The Failure Of TLDs

I’ve been setting up a site for my wife and I to help us keep in touch when we move over to the UK next year and to let us share photos with friends and family etc. Of course this leads to the fun of picking a domain name that makes sense for us and is easy to remember. Going through the list of names we thought up, “thesuttons” was the only one that we liked and was available – but only in a few TLDs.

See, thesuttons.net, thesuttons.com, thesuttons.org and thesuttons.id.au domains were all taken but thesuttons.info was available so I registered it and set up the site. Unfortunately, it turns out that .info domains are spam. Anything containing a .info domain name in any form is considered spam. MSN was blocking my messages with the address outright, AAPT considered an email with the address in it probably spam (and took multiple hours to actually deliver it) and Brisbane City Council seems to just block the site entirely.

The TLD system has long become meaningless with companies buying their name in all the TLDs, random people buying .org and .com domains and son on. It hasn’t actually been a problem though as it turns out people have brains and can work out whether a site is by a person, non-profit or company by reading the website rather than just looking at the domain name. It comes as a surprise to me then that so many of the new TLDs have been such appalling failures.

As I mentioned, only spammers need bother registering .info domains as they’re assumed to be spam anyway. .biz domains are the fastest way to make your business look shonky and noone uses .us except for ridiculous pin-the-dot-on-the-domain-names like del.ic.io.us or whatever the heck it is. The worst thing is that none of these really open up much new “domain territory” because companies essentially have to register their domain in all the variants and people tend to want one of the well-known TLDs for their site. I can see a lot of people heading off to thesuttons.com or thesuttons.net by mistake because they didn’t realize .info domains exist.

In the end I’ve done a bit of a land grab on domains and registered anything that looked vaguely usable and I’ll test them out to see how it goes. Right now you can get to the site by any of thesuttons.info, thesuttons.name or thesuttons.biz. We’ll see how it goes.

UPDATE: Confirmation that MSN blocks .info domains, though it’s not because they don’t like the domains, just a horribly broken filter for .info files to prevent viruses. I guess all that security training they did a while back is really paying off…..