharc | Hacker News Reader

Why should they be "cleaned up" when there are TLDs like .blog, .hotel, .sucks, and other great ones (.great doesn't exist) that are allowed to be there?

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.sucks really shouldn't exist, it's pretty explicitly set up as an extortion racket. They charge nearly $300 a year because they know that brands will pay a lot to prevent anyone else from getting brand.sucks.

> it's pretty explicitly set up as an extortion racket

Or rather for squatting. google.sucks is registered by Google LLC, microsoft.sucks by Microsoft Corporation, meta.sucks by Meta Platforms, Inc., and so on...

That's what they're saying. Corps are "forced" to buy their own domain with .sucks to prevent someone else from hosting something critical of the brands there. Whoever came up with .sucks gets to make money from people buying the domains just to prevent others from using them to actually host something.

Microsoft owns microsoft.sucks but they decided to redirect it to microsoft.com, which is a bit of an own goal. The others don't point to anything.

Looks like the redirect doesn't work for me since they couldn't get their SSL working.. Truth in advertising at least.

I'm going to claim dotsucks.sucks now.

Didn't somebody register dot.com and had an email address of dot.dot@dot.com? You could have dot.dot@dotsucks.com

You may be thinking of Tony Finch, dot@dotat.at.

Because gTLD must be at least three letters long, and ccTLD must be two letters long.

That's what the rule says. But of course, such rules are arbitrary and can be changed.

Two-char TLDs are a special case and are bound to a country. And this rule works both ways - Soviet Union wanted .ussr and was given .su

.su also still exists, despite its backing country having gone under over 30 years ago.

Because the country disappeared before that rules was set in place.

Yup. IANA dind't have ccTLD retiring procedures yet, when Soviet Union collapsed in 1990. But would they want to, they could delist it at any point. IANA holds the registry for all TLDs and - that's extreme and unlikely - could delist .ru, .ir or .kp at any moment.

The WLAN password at ICANN meetings is oneworldoneinternet. Keeping the net together needs continuous peacekeeping effort.

ICANN could delist in theory, that peacekeeping makes it impractical.

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