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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.
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.."
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
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