ICANN Selects New Top Level Domains

Azog, joined by a bevy of like-mindeds, wrote with the news: "ICANN has selected several proposals for new TLDs for further negotiation. The selected entries, and their proposed TLDs, are: JVTeam (.biz), Afilias (.info), Global Name Registry (.name), RegistryPro (.pro), MDMA (.museum), SITA (.aero), and NCBA (.coop)." Here is the unanimously accepted resolution. cyrdog points to Wired's coverage, and pavelivanov points to the story at CNET. And as several people have pointed out, .web is conspicously absent, even though it seems like a shoo-in. Someone, somewhere is going to get that one day ... Update: 11/17 09:48 PM by H :Check out SatireWire's coverage as well *grin*.

Comments

weak start

[YoJ]

Is it just me or does this seem like a weak start for new TLDs? My guess is that these new TLDs will become the ghetto of domain names. Real businesses will have .com domains, and wannabes will have .biz. But new TLDs are always good, because they remove an artificial scarcity that damages small websites.

Why some obvious ones weren't accepted...

[Speare]

Apparently, it's not just a matter of their saying "gee, a .foo would be cool," but it's a matter of giving the new .foo over to the person/organization who submitted the proposal.

They dropped .xxx and .kids because the applicants weren't competent to run a registry service.

So, it didn't come down to logical divisions, but to registrars. Just like .mil is managed by one organization (DoD), so would .xxx or .kids.

Personally, I am glad ".kids" didn't make it. It's an idiomatic word. (Is it related to that infamous .cx image?). I also prefer the three-letter ones, just in consistency.

I also didn't like the .web thing. Isn't the www. convention enough? Or would Foobar Inc., need to move their web presence to some new toplevel domain?

Re:I don't understand...

[Lazarus Short]

As far as technical reasons go, there is the potential for the root nameservers to become overloaded, both in terms of number of hits, and in terms of memory needed to store all the TLD's. However, the COM nameservers are already very stressed out as it is, so the odds are that things will get better rather than worse.

The real reason we don't have infinite TLD's though is that we'd just be moving the problem up a level. Instead of fighting over "foo.com", Foo Inc. and Joe's Foo Emporium will fighto over ownership of the "dot foo" namespace. And now, they'll have to compete with the Foo Foundation (formerly foo.org) and Foo University (formerly foo.edu).

No, the real solution here is twofold. We need

• A Usenet style hierarchy By polluting the top level namespace with ".biz" et. al., we're actually moving away from this goal.
• A Product/Concept/Keyword matching system. Search engines and things like Real Names(tm) are helpful, but the former aren't precise enough, and for the latter, I'd prefer an open system.

--

Not retarded, fantastic!!!

[b0z]

I just hope I can be the first person to try to get the chicken.coop domain name. WOOHOO!

TLD Moderation, the slashdot way

[juliao]

IMHO, the accepted proposals are very, very bad choices, as far as domain names go. And that is the matter, isn't it? What TLDs to support, not _who_ is going to support them.

Let me moderate them one by one:

• .biz Score 1, Redundant A dot-com wannabe? What does this entail, other than having the people that already own dot-com trying to sue for the dot-biz?
• .info Score -1, Redundant Hmm, i wonder what this one if for? Any use i can think of for this one can be better served by info.domain.something...
• .name Score -1, Silly This is probably the worse option for "personal" domains i can think of. Let alone sorting problems with two people having the same name (who gets the domain? the oldest?), i don't really think this is going to be very popular. I wouldn't want one, would you? IMHO they should have gone for .home, .ind (for individual, or independent, or whatever you want it to mean) or something of the kind.
• .pro Score 4, Interesting This looks like it can actually be used to some effect. Of course, if it's targeted at professionals of some sort, i wonder if it is going to achieve its objectives. I see a lot of www.windows.pro domains popping up for magazines, companies, and so on. But that's probably what they want anyway, to sell domain names, right? Being useful to people is for sissies...
• .museum Score -1, Troll dot-what? Is anyone here in their right minds? How many of those are there going to be? 100? 200? 5000? What's next? dot-church? Too limited, too long, too hard to remember if there are only going to be a few of them.
• .aero Score -1, Redundant Too limited. Too self-serving. Too redundant. Except if it's meant as a domain for airheads...
• .coop Score 2, Interesting This one could be interesting, but isn't this covered by .com or .org already? It could prove limited in usage.

In general, the new domains are either redundant or too limited in usage. The criteria for appraisal of the proposals were not, in my oppinion, in the best interest of the Internet Community. ICANN could have started off a whole lot better.

I always knew I was going to miss Jon Postel, i just didn't know I was going to miss him this much.

.pro is really a Usenet-style name system

[Huusker]

If you read the application, the second level will be

• .med - Medicine
• .law - Legal
• .arg - Agriculture
• .ins - Insurance
• .fin - Finance
• .aer - Aerospace
• .rx - Pharmaceutical
• .trv - Travel
• .art - Arts & Entertainment
• .pub - Publications
• .auto - Automotive
• .npo - Nonprofit
• .acct - Accounting
• .trans - Transportation
• .util - Utilities

So it is really more like a Usenet-style name system. Ex: ford.auto.pro, citibank.fin.pro, northwest.aero.pro, etc.