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If I'm understanding right, you can buy "twitter.sucks" for $200 and you own that, regardless of who owns .sucks as a TLD? Or is it a rental? You can separately purchase ALL ".sucks" for 185k? What happens if the owner of .sucks dies or goes to prison, do you also lose "twitter.sucks"?
Getting twitter.sucks is just leasing/buying a domain name, which is a lot more simple. Generally you pay for a set period, and have the option to renew it. I'm not sure what happens when a registrar closes down, other than it's likely someone else takes it over. The agreements linked below have sections describing what happens if a registrar closes down or gets shut down by ICANN for breaking the agreement... presumably someone else takes it over. There are surely other people who know more about this than I do.
You can start a new gTLD that nobody else has for $185,000, plus the cost of operating the registry. From what I understand it's basically a lease. As a registry, your job is to maintain a zone file for the TLD, and sell domains. (edit!) reading the contracts, you also pay them about $6,000 a quarter plus .25c for each registration for revenue over $50,000.
Here is the agreement ICANN has for people who start TLDs: https://www.icann.org/en/registry-agreements and it is fairly legal and arcane.
They have a FAQ about the gTLD program: https://newgtlds.icann.org/en/applicants/global-support/faqs/faqs-en
TLD, or top level domain, is the starting point of the domain name system. It's what comes at the end of the URL, and it's set up that way for very good reasons that I won't get into, because it would be a very long discussion.
You can think of the TLD a bit like a country, and the primary domain name, eg: "Twitter" as the company name. While "Twitter" is a valid business in the .com "country", it's unfounded in many others. So to push the analogy, it would be like McDonald's only having it's business in the USA, and someone in England starts a business in the UK, calling it McDonald's. This happens before McDonald's (USA) starts making any inroads into the UK to expand there. So the UK McDonald's owns the name and if McDonald's USA wants to expand to the UK, they can either buy the existing McDonald's company in the UK, or change their name for the UK. Same deal with domain names. If you own "Twitter" in the "country" (TLD) of .sucks, the owner of Twitter.com couldn't really do shit about you owning it.
There's the other obvious issue that if you're making a site like "twitter.sucks" you will have to be very careful not to infringe on their copy rights for things like their logo, etc. Especially if the basis of the site is to mock the .com version of the same.
DNS is a very interesting part of the internet. You can get rather deep into the structure and systems in use and how subdomains work and how complex they can be. For now, the only interesting quirk of the internet that I want to touch on is that there's technically a period at the end of every domain name (eg "twitter.com.") which is almost always omitted. That period represents the root of DNS, which is a thing that actually exists.
DNS engineer here, got two corrections to make if you care:
That's not entirely true. .sucks is walking an extremely fine line and if they ever grow big enough and piss off enough companies, they will be shut down. Larry Strickling, head of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration has spoken on multiple occasions about his concerns about gTLD (what people are calling "novelty" TLD's) abuse to redirect users incorrectly (either for parody or for malicious purpose) Source. ICANN absolutely will crack down if they think a gTLD is acting rogue as they would be afraid of the NTIA cracking down on them. Passing the gTLD rules was already very contentious for many reasons. Defensive domain list expansion being one of the biggest.
Surprisingly, no. Copyright infringement doesn't apply to parody. Unless twitter.sucks is a fully functional site that draws in revenue (and not just from the humor, but from actually having a directly competing product), then it's mostly safe from a copyright claim.
You make excellent points, I will defer to your knowledge for all the things you've mentioned.
Thanks for the reply. I work in IT and do a blend of system administration and networking, and I appreciate DNS intensely.
Thanks for all you do