Stop Corporate Takeover of New Internet Names | Hacker News Reader

Stop Corporate Takeover of New Internet Names

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106 pointsvishal012381 comments

What benefit do these new TLDs bring to the table? If ICANN need additional revenue, why not fractionally increase the cost of the current gTLDs instead of introducing more?

All these new domains can possibly achieve, IMHO, is to confuse the consumer and allow corporations to control access to 'desirable' gTLDs.

If the domain space is so overcrowded, then by all means introduce a new gTLD - but keep it ICANN controlled. Either run a poll to choose, or allow the corporations to 'sponsor' their choice of TLDs incorporation into ICANN - but there is no way they should be commercially controlled!

UPDATE: Im really upset that I missed this - looks like ICANN opened up a discussion for public comment (which has now closed after only a month? Surely such a major change should be open to larger public debate..): http://www.icann.org/en/news/public-comment/closed-generic-0...

UPDATE2: I have sent an email to karen.lentz@icann.org requesting that the discussion be reopened. I believe it is our duty as a community to publicise this discussion amongst web professionals and have a further chance to fight it. I would respectfully request that you do the same!

UPDATE3: The more I think about this, the more concerned I become. These new gTLDs, given the proliferation of combined search and location bars in modern browsers are tantamount to a direct keyword to those corporations with $185k to spend. Type in 'antivirus', and you will be directed to symantec - not the search results you would likely expect. This has to stop - NOW.

Searching from the URL bar has always been a bad idea, too bad Google adopted the practice.

That's hardly a reason to stop the new TLDs, you just need a rule that says you can't have A/AAAA records on the new TLDs.

There are many reasons. That is just one of them.

Please see parent and other posts in the thread, comments on the linked article, and discussions in the forums for others.

you already dont/wont have naked tld records because of local addressing: http://www/ becomes http://www.mydomain.com/ inside my os as directed by my dhcp server.

Franky, I don't see the point of this. It opens an all-new can of worms, just like allowing unicode in DNS, while being useless even for marketing purposes (people are used to sites being ".com" and suspect anything else).

So ".com" is crowded. It would be much better if someone did something about squatters. So many parked domains and so little done about it...

Allowing languages other than English to participate in DNS may open a can of worms, but it is at least a significant advance that addresses a fundamental flaw in the Internet. (How would you feel if all internet addresses looked like 啤酒女孩和快速的汽車.可卡因, and you just had to deal with it if you wanted to use the internet?)

But in this case, I also fail to see how this really benefits anyone other than those who manage to monopolize and monetize TLD.

I agree. I think a viable solution would be something like if you haven't done something with in 1 year then the domain becomes available. I personally hate getting an idea, checking through domains only to see someone waiting for someone else to purchase their domain that they bought for $10 bucks off godaddy.

So domainers only have to upload a Wordpress and post some blog post (with copied content) and they have done something with the domain,that is not the solution

Parking is hard to fight. How do you define appropriate usage? Then, once you have, how do you deal with the services which will emerge to populate your domain while you squat?

It's trivial to fight. Just raise the amount that the first-level registrar pays ICANN to something like $10/year. ICANN gets a huge pile of money and speculative domain squatting becomes, with rare exceptions, uneconomic.

Domains probably get more expensive for the rest of us, but I can live with that.

What do the first-level registrars pay currently? Would that bump cause the yearly cost for the domain-buyers to increase by $10? If so, I don't understand why that's enough to have the effect against parking.

Problem: The .com and similar namespaces are crowded. As someone who has been searching this weekend for a domain, the sad fact is that a huge number of domains are simply "Parked free, courtesy of ..." or "Coming soon", or "Under construction", or "This domain is for sale, please contact..." In short, domains are being bought up and not used, and the commons is ruined.

Solution: Increase the price of .com and .net and other tlds to approximately $X. End the domain squatting market and put the sort of implicit requirement that the domain must generate $X for you to want to hold on to it into the equation. Now, let's argue about where $X is.

"In short, domains are being bought up and not used, and the commons is ruined."

How are "the commons" ruined?

Domains (as a business) has been going on since domains were available and some people recognized they would have value and bought them up. Call it "squatting" if you want (a derogatory term) which came up back in the day and plays no relation to the traditional use of "squatting" (thank the media for that one everybody just repeats it now).

