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ICANN Sneaks In Reserved Names For Existing TLDs
"But, under everybody's noses, ICANN has recently snuck in some name exclusions for the existing TLDs, com, net and org. This was hidden in the revised agreements between ICANN and Verisign. See this page in ICANN's site (this is from the com agreement, but similar provisions are in the other two).
Among things that are excluded from use as second level domains are all one and two letter names, all names that are the same as another TLD (both the existing ones and the group like museum that's planned for debut this year), and, most questionably, various names and acronyms relating to ICANN, IANA, and other Internet governing organizations, including aso, dnso, pso, ietf, and ripe. No other organizations in the world yet have the power to ban their names or acronyms from use in all TLDs (though many are clamoring for these powers), but ICANN and IANA have taken this right in a bald power grab, stopping the many other entities in the world whose initials happen to match these from having a right to try to obtain sensible domain names for themselves.
These exclusions apply only to new registrations, not renewals, so the many existing domain names that violate these exclusions will be allowed to continue so long as they don't lapse for nonpayment or get cancelled by a domain dispute panelist's decision.
I have more domain name information and commentary in my site."
But then again, why Is Nissan Motors entitled to that name anyway?
They're not and that's why they don't have it, Nissan Computer Services in North Carolina does. However, Nissan Motors has appx two and a half shitloads of lawyers so they will wield them like a hammer and pummel that poor Jew fellow who owns Nissan Computing Services.
"uselessness of 1-letter names" Actually once the United States catches up the with rest of the world's grasp of WAP 1 letter names would probably be the most sought after names on the market. Imagine how much easier JAne and Joe Handheld Device user would go to your site if they only had to enter 1-2 letters.
The Internet Domain system was never intended to be used as a keyword system. That's why Netscape and Microsoft built search and keyword capabilities right into their address bar interface. Your hypothetical index has been there from the very beginning, and it's called Yahoo (etc).
We need:
[1] a new set of root servers (easy).
[2] copy all existing TLD and SLD info to these servers (time consuming/expensive but possible)
[3] set policy. "First come, first serve." (that's it. done.)
[4] Convince big name ISPs to point to these root servers. (extremely difficult)
Do you want:
- Nissan Computers
- Nissan Motors
Same for anything else. sunsetmotel.com (I just made that up) would be an index to all the Sunset Motels in the world. If there are 15 legitimate contender, it's better to have an index, than to have one winner and people who can't find the address of the Sunset Motel they have in mind.
That's why I prefer an index like Google with some editorial power. Compare a helpful index with the winner of a stupid URL war.
Downplay ICANN! Use search engines and private indexes!
- A.P.
--
Forget Napster. Why not really break the law?
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
What happens when two companiesvie for the same name?
This bothers me because then the 'big boys' woulds decide with copyright holder is entitled to teh domain. Case in point, Nissan.com run by Nissan Computer services, but Nissan Motors wants it, too.
Under the old system, Nissan Computers got it becuase he was there first, and because he has a legal right to the name. Under the new system, I guarantee that Nissan.com ( dot-whatever) would go to Nissan Motors without any sort of consideration. This a a Bad Thing.
But then again, why Is Nissan Motors entitled to that name anyway? 'Nissan' is not their name, it's Nissan Motors (or something to that effect).
.
Hilary Rosen's speech was about her love of money and her desire to roll around naked in a pile of money.
The Internet became popular not because some business decided to push it, originally. Businesses were latecoming. It became popular because there were enough people doing enough cool stuff that it attracted everyone else.
What does this have to do with domains and root servers?
If we start using non-ICANN domains for our really cool stuff, the free stuff, and resist the temptation to put anything more than instructions on how to get to the cool stuff (e.g. change your resolver hosts) on legacy TLDs, then it can more quickly build up a following.
If the .mp3 domain gets going soon, how long do you think it will take the RIAA to be using alternate domains?
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
How would you define legitiamte use? Is this: http://www.orangepurple.com/? I register the name, but I just don't know what I'm going to do with it yet. Am I a bad person?
Um, wait a second...
