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Comment by bachback | Hacker News Reader

No, it is my impression that 99.999% seem to believe the same. No upvotes on HN, and only dirty jokes about it (how original). Quite amazing given that this is one the major changes of the internet's naming infrastructure. Think about use cases for example where a person or company owns a TLD and assigns sub-domains to products. That is tremendously powerful. Or use-cases where it improves search capabilities. For instance if every .lawyer would be assigned only to "registered lawyers", .lawyer would be meaningful. Alas the way it's going down is not optimal, but we will see.

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Registered where? California? New York? The Netherlands?

That's the problem with creating .lawyer, .plumber, etc. as TLDs rather than a subdomains of an appropriate ccTLD. There's not enough local oversight to make them actually valuable. If I were in need of a California lawyer, someone who owns a .lawyer.ca.us (administered by the state) would look much more trustworthy than someone who owns a generic .lawyer domain (could be a scammer in Nigeria).

Ditto for things like .paris and .london. There's no reason they can't be administered as paris.fr and london.uk respectively, and I'm disappointed that the national registries of these countries failed to offer enough incentives for people to prefer such subdomains. Besides, I can easily imagine residents of Paris, Kentucky (paris.ky.gov) and London, Ontario (london.ca) getting pissed with those big cities who think they can get away with exceptions like that.

Whatever rich law firm buys california.lawyer will probably do well in your google search.

Every registered lawyer will not be able to have a .lawyer by any remote stretch. If they ever do a .lawyer there will be an initial name grab for the "prime names", but past that you will have a very large majority of lawyers picking the least worst option between .lawyer .com or .whatever they can fit their name in

Also I dont see how product-name.tld is better than tld/product-name from a user point of view. What is stopping amazon from doing product-name.amazon.com right now?

Think about use cases for example where a person or company owns a TLD and assigns sub-domains to products. That is tremendously powerful.

I don't think I agree. People don't care about URLs after they have entered the first one into their browser, and for that, the shorter the better. Nobody likes typing long URLs with subdomains, that's why almost everyone uses Google to find any website that's not shortword.com.

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