What are your opinions/impressions of top-level domains (i.e. .com & the like)?

I liked how things were some time back, before TLDs were generally opened up.

Aside from a very few TLDs, I don't think that the newer TLDs have added a lot. And they've created a number of problems, like companies going out and registering a million TLDs, because there's no clear place for one to live and they don't want people spoofing their domain. That's great for domain name registrars, but bad for everyone else.

Some have slightly shortened domain names, but the gain is pretty small, and most people don't use domain names anyway, but search engines. What actual utility is provided by having a ".diamonds" TLD? Were diamond vendors having a problem presenting themselves as diamond vendors? Many relate to specific businesses (".dental"), and while maybe possession of a particular domain could be useful to indicate that someone has passed some kind of licensing standards, that's useless at a TLD level, because there's no global licensing authority for dentists.

Honestly, the only TLD I can think of off the top of my head that I've really seen what I'd call reasonable use made of is .int, for international organizations. I think that that's legitimately-different-enough from .org, which was used as something of a catch-all for non-company uses, that it's helpful to identify official sites.

Some TLDs were just abysmal. I was pretty thoroughly disappointed that ".biz" went through -- that is a prime example of registrars just trying to get additional registrations from .com registrants to avoid people exploiting confusion. There's just no justifiable reason for it. Nobody is going to want to operate a .biz alongside an identical .com; it just generates duplicate registrations and fees for registrars.

I think that introducing a new catch-all domain of some form was a good idea -- ".org" or sometimes ".com" used to be used for that. I think that .info is probably the most-successful example.

I think that the idea of a TLD with an entry reserved for each person is maybe interesting, but it'd require giving humans some kind of globally-unique identifier. We don't have that in 2024.

By-and-large, I would have not opened the doors to the flood of TLDs. I don't think that they've solved many problems, and I do think that they've created a number of issues.

EDIT: Actually, what I think would buy a lot more is a standardized structure for some domain names below country code domain names. For things like businesses, I think that that'd be kinda preferable. Countries generally do have extensive mechanisms for determining "who owns a name" that DNS could have simply used, but what we have today being used is mostly one global namespace and the collisions that that entails. My preferred route would be to have, instead of ".com" and various owners of names around the world smashing into each other, ".co.uk" like the UK has, and let the UK figure out who gets to own a business registration there. I think that some of the problem is that we in the US started out kind of with our "own" American TLDs, like .mil, .edu, and .gov, since we built the system. We could have put them under the US country-code TLD, like .mil.us, .gov.us, and .edu.us, but didn't, and so most other countries followed suit over time (not with those TLDs, since we kept those for ourselves, but with TLD use in general). Obviously, there's still a need for a lot of things at the international level, but a lot of what lives directly under TLDs is really stuff that's clearly not and will not be global, and it's produced collisions that don't need to happen.

Thanks to these new TLDs I can have an @national.shitposting.agency email address.

What a time to be alive.

I'm somewhere in the middle on it. Like mentioned elsewhere, some of it feels like it's just to generate additional business around domain registration while companies buy up duplicates to prevent spoofing. Also ".zip" is a fucking travesty.

They seem to work, and I am able to browse various web sites using them.

Personally, the childish side of me will always get a kick out of .wtf in a website name.

I despise the current system where ICANN lets you slap anything you want on the end of your domain. It means it’s easier to fake a company landing page and it’s a cash grab from an organization that’s supposed to be a non profit. The original domain hierarchy created easily recognizable structure where now it’s just anarchy.

Medicare.com (and their tv commercials) was a good example of misleading people. Some cities and states are using .com sites when they should be using .gov.

The only new TLDs I find useful are .blog and .tv (for streaming sites, not Transylvania). And not many sites are using those.

I think that the whole DNS syntax system was poorly designed, that the original division in seven top-level domains (.com, .net, .mil, .gov, .org, .edu, .int) was short-sighted, government/country-based top level domains have some reason to exist but in practice everyone picks whatever (e.g. ".ml" URLs often have nothing to do with Mali, ".it" with Italy or ".ee" with Estonia). But it's damn easy to say that in two thousand bloody twenty four, so I don't blame the people creating this mess. (Plus fixing it would make an even bigger mess).

But I digress. I typically associate the original seven with old businesses. I have some weak suspicion towards services using country code TLDs to spell obvious words (like, say, "among.us"), but otherwise I associate ccTLDs with local stuff. No strong opinion towards newer TLDs.

I like them. Just a personal opinion, of course.

I prefer my domains on .net for no real reason. I still get .com for some things.

The new ones won't catch on so it doesn't bother me that much. We should be grateful that the enshittification isn't faster when it comes to URLs

I still would have preferred if the top level domain was at the beginning of the URL (com.google). Would have made a lot of pushing way more difficult and more sense.

country ones, .edu, .mil, and .gov are all that matter. .org and .net never really worked out well as it just became a secondary catch all after .com. Ive never even seen .int used