"In the ongoing and contentious debate over new Top Level Domains, one flamewar-provoking issue has been whether certain names ought to be reserved as second (or higher) level domains within new TLDs because there's something inherently (or at least potentially) abusive to their use"
Abusive? To American standards? To Muslim standards? To Buddhist standards? Does this mean the entire world has to compy with a view of what is abusive that is typically American?
It is bad enough already that the com/net/org domains fall under American jurisdiction, now we have to comply with American conservatism too...
When will everybody start to realize that the Internet is more International that the United States?
-- Nothing is as subjective as reality --
What percentage of them are actually used? I'd like to see all TLDs that don't have content hosted on them after, say, 60 days, freed up. Use it or lose it.
.com or .org; I'm certain you meant second level domain.
Two problems here.
1. TLD is a top level domain, like
2. What if people aren't putting web content on them? What if, for example, they are using it as a second level domain specific to a particular non-web service, like email? Some companies have domains dedicated to email, for various (legitimate) reasons.
Get real, will you? I knew Jon Postel - I had a beer with him in Geneva the year he died - and I knew his long and close friendship with Vint Cerf, whom I also know. And Vint is now Senior Vice President for Technology at MCI WorldCom.
One of the things that tied Vint and Jon together (apart from being close friends for thirty years) was that both of them cared passionately about a free and open Internet. Vint still does. You only need to look at his page on Social, Economic and Regulatory Issues to see that. ISOC's slogan 'The Internet is for Everyone' is very much his slogan.
I think everyone agrees that ICANN is a mess - but it's a mess brought about by lawyers (mainly American lawyers), not by the Internet pioneers. Also, and this is what makes me most worried about articles like this one, is that the people who are doing most to damage the concept of a free, open Internet for everyone are not the pioneers - they're the get-rich-quick sleazoids who come in on the back of the pioneer's work and try to grab a chunk of the territory for themselves. We can all see that people who register patents for old and obvious ideas just by tagging 'Internet' onto the end of them are sleazoids. Can you not see that alternate TLD registrar wannabes are also sleazoids?
Yes, ICANN stinks. Yes, we need a more open, democratic authority controlling the top-level domains. But the Internet pioneers are not the enemy, and MCI is not the enemy. And in my opinion, the second thing that needs doing to ICANN (after making it democratic) is to move it out of American legal jurisdiction.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
I do agree with the first two options (although not with the third as I think that is abusing the system badly - maybe Coke will pay ICANN and Verisign to reserve coke.tld in all namespaces in the future (even coke.book or coke.museum or whatever silly TLDs are released) whatever their Trademark covers).
However, if uk.com is accidentally not reregistered, then there will be an awful lot of angry customers of uk.com when their domains stop working. I imagine similar services exist for other countries, de.com? fr.com? eu.com I know exists...
Perfect as Verisign just start their own "uk.com" service using the reserved word because "The domain just wasn't reregistered - your credit card was never authorised (never entered into the terminal more like) - sorry, nothing we can do"...
In the UK, the first two rules already exist, hence there is only one 1 letter domain (x.co.uk), and a few 2 letter domains (bt.co.uk, f9.co.uk) that were allocated before Nominet came in to manage the namespace. It works quite well, and gets rid of confusion. You cannot have gov.co.uk, or nhs.co.uk, or org.co.uk, as the third-level-domain conflicts with an second-level-domain.
It is unreasonable to give major corporations first dibs on names in TLDs unrelated to their primary area of business.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
In general, with the exception of certain 'famous marks', a trademark applies only to one specific market.
I may hold the trademark for "Ferret's Bookstore", but that would only give me ownership of the domain "ferret.books" , not first dibs on "ferret.com" or "ferret.shop" or "ferret.xxx".
Before suggesting that an international organization take pains to protect American trademerks, first consider the definition of a "trade" "mark", and how a registration for a specific term used for a specific market in a specific locality applies to a global naming system.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
Why should they take away all 1- and 2-letter names? I can somewhat see the uslessness of 1-letter names (but having one would be very sweet), but two-letter names could definitely have some use. They say that they are trying to avoid confusion with established country codes, but why not reserve just country codes then, not everything?
