The Net is Dead

Marco van Hylckama Vlieg on web technology, design, life and everything

A rant on internet domain names

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Tuesday Nov 1 2005

This is just a short rant to voice my disgust on the current situation on internet domain names. If you ask me, things are completely screwed. I got to think of how bad things really are when I was thinking about helping a friend to setup his own website for a special purpose. While I already knew it was going to be useless, I took a shot anyway and checked out whether hans.com or hans.nl were still available. Of course they weren't. I could have known. Hans.nl holds a blank page. I'll give the owner the benefit of the doubt and just assume there'll be a really nice site on it eventually.

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Now I would have felt perfectly fine about it if hans.com would host a nice website by a guy named Hans. I for one would love to have a domain named marco.com. Unfortunately for me there's a company named Marco which is the rightful owner of this domain. A perfect reason to own the domain and they actually host a website on it reflecting the fact that they ARE 'marco.com'. Not so with hans.com. When surfing to hans.com I landed on an ugly, clearly spammy looking page owned by a 'company' that registers just about anything they can get their hands on. It's the kind of page every surfer hates to land on. I'm not even linking to it because I don't want any of you to accidentally land on it. Yuck...

A similar thing happened to our beloved but unfortunately discontinued zonacolonial.com (again, no link, screw them assholes!). It was a glorious portal for the Colonial Zone of Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic that I have worked on for months, often long days and weekends too. Unfortunately my friend J.T. , who originally registered the domain, forgot to renew it even though our project was discontinued. Before I even realized the domain was taken by yet another 'company' similar to the one that owns hans.com. Sickening, really.

I guess we've seen it all. The 'all the good names were taken'-feeling. While our feeling of justice would at least be somewhat satisfied by finding out our domain of choice is taken by someone who's actually using it for a purpose in which the domain name is reflected, 99% of the time we get this dull feeling of injustice when finding out it's yet another case of a 'hijacked domain', registered by someone for the sole purpose of either getting ad-revenues with their ugly spammy 'search pages' or ripping other people off by charging huge amounts of money for a domain transfer.

I guess we're dealing with another example of why I sometimes feel the net is dead as a doornail...

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Commentary

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At 01 November '05 - 02:52 Bung Phê wrote:
It certainly sucks. I’ve run into the same thing with my original first name, which i am currently trying to register in a .nl domain.

Now i’ve moved all my current .net and .com domains to Dreamhost.com (thanks for that!!) i wonder what company you can suggest me to register some .nl domains.
At 01 November '05 - 02:57 Marco wrote:
I can recommend TransIP for managing it. They just rock with real-time domain management. Highly recommended. (and no, I don’t work for them )
At 01 November '05 - 05:20 Tomer Lichtash wrote:
I would rather think that languaged as we know it, has finished it roll on the net. A new language, should be invented for domain names. Words arn’t good enough, sadly. Or unsadly.
At 01 November '05 - 06:34 jamEs wrote:
I agree with you, the state of things like domain names is pitiful. So often good domain names are wasted when useful sites could be posted there. It just results in the bastardization of names or cumbersome addresses.
At 01 November '05 - 06:41 localhost wrote:
Tell me about it. I still would love to have any of the localhost.* domainnames. There is actually one for sale. They want a minimum of $750. And a domainname with 127001.* is not allowed…
At 01 November '05 - 06:55 weefselkweekje wrote:
A domain I let go of a while back has turned spam too. I didn’t fully realise at the time that a domain with a proper pagerank is worth hanging on to, if just to avoid this happening.
At 02 November '05 - 01:08 Bung Phê wrote:
And thanks again Marco. Registering went as smooth as you told us
At 03 November '05 - 02:45 Jules wrote:
I want ernst . nl !!!
At 03 November '05 - 11:49 bosmeneer wrote:
Just when you mentioned it, the bugmenot.com-domain has expired 5 days ago. And the Google-cache from [url=http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:dfNv1qIvI18J:bugmenot.com/+]yesterday[/url] is already different from the current site.

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