Real estate has also gone up in value and there are people who recognized and took a chance on that and have made money as well.

"Solution: Increase the price of .com and .net and other tlds to approximately $X. End the domain squatting market "

The price of .com (and all else) is effectively determined by contracts that ICANN has negotiated with the registry operators (Verisign in the case of .com) who then sell to the registrars (like godaddy and the much loved on HN namecheap).

Squatting is an accurate description for rent-seeking behavior that levies a cost on the internet community at large. Unlike land -- a physical, real resource -- domain names exist at the discretion of ICANN, the bodies responsible running the root name servers, the infrastructure providers that default to those root name servers, and ultimately, the internet community.

In that regard, they're even more of a manufactured monopoly than any other form of 'intellectual property'; they require no investment in of themselves, and exist at the mercy of the voluntary participation of the network at large.

In this regard, they're most similar to IP address allocations, which are now subject to considerable constraint and no longer freely available for abuse, as providing unrestricted IP allocations is damaging to internet health.

Likewise, supporting rent-seeking domain squatter behavior is damaging to those that would make beneficial use of the domain name space.

"domain squatter behavior is damaging to those that would make beneficial use of the domain name space."

How would you propose to determine beneficial use of a domain name?

For example let's say the domain "pifflesnort.com" was taken by someone in 2003 who decided to use it periodically to post a list of movies they had watched on TV. Now you come along (in 2013) and you want it to do something more than that (say do some serious writing). But it's taken already. Let's go further and say that it wasn't taken so you grabbed it. Now someone else comes along and wants it for the name of their new foundation.

Where exactly do you draw the line and what constitutes "beneficial" use of the domain? Do you plan to have a body of people deciding that?

(just checked by the way and pifflesnort.com is "parked". Of course that doesn't mean it wasn't used last year and that doesn't mean it isn't used for email (or an ftp server etc.) and that doesn't mean that the owner isn't hard at work on a website but hasn't launched yet either.)

I don't think it's difficult to draw a line between a dude keeping a list of movies he watched and a "This domain may be for sale, meanwhile search for shoes and mortgages" clone page.

We shouldn't be afraid to call things out for what they are. The dude with the movie list is doing it because he enjoys it, so what if only a handful of people in the world ever read it. The clone squatter page on the other hand, provides nothing of interest to anyone and exists solely as a means to extort money.

Except for one thing.

The "dude" with the movie page could be someone who fully intends to actually sell the domain when the right buyer comes along. People already do this type of thing. Put up a "kinda sorta page" that looks and quacks like a duck.

Once again, how are you expecting this is going to get enforced exactly?

As an aside buying and selling domain names is a valid business model and has been around for quite some time.

People who managed to register domains back in the beginning were confronted with almost unlimited inventory and had to decide what to register at the time at what was $100 per domain (for two years later lowered to $70 for two years). [1]There was no guarantee they would be able to sell the domains that they registered. If there was they would have registered more than they did. Later once the top names were grabbed others took advantage and actually spent real money to buy them with the hopes of reselling (say buying something for $50,000 and hoping to wait a number of years and sell it for $300,000). Some of those people have made money and some are still sitting on those domains.

[1] And of course prior to that domains were free but they actually vetted the applications so there was somewhat of a constraint on what you could register. Additionally the utility wasn't as obvious as it was even a year or two later when Network Solutions (the sole bidder on the contract) asked to be able to charge because of the amount of domains registered exceeded the original intent (or whatever) of the contract.

Most everybody here has likely had some kind of issue with domain squatters. Don't pretend it's a desirable business model.

Squatting is a valid business model, but so is selling child pornography, heroin, or human body parts.

>I don't think it's difficult to draw a line between a dude keeping a list of movies he watched and a "This domain may be for sale, meanwhile search for shoes and mortgages" clone page.

For a human, it's not that difficult. But if you pay that human $15/hour and he does a site every two minutes, it costs you 50 cents to check each website.

> How would you propose to determine beneficial use of a domain name?

"I know it when I see it" (and you probably do too).

> Where exactly do you draw the line and what constitutes "beneficial" use of the domain? Do you plan to have a body of people deciding that?

Sure. We already have that for IP block assignments.

>Solution: Increase the price of .com and .net and other tlds to approximately $X.

I don't like it. Makes things more expensive for normal people.

