Slashdot Mirror
ICANN And The Domain Game
MSNBC has a nice summary of the applications for new top-level domains recently filed with ICANN, which ICANN has just completed placing online. As you contemplate the applications, and perhaps consider commenting on them in ICANN's comment forum, this piece by Brock Meeks may come in handy for placing things in perspective. (Our last ICANN story explores this same topic.)
We need to go beyond the current TLD system, but what ICANN has done won't cut it. Introducing new TLDs as a short term solution won't work any better in the long run than just maintaining the .com, .org, .net, .** system. We need a dynamic system to introduce new TLDs as they are needed. If, 2 months from now, Stoughton, Wisconsin were to sucede from the US, we would need a system that can establish a new National TLD for this miserable little City-State. This would benefit the people if we introduced some security measures. For instance, a certain number of people must send in requests for the creation of a new TLD before it will be admitted. This would allow large organizations, or even large cities, to maintain their own TLD. I think this would be great.
Pax Digitalia
Mr Meeks is obviously very hostile towards ICANN for some reason, so I have to take his views with a pinch of salt. He also seems to have no idea who CORE are. Finally, he ignores the idea of opening up *all* top level domains. Could someone give me a concrete reason why this shouldn't be done?
I don't really know who maintains BIND nowadays, but whoever it has has the power to fix all this.
Just start an alternative domain name system and incorporate it into new versions of BIND. Most admins will leave the alternative in their install (why not?) and voila - instant acceptance.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
The funny stuff is that this article about a monopolistic position, business pressure over competitors and bad business practices is published on a web site running on a Windows server, optimised for Microsoft products.
How paradoxal life can be sometimes...
É que os desafinados também têm um coração
I like the idea, but I would feel nervous about it for the following reasons:
.infara to everyone downstream. A company sets up joetastic.infara for some god forsaken business idea. Then another ISP sets up servers that serve the TLD .infara. We now have two .infara TLDs with possible conflicts.
Say that I set up DNS servers that serve the TLD
Even beyond that, the content delivered by that specialized TLD would be limited to those people who use that DNS. There would not be as much universality as there is with the current set up.
Pax Digitalia
The current problems with toplevel domains are nog problems of DNS. DNS was meant to be used to give organisations a name on a global network. The problem with domain names today is that they are used to label content of a specific service on a network, namely HTTP.
HTTP uses hostnames as a basis to describe infomation and are now allmost part of the content. This sceme does not scale very well since you cannot possibly determin by a hostname what content may be on it or vice versa. The problem is not with DNS, it still works for the purpose intended. It is with URL's. They are based on hostnames and that is showing it's limitations. A scheme used in NNTP (news) is better (but by no means perfect).
New toplevel domains will not fix this problem, because the problem is not DNS, it is HTTP and that is what should be fixed.
I guess I just don't get it. They only new tld that i feel is absolutely necessary is .xxx or .sex because it allows the filtering of porn for the corp and home world. Everything else just seems like adding to the already chaotic system.
People complain up and down about domain naming and squatting and copyright infringement and other effluvia, and then in the next breath say that they want more tlds to add to the barrel of monkeys.
The answer to the inevitable question of "why not new tlds?" is that the current system does not handle registration and arbitration well now, so it can only get worse with more options.
Who the fsck is going to remember a domain name when there are 7693 tlds?
Ummm, Jon, aren't you supposed to be dead...? - Otter(3800)
Ths next step in this marketing stupidity will be when we will create countries and carefully choose their name to get a cool TLD. .sex TLD to become a zillionaire!
I'll create a country named South Eastern Xanadu and get a
____________________
Ni!
This is out of hand. I know removing TLDs sounds radical, but what about limiting them from the current set, to the current set including government extensions.
.zine or .fund or one of the soon to be 45+ variations.
As we have seen, with the exception of generic, i.e. "business.com", "travel.com", etc. Trademarks & Copyrights are protecting the business name anyway. Why should I need to be concerned with someone using mybusinessname.web or
I own mybusinessname and international courts seem to agree. They even appear to be leaning towards me owning the derivations (mybusinessnamesucks) too. It seems this process only ensures we will continue to litigate the ownership rights to the "mybusinessname" part in 45 new ways (plus every country).
TLDs served a purpose 15 years ago, when I wanted to know what type or who owned the site I was visiting. Back then it was an actual question, now it serves little purpose, as most browsers auto complete names anyway. TLDs should not be expanded at all and the process would be cleaned up considerably.
On ICANN's TLD correspondence page, there are two cases in particular that I find tragically hillarious. The first involves the folks that brib... er, bought the marketing rights to Belize's ccTLD, ".bz", which they have decided to market as "dot-biz." The second involves the company marketing (Western) Samoa's ccTLD, ".ws", which they are marketing as "dot-website" (though I swear I recall they were selling it as "dot-worldsite" -- whatever).
Anyway, ICANN's response to both is that the ccTLDs are established to serve the geographical community they represent, and should never be taken to mean anything other than what their ISO definitions imply: in this case, Belize and (Western) Samoa.
But what I found really interesting was that ccTLDs are assigned by IANA to be held in trustee by the particular country, and that discussions of "rights" are specifically "inappropriate" in regards to ccTLDs. In other words, the countries don't own their ccTLDs -- they are merely trustees acting on behalf of IANA -- and therefore they have no legal authority to transfer "rights" to said ccTLDs.
And what is more, ICANN's repsonses point to several authoritative sources, including USPTO guidelines prohibiting assignment of trademark status to TLDs alone (i.e., ".com" cannot be a trademark, but "biz.com" can). They also link to a particularly interesting court decision that holds TLDs indicate the type of services (like "fast food") rather than the source of services (like "McDonald's"), and therefore cannot qualify for protection.
At any rate, the correspondence links provide an insightful read.
"I came here to kick ass and chew bubblegum. I'm all out of bubblegum." MSE USC APX AIA CSI CASp
Well, they may have taken your TLDs, but
they can never take your...
FREEEDOOMMMMMM!!!
-- The Funk, The Whole Funk, And Nothing But The Funk
They shoudl go back to geographic. Period.
Ditch ALL generic TLDs.
Leave it regional.
---------///----------
All generalizations are false.
--
I like to watch.
I *hate* saying that, but there needs to be some hard and fast rules for registrations.
.com is a global URL and can only be used by global companies -- that is, companies with their business name registered in multiple countries.
.com, .cc and .sub.cc domains. Get them the hell out of every other TLD.
.home sites...
The first rule is that
The second rule is that every other business must register by country code and subdomain (state/province). If you have a national company, you get the country code TLD. If your company is smaller, you have to prepend your province/state. This allows "Harry's Hamburgers" to be owned by two different companies, one in Saskatchewan and one in Ontario.
The third rule is that companies can only register
The fourth rule is that there are no other specified TLDs. Open the entire thing up: register whatever the hell you like.
The DNS farms can deal with lookup perfectly easily: monitor TLD usage and organize the databases to provide the fastest lookups for the most-used TLDs.
Let the system sort itself out. You register "billybobweb.aint.this.fun" and you can expect the DNS to take freaking forever finding out where the hell you are.
Register "www.billybob.home", though, and chances are that it'd be looked up pretty quick, 'cause every @home cable subscriber and his dog will be setting up
I think that within a year, we'd have all pretty much settled down to a handful of common and *useful* domain descriptions, chosen by the users themselves.
And then bitchslap WICO upside the head. Ain't no one gonna confuse "www.coke.sex" with the cola product!
--
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.