Talk:.com

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[edit] .com = common ?

Note that many think that .com is for "common" and it's becoming more and more popular and accepted point of view. There are even rename talks... Would adding that be NPOV violation? (posted by Muxec, noted added by Fudoreaper)

Please cite sources. .com has ALWAYS meant commercial, since it's very creation. Can you provide any evidence that .com = common? Until you can, i will regard this as a misconception propagated by misinformed and confused internet users, not so closely tied to the internet. &ndash: Fudoreaper 02:44, 15 October 2005 (UTC)

I've seen people alleging that it should stand for "community", too, but the latest official designation is still RFC 1591, which says it's "commercial". Anything else is simply an ignorant misuse, a sign of the dumbing down of the Internet. (Hey, why not make it stand for "Communist"?) However, despite the rampant misuse of the domain, I haven't seen such attempted redefinitions of it actually catch on as popular designations of its meaning, used widely in discussion, description, and registry/registrar marketing; people still either know it means "commercial" (even if they ignore this fact when they decide what domain to use for their noncommercial site) or they're totally clueless about what it actually means (but still think it's "cool", despite the dot-com crash of 2000). I don't think you'll find any widespread sentiment to the effect that it actually means "common", so it's a neologism on your part. The widely-marketed misuse of .ws as WorldSite or WebSite has more tangible support than your claims about .com as common. *Dan T.* 03:23, 15 October 2005 (UTC)

1] Just supposing that there was a siginificant movement for this renaming- what the hell would they mean by 'common'? That the subject of this site is common? That the site is "the most commonly used"? Ignoring idiocies, the only intelligent interpretation I can see, is that it would mean common, as in 'the commons' (property of the people), a.k.a public domain, therefore at total opposition to use by businesses and those agressively guarding copyrights and patents.

2] If it was to mean community, this would also be at total opposition to current uses. What do they expect, for Coka Cola to switch to .biz and let coke.com become a forum site (which i expect would be full of critism of Coke's ethics)!?!

Clearly neither have been thought out beyond the next pint, therefore should be ignored, except possible inclusion in a 'Misconceptions' section, if that was ever to be viable. I do 'thou notice the irony, in that given the way they act, you'd think that the whole of the American web industry believe .com = America. --Myfanwy 01:15, 22 February 2006 (UTC)

I used to think it stood for company.--Canadianshoper 00:17, 1 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Early entrepeneurs

Wasn't there a smart guy who earned a good sum by quickly registering websites such as mcdonalds.com etc, and later being able to demand millions of dollars by the company? Similarly I come to hink of the old whitehouse.com pornsite... 85.226.122.237 20:23, 17 December 2005 (UTC)

As I recall, Mcdonalds.com was registered by a journalist to show that he could, for the purpose of mentioning it in an article, and he later turned it over to McDonald's for token compensation. Whitehouse.com started as a political site, soon became a porn site, and continued that way until the domain was sold recently; it's now got a "temporary" page with ads on it with a "people search" site supposedly coming soon. *Dan T.* 20:53, 17 December 2005 (UTC)