How about this: Impose a fixed $20,000 fee on the sale of an existing domain name. You can transfer for free if you like, but if you sell the domain then $20,000 is due immediately. Maybe make an exception if the sale is part of the sale of an entire business or other such things that normal people might do but squatters couldn't easily craft sham transactions around.

That's just price control, which always works great in market systems. /sarcasm

If you did that, squatters would just lease out domains instead of selling. $20,000 to be listed as the whois contact on the domain? No thanks, just agree to point it at my DNS servers and you can keep ownership yourself. Or you know, take this gift of bitcoin in thanks for free transfer to me.

>That's just price control, which always works great in market systems.

It's not a price control. Price controls are like minimum wage laws which regulate the price at which market participants can sell goods and services, and are generally broken because they lead to a shortage or surplus (depending on whether the price control is set higher or lower than the would-be market price).

This is effectively a tax. Taxes are an extremely effective method of behavior modification. Their primary economic consequence is to discourage the taxed activity, which is undesirable in the case of e.g. employment, but in this case is exactly the desired outcome.

>If you did that, squatters would just lease out domains instead of selling.

Are you serious? Nobody is going to lease a domain name, because the minute the lease expires after you've put all your marketing efforts into telling everyone what "your" domain name is and having them use it, the squatter could just raise the price by a factor of a thousand and have you by the short hairs. And a lease that allows perpetual renewals should be considered a constructive sale for the purposes of the fee and require immediate payment.

>Or you know, take this gift of bitcoin in thanks for free transfer to me.

That would be fraud and could be subjected to criminal penalties. Also, the fee would apply to the seller, so the non-repeat purchasers just buy the domain name pursuant to whatever covert payment method the seller is using and then report the squatter to the authorities which costs the squatter the $20,000 plus penalties and gives the buyer the satisfaction of sticking it to the jerks who were squatting on the domain they wanted.

It seems like this solution means that if you want to have your own domain, either you must be rich or the website must be profitable. You're basically saying that only the rich should have access to domain-branded blogs and other non-commercial sites, and everyone else can make do with subdomains like a blogspot or blogger website. I think raising fees would have consequences for well-intentioned users far beyond the effect it had on domain squatters.

In particular I refer to the .com namespace which, after all, should be used for commercial purposes. We already have .name and so forth for personal sites. Given that .name presents the ultimate namespace collision factory we do come down to a scarcity problem though. Thoughts on how we can handle that?

Also: Note that I said we should argue about the value of $X. I did not at all imply that $X should be such that "only the rich" have access to the ability to purchase a domain. That said, people spend $1200 annually for cell phone service, which I think we can draw comparisons between and DNS. If a person pays $1200 a year for a number they can be reached at through the POTS, is it unreasonable to expect them to pay $X (which we still haven't defined, simply said should be higher than $10) to be reachable on the Internet?

That's an US centered view. No regular person spends anywhere near $100/month on cellphone service where I live, nor could many afford it. For $80/month, you can get a cellphone plan with unlimited sms and calls, 100mbps home internet, 100 TV channels, and a POTS-over-IP line. And yet, many still can't afford cable TV or home Internet.

And this is the problem is pricing global product and/or services; what's reasonable in a market like the US is prohibitively expensive in many others.

"It seems like this solution means that if you want to have your own domain, either you must be rich or the website must be profitable"

Not really. Looks like the namespace is big enough for all of us. Your post made me curious how crowded the .com space really is and within 30s of trying, I found this free gem: notrichbuthappy.com Nothing wrong with it for a blog, right?

Not at all. I wasn't saying the .com namespace was crowded. I was responding to someone who thought it was and who thought the appropriate solution was increasing domain registration prices.

From my understanding, there also was/is a loophole that allowed squatters to hold on to a name without cost for a period. Once it rolled off, they were able to grab it again at no cost. Don't recall all of the details or whether the loophole was closed, but at one time it powered a lot of the squatting activity.

You are talking about "domain tasting". It was closed because it wasn't good for the registry operators (once again Verisign in the case of .com and .net).

That said there is a cost. A registrar needs to keep money on deposit with the registries for the domains that they have purchased. So if they have a constant 1000 domains being registered and dropped and registered it will cost them money. They will make that money somehow from the registrant (in addition to a registry closing the loophole for other reasons).

