13
votes
Google released a .zip web domain and people can't decide if it's the phishing apocalypse or just as bad as any other dodgy link
Link information
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- Authors
- Jacob Ridley
- Published
- May 18 2023
- Word count
- 625 words
I think the biggest problem here is that nobody at Google seems to have raised the potential issues with the .zip domain.
Or if they did, someone overruled them.
Anyone who stops and thinks about it for even a few brief moments can see any number of potential pitfalls with this.
Thinking up problems is the "brainstorming" phase and then you have to go through them and decide if they're important problems or not.
There's likely an internal design document going into it, but that doesn't help us because we can't read it.
It’s just common sense to not have domains that share names with common file extensions. .jpg, .pdf, .doc(x), .mp3 all don’t exist because they would have similar use cases—confusing and unnecessary at best, disastrously malicious at worst.
The fact that they didn’t exist before this, despite the hundreds of other silly TLDs, is evidence that someone considering the addition used basic critical thinking and realized: “Wait, that’s a terrible idea.” Somehow that didn’t happen this time at Google.
They also released .mov
People like to snarkily argue that we went through this with ".com" already so why worry about it with .zip and .mov, but I think that these are not equivalent.
There are parallels, yes, but .com files have never been commonly used or run by the every-day computer user like .zip/.mov. The move to approve these domains feels like another one of those that doesn't even remotely consider how regular every-day people use computers
In today's world, with tons of extensions, applications, and platforms that auto-convert text into URLs, you're going to have tons of accidental .zip and .mov links that could easily point to some malware domain/file
Yeah, the last time I actually interacted with a .com file was in the days of DOS, before the web was even a thing. However .zip and .mov files are still used by and likely recognizable by most computer users... which is why those domains are extremely problematic as potential malware vectors.
This is an interesting situation that understandably has been causing controversy. I can see how it's not as bad as some might initially think, since there are already plenty of ways to disguise links and people aren't that good at knowing which links are safe just by looking at them. However, to me this seems like a fatalist "things are already bad so what's one more bad thing?" type of argument. Also, what exactly is the demand for .zip as a domain? Seems like an unforced error.
I agree, but I also think that same argument works the other way. Why set one more trap door into the landscape of the interne that people can fall into? As you mentioned, why even bother creating this? Who is asking for .ZIP domains?