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ICANN Registers Improper Domain Names
wetmondo writes "When ICANN was started in order to open up domain registration to competition, some people worried that this might create some problems. Well, here is proof that they were right. Yahoo! is reporting that they screwed up and registered domain names with dashes at the end such as e-.com. Domain names with dashes at the end causes ftp and telnet to fail."
For example, if you read this article, one guy grabbed "e-.com", "e-.org", and "e-.net" for his e-commerce site. Hello, there's something wrong here: .org sites are supposed to be for non-profit organizations, not a commerce site.
We need to education both IT managers and the general public that there is a significant difference between a .com and a .net address. If that understand was in place across the planet, then there should be no confusion between sites such as "whitehouse.gov" and "whitehouse.com", or "apple.com" and "apple.org". But, because we *know* people are stupid, they feel they have to do this.
IF people were intelligent enough to recongize this, then the next step would be to prevent any person or group to own the same name in any more than one TLD, unless sufficient cause is show (and that cause does NOT include trademark infrindgement). With the above in place, anyone would recognize that "apple.org" is not Apple Corp, but some organization that might deal with apples or Apples. Therefore, Apple would not have to grab all the domains in every TLD.
Then, using internationally determined standards, the next step would be to limit the registration of certain TLDs to appropriate people. .com and .biz to registered profit businesses, .net with the network infrastructure, etc.
Finally, and what I think is really important right now is to actively use the country code in domains. Browsers can easily be configured or patched to automatically end .com and the other TLD's in the appropriate country code (.us, etc) Yes, this means that by default, a person in the UK would have to go "www.apple.com.us", but this is necessary to remove the American-ization of the Internet, and would limit domain name disputes to within countries only (no etoys vs etoy problems).
But public education is the most important thing. I watch game shows which will generally have a higher cut of people than the rest, and it amazing me how dense they come to computer terms. They don't try to learn how it understands, they just want it to work. We need to actively promote education; I know that I will be trying to teach my mom the fundamentals of using her new computer rather than running through a simple list of steps just to type a letter. I'll try to apply the same to the internet stuff. But everyone needs to learn this. While we as the john doe internet surfer is still ignorant of how domain names work, IT managers are going to suck up all those domains for no real go reason.
Of course, the other option would be to increase the cost of registering domains, but this would hurt more than help.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
It's egregious to attribute this to ICANN and say that the cynics were right. Of course there will be small problems with any distributed system. The fault here, though, lays with the registrars who improperly registered names that shouldn't have existed. It's ironic that NetSol ends up being the good guy here (from one standpoint only, of course, not the domain owners' by a long shot!).
Hopefully this incident will give ICANN a kick in the pants as far as moving on to the next phase. There need to be more TLDs, and there need to be rules that allow those TLDs to expand the domain name universe, not just give trademark-grabbers more TLDs to register theirs in. The situation right now is getting ridiculous.
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lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
What's even more nuts is what is happening in the toll free number area. Large companies with 800 numbers (like 800-FLOWERS) just *had* to duplicate their numbers in 888, then 877 and you can bet when 866, 855, 844, 833, and 822 toll free "area codes" are eventually open, those will be duplicated too.
Quite a lot of discussion on this topic has been going on in comp.dcom.telecom for a few years now.
The only way that makes sense for trademark issues is to create a TLD for each tradmark field, there are about 40 of them. Then add a country code since envery country does not have the same system of tradmard classification. So, for example ,
www.macdonalds.food.us would sell Big Macs,
www.macdonalds.farm.us would do the EIEIO thing..
and etoys.merchant.us would leave etoy.art.uk alone.
There would be room for apple.comp.us and apple.music.uk and apple.food.* and apple.electronic.uk could be Apple Computer's UK site depending on how the UK/EU does it's Trademark classifications.
Starman97@Gmail.com (bring it on spammers)
It breaks various programs because it is an ILLEGAL name. (I think the standards have changed since the old days and are a bit more flexible). However, it is still recommended that domain names have the following form:
A domain name is a sequence of labels seperated by dots '.'
A label is a sequence of letters 'a..z', digits '0..9', and hyphens '-'. A digit may not be the first character of a label. A hyphen may not be the first or last character of a label. A label must be less than 64 characters in length.
Ryan