Actually, what I was referring to is known as "domain kiting":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_tasting#Domain_kiting

"Domain tasting should not be confused with domain kiting, which is the process of deleting a domain name during the five-day grace period and immediately re-registering it for another five-day period. This process is repeated any number of times with the end result of having the domain registered without having to pay for it."

Apparently, there was no cost to the squatters.

You just need to research, pick up the phone or email and negotiate. Even squatters know the relative value of domains fairly well and you'd be surprised how many names are held by someone who doesn't even remember he owns them.

One should never pay money to squatters. It only encourages them to proliferate. If everyone would just let them keep paying yearly fees for thousands of domains nobody ever buys then they would eventually go out of business.

But that would kill all the cool/gimmicky sites that don't make any money (like zombo.com etc, not to mention all the world's blogs...!)

It's a little unnerving that large companies want control over some entire gTLDs. I wonder if Google will let iOS app developers have ".app" domains? I doubt it.

For example, here are some relevant portions from Google's applications for the .app gTLD:

(Note: Charleston Road Registry is a company wholly owned by Google.)

The proposed gTLD will provide Google with direct association to the term ʺapp,ʺ which is an abbreviation of ʺapplication.ʺ The mission of this gTLD, .app, is to provide a dedicated domain space in which Google and select members of its application developer network (“Network”) can enact second-level domains that relate to the offering of Google’s and its Network’s applications and application-specific content. Charleston Road Registry expects uses of the gTLD may include but are not limited to Chrome applications, web applications, Google App Engine applications, Android applications, and mobile applications on other platforms. The proposed gTLD will enhance consumer choice by providing new availability in the second-level domain space in which Google and its Network can deliver new content and offerings. It also creates new layers of organization on the Internet and signals the kind of content available in the domain.

Charleston Road Registry intends to operate the proposed gTLD as a closed registry with Google as the sole registrar and registrant. The goal of the proposed gTLD is to allow Google and its Network to manage the domain name space for their application offerings. The proposed gTLD will provide Google and its Network with the ability to customize domain and website name application offerings to signal to the general population of Internet users that .app websites are indeed managed by Google. The specialization goal of the proposed gTLD is to extend the Google brand and reputation to each .app second-level domain. This specialization provides a mechanism by which Google and its Network can easily link and manage their applications and related services. This specialization makes it clear to Internet users that this is the authoritative and designated space where they can find Google’s and its Network’s applications offered in association with the Google brand and accessible via differentiated and streamlined web addresses.

The text you copied explicitly states that they would be opening this up to other platforms:

and mobile applications on other platforms

Not that I necessarily agree or disagree with the expansion of these TLDs, but Google is hardly the kind of bad actor I would worry about.

If you read the quoted sections further:

The proposed gTLD will provide Google and its Network with the ability to customize domain and website name application offerings to signal to the general population of Internet users that .app websites are indeed managed by Google. The specialization goal of the proposed gTLD is to extend the Google brand and reputation to each .app second-level domain. This specialization provides a mechanism by which Google and its Network can easily link and manage their applications and related services. This specialization makes it clear to Internet users that this is the authoritative and designated space where they can find Google’s and its Network’s applications offered in association with the Google brand and accessible via differentiated and streamlined web addresses.

So all .app domains would be Google branded? That hardly bodes well for "all mobile applications on other platforms".

Or whether Google would allow WordPress blogs to use the .blog domain? From what I recall, they intended to make .blog exclusive to BlogSpot.

I somewhat doubt that most of these new domains will catch on. We already have .jobs, .aero, .travel and .mobi which I have yet to run into while browsing the web.

Plus people have already gotten used to recognizing a domain name simply by having a string of characters followed by .com or one of the other popular TLDs. Trying to keep them from prefixing the domain with www has been a losing battle.

I could see .app taking off though.

I can imagine this could change in the future. Just a matter of educating the people and if companies of this scale decide to do it, they certainly have the resources.

Incentive for corporates could be branding marketing. As we know, .com is crowded. Could be easier to push http://aging.beauty into peoples minds than some clever .com variation.

Currently users solve the problem by using Google or Facebook, but that is not in the interest of businesses. They probably would like to see the customers coming directly to then, instead of going through search engine (where user is bombarded with messages from competitors)

>" Just a matter of educating the people and if companies of this scale decide to do it, they certainly have the resources."

