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ICANN Has Approved New TLDs
dilip writes: "An Associated Press story mentions that new TLD's have been given the green light. It also mentions that there is no decision on how they will be doled out, what they will be or how trademarks will be handled.
Please note however that ICANN's own website doesn't have any mention of this yet (The story is dated the 16th, which is a Sunday, no doubt that the ICANN site will be updated on the Monday)" [timothy butts in:] John Jorsett points to this ZDNet article which says the domains include .shop, .tel and .news.
[That, of course, must be said in one's best Apu voice]
Fuck this shit! It's gonna be the fucking apocolypse man. Fucking registrations flying it from every fucking registrar. Shit. And the registrants are gonna be riding fucking net splits like on fucking IRC man with the simultaneous fucking reg attempts. There's only one fucking solution. I now repost the AC's comment:
The Solution: Allow ***ALL*** TLDs.
Seriosuly.
Allow anything to be used as a TLD.
HOWEVER, still require registrations to consist of domain name + TLD. i.e., you must still sumbit both parts to constitute a single registrationa application. The TLD itself cannot be registered to anyone. and remains open for anyone to use.
This would END squatting because it would be impossible for Microsoft, etc. to register all forms of Microsoft.* as doing so would require infinite money. This also allows same named entities to coexist. Apple Records can have apple.records. Apple computer can have apple.computers. A farmer in WA can have apple.farms. While another company can have foster.farms. Joe Apple can have joe.apple. NYC can have the-big.apple. All existing in parallel yet not conflicting with each other.
Unownable TLDs also ENDS the "domain brokering" business because specific domains cease to possess any value. If you have foo.com, foo.net, and foo.org, you can demand high $$$ from any foo entities. With infinite TLDs, there's always an alternative choice.
How to implement this from a tech POV? Use the first letter of the TLD to divide up the TLDs among the root servers to balance the load. Subdivide for common letters. Custom DNS software? Yes. But *only* for the root servers. The rest of us need not change a thing.
Will ICANN do this? Heck no. Bidding wars over limited domains generates big $$$. And trademark holders like the idea of "buying up all variations of our name so no one else can use it". So between the $$$ and politics, I suppose this sensible suggestion will never happen.
Seriously, how do they choose who gets what first, a lottery? You know there are going to be countless squatters ready with scripts to register anything in the english language in the first three hours. What mechanisms are in place to ensure that names are not simply auctioned or held on to by the domain registrars (network solutions come to mind?) instead of the public.
Unless there's some legislation forthcoming, this is going to be a litigation factory. Currently, trademark law (at least in the U.S.) permits companies who are engaged in widely different lines of business to have the same or similar names. If the established companies try to corner their names in every single domain space, even unrelated ones, there are going to be some ticked off folks. Just because I have salon.com, does that mean I get to have salon.banc if I don't actually have a bank? And what if I later establish a bank, does salon.banc have to hand it over to me? Just thinking about all this makes me appreciate why they've been haggling over this change for 5 years.
The setting: inside a small appliance/tv/stereo shop. I'm killing time dinking around with their WebTV display model when a random employee walks over and takes the keyboard from me. .com or it won't take the address" .org"
"Hi. Would you like to see a demo?"
"Umm... okay." (i'm killing time, remember?)
[Now the random starts going through his spiel. i interrupt]
"could you go to slashdot.org for me?"
"slash dot dot ord?"
"no, dot o r g"
"oh. sure."
[types in (i kid you not) www./..org.com]
"no no, s l a s h d o t dot org"
"oh."
[types www.slashdot.ord.com]
"no, no dot com, just dot org"
"oh, but you have to put in the
"um. no, seriously. just
"no, it's not like internet explorer. you have to put in the _whole_ address"
"uh..."[glance at watch]"um.. i need to get going.."
I thought the at-larges were supposed to be the counterbalance, the last bastions of hope for the average user to offset the awesome and frightening clout of the corporate droids. At the time people complained that at-large representation seemed to be merely a bone thrown by the powers-that-be, to defuse charges of corporate dominance.
