Larry Page was held back by Google execs from flooding world with new dot-word domains Google's new mom, Alphabet, has sent the domain name world into a frenzy following its decision to set up home at the online address abc.xyz. But behind the decision lies a deeper truth: Larry Page, as Google CEO, wanted his search giant to go big on new dot-word domain names – like .book or .computer – but was stymied by …
There is no technical reason or excuse for the end of domain names to be limited. ICANN is a scam organization, ripping off everyone from consumers to registrar applicants, while doing little or nothing to crack down on abusive practices.
Canned top-level domains should have been abolished, opening up any string to registrants. whatever.wherever is a perfectly valid domain name, and yet we're still dealing with this fake "shortage" of domain names. If your last name is Walters, then you should be able to register bob.walters as a domain.
This is what a lot of us thought was finally going to happen when ICANN announced opening up TLDs. But nope: It turned out to be just another money grab from these do-nothing jerkoffs. If you've ever been privy to ICANN's internal communications, you know that it's a bunch of blowhards doing nothing for the Internet community at large.
>There is no technical reason or excuse for the end of domain names to be limited
There is. The whole point of DNS is the hierarchical model of authority that allows the process to scale both technically and administratively.
An entirely flat database (which is what would effectively result from a free-for-all in TLDs) would require an entirely different technical infrastructure and implies a single world authority for domain name registrations.
I don't see how this move to alphabet will help him anyway. Presumably the only suits than can stop him are the board. Seeing as all the old Google shares are being converted to Alphabet shares, so that Google will simply become a wholly owned subsidiary of Alphabet - nothing is changing. There'll still need to be shareholder representation on the Alphabet board.
To be honest, Page and Brin can probably overrule them anyway. As I understand it, they still control lots of votes, as they kept high voting weight shares for themselves at the float. Much as Zuckerberg did with Facebook, so he had 50% of the votes with only something like 5% of the shares.
Then again, as with Amazon, the shareholders can't complain they didn't know what they were getting. Google still make big profits, but like to invest heavily in odd areas of R&D, of which something might pay off handsomely. And Amazon don't do profits, they spend them all on growth.
I don't see how this move to alphabet will help him anyway.
Regardless of Googles announced reasons, the "Alphabet" restructure is most likely a response to the EU (the gov bit, not the population) becoming very anti-Google recently and looking like they'll take action.
Restructuring Google gets in ahead of that, meaning the EU politicians will have to go back to the drawing board to observe, collect new evidence, then deal with the new structure.
Good lord, what idiocy won't these people spout?
The collapse of the gTLD bubble can't come soon enough for me. It's too late for all the speculators to be wiped out (some took profits quickly), but maybe the remainder will suffer for their sins. And if they work up a class-action suit against ICANN on some pretext that would be lovely too. (Not that there's any legal grounds for finding against ICANN, but maybe the threat would make them think a bit harder before trying something like this again.)
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