As others have pointed out, we've had things like "travel", "biz", "pro", "me", "mobi", etc for some time now. Not many legit sites operate under these, so I don't really think that these new ones have a big chance. Consumers are already confused about what "www" really is and there is a lot of bad / not-quite-correct / flat-wrong info about what "www" is if you ask even folks who self-identify as "tech savvy".

I sense a lot of consumer confusion coming up, a lot of malware / marketeers using these things, snakeoil SEO firms insisting on them, brands buying up tons because they're scared, and generally a bad time for domains.

me is actually the ccTLD for Montenegro.

All of these just sound spammy, but I'm more concerned with what happens when REAL companies start using "aging.beauty" as right now the "weird" TLDs are a big red flag to warn me that it's probably just some SEO junk and not what I'm really after.

Teeth whitening solutions, anyone?

I don't know what to expect if all those new TLDs start to catch on. Even today, with all these startups using TLDs such as .io, .ly, .it, etc, I have trouble remembering their exact domains.

Google has the clout to make it happen by favoring the domains they want to control on search.

Others not so much.

This would get them into big troubles, at least in the EU.

Doubt it, Google will add another section like they do for News, Images, Products etc.

This is why we need something like namecoin to take off: http://dot-bit.org/Main_Page

Yup; let us know when ya'll are done with the ICANN shenanigans so we can start implementing P2P DNS more widely, start publishing worthy content on it to draw people to it, then take back what is rightfully ours:

The Internet.

An open requirement from ICANN won't prevent Amazon requiring something outrageous ($1'000+) per domain that most won't afford.

Any open requirements should come as a maximum price limit for creating new additional entries under the TLD.

Hopefully they'll also include non-discriminatory pricing (so that the owner of a TLD won't be able to raise the rent once a specific domain becomes popular in traffic/sales).

That would be a PR nightmare for Amazon - instead of the PR coup that giving them away for free would be. Would be one helluva promotional tool for AWS if it came with unlimited free .app domains.

I don't understand why people are so quick to assume companies are buying these up for nefarious reasons or to harm consumers.

> I don't understand why people are so quick to assume companies are buying these up for nefarious reasons or to harm consumers.

Because, historically speaking, that's what big faceless corporations usually create monopolies for.

It's not that they're against consumers, it's that they are for themselves. This rarely aligns with what's best for consumers on a small scale.

This is the exact opposite of a monopoly. Everybody and their sister is going to have their own extension and anybody who can afford one can still buy their own.

Everybody and their sister is going to have their own extension and anybody who can afford one can still buy their own.

so I can get a .shop extension too after Google gets the one and only?

I don't think so. Based on what they wrote in their application for the 'app' tdl, Google, in the name of Charleston Road Registry, plans to totally close the TDLs they get :

think about them like really expensive .com's and this will be easier to swallow. you can't get google.com or sex.com because they are taken - but you can get any other .com that is available. or you can get on somebody elses domain for free like .blogspot.com .wordpress.com .tumblr.com etc.

there are a lot of reasons i don't like that ICANN is doing this but fear that these companies are going to employ abusive monopolistic tactics is not one of them. and i think ICANN is likely to just ignore such complaints, because they don't make any sense. this is the opposite of a monopoly and these companies would be dumb not to share the extensions.

edit: his comment was edited after I typed mine and I'm too lazy to change it back and forth-

for $1 million plus in costs. You are confusing the extension with a domain name. The point is not to have ONE company own and control an extension (like .com) and all the domains in it. ICAAN should control them and then allow people and corps to register domains within that extension.

"The point is not to have ONE company own and control an extension (like .com) and all the domains in it."

This has already happened. Afilias controls .info. Public Interest Registry controls .org. (Afilias actually runs the backend operations of .org for Public Interest Registry.)

I operate a registrar and I pay money to both of them. When we call support (rare) the same people take the calls for both TLD's.

I was around when this happened and .info was being floated and passed on an opportunity to invest in it.

I'm not confusing anything I'm trying to put it in terms you will understand.

One company does control .com right now, and .net. Their name is VeriSign. Just like VeriSign administers those, Google is going to administer .shop.

Wrong, they do not control anything, they administer it. I can register any .com that is free and Verisign cannot stop me. Google can refuse to allow anyone else from having televisions.shop or whatever.shop

That's a theoretical problem that wont matter in practice. Google only has two practical options: they can make .shop completely open and operate it just like .co or .io, or they can lock it down and use it only for themselves, in which case it will essentially just be a vanity domain, not an extension.