Sadly, it seems such accusations were correct.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
I live in a town with a population of 4000, and I'm one of 2 people here that knows how to run a nameserver. So when I wanted a me.city.state.us, I had to set up the server, find a government representative willing to listen to a nerdie teenager, fill out a (paper) registration form, sign it in upteen places, and fax it. And this was after filling out the online form 5 times before they were satisfied with the information I'd provided. I actually went a little far in my description of the process. I had to stop at the 'find a government representative', because I had no idea who to talk to, and those I asked could have cared less. So I stuck to my .net domain, thank you very much.
Maybe its different in other counties, but its pretty worthless in the US.
--
I know it's a sore subject, but if they did .shop, why didn't they also do .xxx? Considering the publicity that the move to have .xxx created has been largely christian conservatives bent on eradicating porn from the internet, i don't see why just creating a .xxx tld and giving porn kings free reign over that tld is such a bad idea. atleast when you get spam that leads to a porn site, you'll know it's going to a porn site. and it will get rid of the misspelling problem and the whitehouse.com problem. Okay, maybe calling them a problem is a bad idea, but just as porn has its place in both movie rental stores and in book stores, can't we put porn on the internet in its own little nitch without pissing off too many people?
This isn't necessarily so. The problem with some of the existing TLD's is that they don't have any clear criteria for who will and won't be allowed to register a domain. Essentially anyone is allowed to register a .com address, so it's essential to preempt anyone else from getting desired domain names.
But if the FSF gets their wish to have a .gnu TLD, they can (and probably will be required to by ICANN) have a strict policy about what one has to do to qualify for a .gnu address. You might, for instance, be required to have a software project with the name you intend to register that meets FSF guidelines as free software. Thus there couldn't be an etoys.gnu unless someone had a free software program called etoys, and the fact that it was a software program rather than an online toy merchant would be adequate defense against trademark infringement. Similarly, the registrar for .sux might very well require that the owner of a copyright is forbidden from owning the corresponding .sux domain. It's perfectly reasonable in serving the purpose of the TLD.
The point is that the whole problem with the existing system is that there's a real shortage of top level domains. This wasn't a problem when the current system was established, because people weren't setting up personal internet addresses or a zillion different addresses for the same company with different names for each product. Now, though, there's serious collision between any person named Barbie who wants to set up a personal web site and Mattel Corporation, and you know who's going to win in that kind of a showdown.
If, though, there were a .mine or .per domain for personal web sites, and a .prod domain for product names, it would be obvious to anyone that barbie.mine was the personal web site of someone named barbie and barbie.prod was the site for Barbie dolls. Then all you'd need is a little bit of case law (or legislation) to show that these sites are sufficiently distinctive that a trademark holder doesn't have to sue to take down personal web sites and a lot of problems go away.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
And we thought the rush for the dotcoms was bad... Now that everyone is more aware of the potential worth of domain names the mad rush to grab up names is going to be overwhelming. I'm interested to see exactly how the fair/legal way to allow registration of then new TLDs is going to proceed.
.com, .net and .org allow a free for all.
We already have a bunch of big brokers calling every week asking when they can start to "pre-register" names from the new TLDs. This is absolutely insane if you ask me. I sure hope ICANN and the accredited registrars can work out a good plan otherwise all heck is going to break loose.
One way to possibly handle this is only allow registrants of a particular name the ability to register the same name in the new TLDs and then for unregistered names in the
That way we would stop, Joe Blow from registering yahoo.shop but if he comes up with a new domain like joeblowiscool.com he can register whatever he likes.
Nathaniel P. Wilkerson
NPS Internet Solutions, LLC
www.npsis.com
Nathaniel P. Wilkerson
www.haidacarver.com
The ICANN site has now been updated. You can get the preliminary report of their little chat-party in Yokohama here.
I strongly believe that trying to be clever is detrimental to your health. -- Linus Torvalds
Wow, after a couple years of waiting, we finally get an announcement that there will be new TLD's sometime soon. Furthermore, they will separately convene to decide which ones they will add, then hopefully get it done by the end of the year sometime. Gee, I can hardly contain my excitement.
I registered my hate for Jon Katz