Reaching Unsanctioned TLDs With A Plug-In

An anonymous reader writes: "Wired is running this article about Idealab creating new TLDs. They propose to do it with a browser plug-in. Many people are upset with ICANN, but is having an incubator distribute new code any better?" If it makes ICANN nervous, I think I'm all for it. If it won't work with browsers besides the Top Two, though, then I guess I'll miss out on dot-duh ...

Comments

RFC1591 & INT TLD

[warlock]

The INT TLD is nothing special - it is defined in RFC1591 along with the other more well known TLDs (COM, NET, ORG, EDU, GOV, MIL and the ISO-3166 two-letter country codes). Anyway, it is managed by IANA (actually, I think the ITU is responsible for the maintenance and IANA merely handle the registrations or something like that).

It is not very well known because it is restricted to organizations established by international treaties, according to the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (1969), and international databases, which are defined as non-commercial entities that provide services of direct relevance to the operation of the public Internet. Clearly not as big a market as COM :)

Some examples are UN.INT, ITU.INT, WIPO.INT.

The problem with this: NO SEARCH ENGINES

[wowbagger]

I run my own system, so changing my DNS to use (Alternic|OpenNic|...) wouldn't be a big deal to me. I could do in in about 60 seconds.

Let's suppose I did. OK, now lets suppose there some site, www.deepthought.42, that has all the answers to my life. Unfortunately, I don't know it exists. How do I find it?

This is the biggest problem with any of the alternate root servers IMHO: there is nobody indexing them! Now, suppose that Google set up to index that domain, and just to keep people from being confused set their system up so that they wouldn't list any Alternic domains in a search unless you were querying search.google, rather than www.google.com. Then, maybe I'd be motivated to use them. But until I can find these new domains, they are no good to me.

Now, what I keep waiting for: AOL gets pissed with InterNIC. AOL configures their DNS to resolve off AlterNIC (remember, you don't LOSE the current set of TLDs, you just gain new ones), and sets up a .aol domain. They offer their uses subdomains off that, so AOLuser JOE42 automatically gets JOE42.aol as a domain (which is an alias for members.aol.com/JOE42). Also, they do this for all the RoadRunner etc. customers.

Now, what a jumpstart THAT would provide for Alternic.....

Theres already an alternate registry!!

[dr_labrat]

http://www.youcann.org/ And heres how you make one yourself!!

If the idea of this excites you:

[mr]

1) Consider the past efforts. RealNames, AlterNIC, and one (I think) OpenNIC
RealNames and AlterNIC have been around for a LONG (internet that is) time. How often do you run into these? (I bet about as often as a Cue Cat sound on a TV that takes you to a web site)

2) The enemy of my enemy is my friend makes for a nice warm feeling for a few minutes, but is not good long term strategic planning. If you don't like ICANN, going off and embracing some alternative just BECAUSE it is an alternative and "would piss off ICANN" isn't good technical logic.

And the gods of the 'net like LOGICAL arguments.

3) Hate to tell you this, but the Internet goes beyond web browsers. Uniform Resource Identifiers need to be addressed. As the 'idea' here is 'we are gonna do this with browser add-ons', this shows these people are not thinking in terms of the big picture. Just a small, http: view.

The internet != WWW

[Masem]

Besides the fact that it needs a browser plugin, this would also limited only to http requests. Any other non-browser-but-net-enabled program, such as IM, Napster & clones, and whatnot, would have no idea about these new domains, and therefore would not work if the servers were based on those alternate names.

I think the whole DNS things needs to be restarted from scratch: the only possible TLDs would be country codes, .intl (for anything international), and .net (for network systems). Within the country codes, it's up the country on how to split it up (This means that trademarks that apply in one country cannot be used to grab a domain from someone in a different country where the trademark may not apply, such as the Corinthians case). The US, of course, would probably just replicated .com, .org, etc, which is fine, but restrict these, and make sure that there are enough TLDs that are NOT related to e-commerce so that nearly every current site can be classified into one of these. If done right, then there would be no reason for a company X to own X.net, X.org, etc in addition to X.com, which makes trademark problems even more limited between two companies and not being a large company and a small-time webmaster. A system should be opened up to allow anyone to introduce an idea of a new TLD, with a public comment period before granting or accepting it, as long as the TLD does not replicate the function of any other TLD and provides a namespace that would have sufficient size to be useful.

Looks like a privacy nightmare

[martyb]

Though the article only mentions that the plugin would resolve the new TLDs, I have to wonder what ELSE the plugin would/could do.

Where/how is the resolution going to be performed? And who will own/maintain/operate/control these resolvers?

Plugin to resolver: Hi! I've got this request from a user. Here's all the stuff I could find out about him, and could you please make a record that he wanted to access this URL? Oh, and by the way, could you also resolve this for me?

Marketers would LOVE this; privacy advocates may not be so thrilled.