If they choose the latter, just use any one of the hundreds of other extensions that will be available.

I hate that ICANN is doing this - but not because of some theoretical power it technically gives Google.

I understand what you're saying, but not sure it will be that benign in practice.

That is, given that the domain format requires a minimum of two parts (the TLD and one other), ownership of entire swaths of possibilities/permutations can be locked down via complete ownership of one TLD.

I'm still trying to figure out why ICANN charges what it does for just registering a domain name. Yes--close to $7.00 a year is too much for what they actually do.

If you have a problem with your domain name, and try to go up against Corporate Lawyers--you're in for a loosing, expensive battle.

That $7.00 times millions equalls a lot of money, but they won't, actively, defend your rights with competent lawyers.

The whole name game has irritated anyone involved with website design, at least in my world.

In the end, the poor and middle class webmasters need to stick together, and fight Corporate Abuse of Power.

TLDs were originally going to communicate something to the user, they never actually did.

Now they represent... how many wasted keystrokes per day? If Berners-Lee agonizes over the second slash after http, then ".com" has to be one of the biggest failures of usability in history.

TLDs were designed by folks who guessed most of the internet would be used for governments and non-profits, and commerce would be this token side niche. Now that nearly everything's .com (or under a quirky country domain to sidestep the whole system), it's lost any significance.

We should scrap it as soon as possible.

People that don't understand the DNS hierarchy (and history) are doomed to call things failures that were not, and doomed to find new ways to break DNS in the future.

I don't remember the bit in 882 where they said "typing characters that will be rendered vestigial in a few decades is a victory for usability," nor would it be true if they did.

I'm not saying we should return to hosts files, but that doesn't mean we can never do better.

And replace it with what? If everyone has to fight over a global namespace we just wind up with a different sort of problem.

I think the point of the comment you're replying to is that everyone is fighting over a global namespace now, but one that unnecessarily appends ".com" to everything in it.

That interpretation might be overly colored by my personal view of things.

However much I might be inclined to agree that we have a global namespace now, I can't agree that ".com" is 'one of the biggest usability failures in history'. The point has been made before, but seeing "facebook.com" immediately signifies a website to people, using fewer characters than "find us on the web at facebook" ever really could. I found it very interesting to see mainland chinese advertisements with web addresses - for example, renren.com might appear in an ad as "人人网". The two 人 would be written in pinyin as "ren", and directly represent the name of the site; the 网 is pronounced "wang" and means net (here, the internet), but actually represents the unpronounceable suffix ".com". Thus I argue that ".com" is not even a clear loss in usability; it's providing context that people want.

a) That was indeed my point,

b) I was gilding the lily a bit, that's fair,

c) I remain skeptical the benefits exceed the costs, (given the viability of sites that don't end in ".com", and the fact no one's raising "lack of context" as a counterpoint to expansion of TLDs), but you make a provocative point. I could see it as an open question.

AOL Keywords ;)

The only one I find even remotely interesting is .blog nothing else.

In the end the rule for which domain you should get is: .com .com and .com.

I think it'd be smarter to just add 10 - 20 new names for specific categories rather than an extension for every brand you can imagine ".apple, .amazon, etc". This could lower the resell price of the .com slightly and raise revenue. Like .co did but it wouldn't confuse the user heavily as this move feels like its changing everything.

Like .biz, .travel and .museum? :P

I hope this works. The attempt to grab .ski domains for ski related companies only [1] would keep me from obtaining my dream email address.

[1] http://www.dot-ski.com/2012/06/13/starting-dot-application-f...

Could you create a viable alternative DNS root today, preferably one without TLDs at all? It seems like none of the attempts so far [1] gained much traction.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_DNS_root

No - the network effect here is huge, and so is the cost of change.

Attempt number 1000 to generate crowd's excitement over long, worthless and often confusing domain extensions. Instead of adding really useful and short two-letter extensions, such as .js and others.

I completely agree. I'd love it if there was a broader selection of "anagramable" 2 letter extensions that aren't encumbered with geopolitical associations (e.g. ly=Libya, ir=Iran, etc.) I have zero interest in .long_noun extensions.

This is pretty silly. ICANN is only opening these domains so they can collect $100k application fees from big companies so of course big companies are taking them over.

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