I made the mistake of buying a .co.de domain and putting my professional email on it. One time it was down for a couple of days, no .co.de domains would resolve and I couldn't get my emails, so I took it upon myself to find out who to contact and actually got them to fix it. Now they've improved and my email is down due to DNS issues only a few hours every quarter!
Reliability is really bad for rare gLTD's, I would say don't even bother. Keep important systems on .com and friends.
.co.de is just a standard SLD you could have owned and operated if you had registered it like any other domain first. A gTLD requires significant up front investment and review+approval from ICANN after demonstration you have the technical capacity to run it, as well as being an actual top level domain.
Not that every gTLD is the pinnacle of reliability (see this post) but your experience with a generic SLD isn't indicative of anything in this case.
Aren't a lot of ccTLDs and most new gTLDs nowadays hosted by a few big DNS providers? When .io was found to be vulnerable to a takeover attack a few years ago they switched to one of those providers. I don't know which, though.
I follow domains a bit out of curiosity. I'm pretty bullish on the new TLDs (as a concept), but I would say .com is the only truly safe TLD. It's the only one where an attempt to remove price controls should see a lot of resistance and any other shenanigans will cause outrage.
After that, .net and .org are still pretty safe, but we already saw the first attempt at usurping .org recently. Some of the ccTLDs (country code) look ok if you're a citizen in a developed country. For example, CIRA is a fairly decent registry for .ca (although they seem to have ghosted me after I asked something more than a trivial question of them).
Next is everything else IMO. ICANN and the registries have egregiously mismanaged and squandered every opportunity with the new gTLDs. However, even with that incompetence, the new TLDs seem to be catching on more and more. I think that's an indicator of how successful the industry could be with better leadership.
One of ICANN's primary responsibilities should be to protect registrants from predatory registries. The .storage anecdote in this thread is a good example of ICANN failure IMO. If they want to push adoption of the new gTLDs, ICANN needs to make predictability and risk minimization for registrants their #1 focus.
The second most important thing for ICANN should be to publicize and criticize discrimination against new TLDs. For example, the whole .xyz being blacklisted everywhere that was on the front page a few weeks ago is the kind of thing ICANN should work to resolve.
As for the registries, most of them suck and they're owned / run by private equity. It's the greediest of the greedy as suppliers with toothless oversight from ICANN and they wonder why they can't get any traction. If the large registries like Donuts were managed better, they'd be lobbying ICANN for registrant protections like price controls. They'd also be actively participating in efforts to prevent discrimination against all new TLDs.
Domains have unlimited supply and the pricing games used to create artificial scarcity are pretty stupid. The goal should be to sell more, not to have perfect price discrimination. I don't mind the $100 / year premium domains for super awesome keyword combos because they deter squatting and that's not too expensive for a small business or individual, but it's really unclear what the rules are regarding price increases on those.
There are also secondary markets that are completely ignored. Reputation attestation could be a huge secondary market for domain registries since they're the only ones that have access to identity info now that WHOIS privacy is a default. The TrueNames thing from Donuts kind of goes to that, but it's a gimmick that's 100% tech (no moderation) and doesn't work very well (I can get typos of my domains with 1s instead of ls).
As for real metrics, I've never seen any. The registries are pretty much all private AFAIK. In terms of TLD failure, they have to put up a bond that would allow someone else to run a TLD for something like 10 years, so pure abandonment isn't a risk based on what I know.
Uniregistry is on my personal don't trust list [1] due to increasing pricing on existing domains. Donuts at least grandfathered existing registrants when they increased prices [2]. The registry for .storage will instantly go on my "never deal with" list if I can find info to corroborate the assertion in this thread.
Aside: feel like reliability of bunch of the newer TLDs and acceptance of them has increased a ton in the last 2 years. Way more random sites out there like .dev .xyz .fun .club too that are used by people for small and large projects. I recently was out shopping for something new and noticed more which companies own huge swathes of the newer TLDs... donuts Inc etc... And they seem to be doing an ok job maintaining etc. All good. The .com space is still king but having more options that aren't polluted like the last round of new TLDs like .biz got, or write ccTLD hacks like .up and whatever that were popular for awhile but risky and expensive, is good.
geez sorry mobile typos/corrections messed up last sentence:
The .com space is still king but having more options that aren't polluted like the last round of new TLDs like .biz got, or various ccTLD hacks like .io and whatever that were popular for awhile but risky and expensive, is good.
We should not have a domain system. Any person should be able to register any domain just like with the left half, like I should be able to get hi.lolthisdomaindoesntexist as a domain. I should get it straight from ICANN for a low flat fee. This is how we fix the sketchy registrars and "premium domain" nonsense.
I was an early user of the .storage TLD and registered a domain for three years. Fortunately I did not build my core business around that particular domain - a new registrar took it over and wants thousands of dollars for the renewal. I don't think there is much if any protection for predatory pricing on gTLD renewals.
The inconvenient reality of domain "ownership" is that you don't own anything at all. You rent it, and there's no control on increases or fees like other types of rent/lease. It's sort of like renting a car for a year and being surprised you don't have any equity when you turn it back in.
Sure, I agree with the principal of the idea. Decentralization is always a great thing and having a few gatekeepers for the popular TLDs is not ideal. In reality though I am not sure how this would work from a DNS perspective. If anyone can define a TLD, you would need mappings of those at a DNS root level. This is a pretty high burden on the root resolvers. You would almost need to decentralize the root functionality of DNS. This would pretty much take a rewrite of how DNS clients function as root resolvers are normally hard coded in. Anyone have thoughts?
I was more saying there needs to be no system of domains per se. Let any person register any "internet address" and ICANN maintains authoritative servers for all internet addresses.
I agree with the “straight from ICANN” part. Having a private entity maintain your address is not unlike yourname.someoneelse.com, you’re at their whim.
Also I see no reason why ICANN has given out the right to sell these domains to private companies that do nothing but seek extra rent on the ICANN domain price. Let alone why governments were given control of the two letter domains, so ly can kick you off if Lybia thinks you have something objectionable.
Because ICANN doesn't want to be in the business of running a couple hundred domain registries. They are not at all equipped to do that, either on a technical or a staffing level.
Domain squatting could be a problem, but we would have less of one with "investors" who speculate on "premium" domains. My mistake typing wrong word above, I've fixed it.