...people and organizations that cannot stand a bit of humor and fun. This is what that is. If no-one can register icann-sucks.com then no-one can make fun of them, right? Wrong! This is a call-to-arms! Spoof them now! Let them know that we will not stand for this desperate grab to appear legitimate!
Or we could just sit back and do nothing. Because, this is not that important or anything.
Ciao.
nahtanoj
With regard to your points:
[1] a new set of root servers (easy).
Done. Several such already exist. OpenNIC, AlterNIC, ORSC, TINC to name just a few. All of these are operating right now.
[2] copy all existing TLD and SLD info to these servers (time consuming/expensive but possible)
Not necessary. They can have .com, .net, .org and the new ones, as well. All we have to do is have the new root servers delegate the legacy TLDs to the ICANN/NSI servers. So ICANN does not cease to exist, it simply becomes one of many. It becomes subject to COMPETITION. People will be able to vote with their feet. In fact, people are alreasy beginning to do so!
[3] set policy. "First come, first serve." (that's it. done.)
Not so simple. Generic TLDs should be first-come first served. There should also be a place for chartered TLDs, though, like the existing .edu. OpenNIC is mostly focussed on chartered TLDs, while the other alternate roots seem to have mostly generic TLDs. Rules and regulations pertaining to domain name ownership and rights and priority should be decided on a per-TLD basis, at the time of that TLD's incorporation into the root.
[4] Convince big name ISPs to point to these root servers. (extremely difficult)
That's the trick, allright. I think this will happen in stages. Stage 1 will be early adopters, mostly people who feel like they have a stake in the way the DNS is operated and who are fairly technically savvy. This is where we are now, with probably less than 20000 users of all the alternate roots combined. Stage 2, I think, will be when some of the free OS distros begin to include alternate DNS as an install option. Probably Debian, Slackware and the *BSD people will be first. This will bring in a ton more users. This may be less than a year away. We at OpenNIC have had discussion with people involved in some of these OS projects. Nothing has been decided, but positive noises have been made. At some point a critical mass will be reached. The alternate TLDs will begin to have enough content so that joe earthlink user will begin to call support and ask why he can't visit www.good.beer or something. This will be stage3, when the ISPs begin to come on board. At that point the revolution will have suceeded.
So get on the bandwagon early. Join up now!
Claim your namespace.
When dealing w/ legal contracts such as this, nothing is hidden from the two sides making the deal. They've both been over the contract many times w/ a fine tooth comb.
Apparently someone thought it was a small enough concession to allow the contract to go through... me thinks you should join ICANN and complain there... Hate to break it to you, but complaining on /. might not be all that helpful
I ate my sig.
I sorta got into the whole domain thing early on, and got "e.co.za" for myself. There's no chance of finding single letter domain names, since only a few second level domains are created for za (South Africa). The control is (thankfully) quite strict here.
had a nice ring to it...
Nice as a personal e-mail domain, yes?
I'm not domain squatting or anything like that, and don't think I will *ever* sell it.
Just thout I'd brag.
Share and Enjoy.
there are resolver libraries which search relative to a default domain suffix, and which remove one component of that suffix at a time until they get to the root. for example, a user at a.b.tld might be trying to look up foo.bar, but his resolver would first try foo.bar.a.b.tld then foo.bar.b.tld, then foo.bar.tld, then (finally) foo.bar.
.store, by populating that com.store domain with bogus entries made to fool folks using .com. for instance, www.cnn.com.store could point to a fake www.cnn.com web site (perhaps a mirror of the real cnn.com site with different advertisements).
so someone who owned (say) com.store could screw everybody whose default domain ended in
ideally of course resolvers wouldn't do this.
but there are a lot of broken implementations out there, and its easier to fix this with ICANN policy than it is to update all of those broken resolver implementations.
New TLDs could start off with domains priced at some very high price (say, $10 million each), with a 10% price cut every day until $10 is reached, about six months after start. Now that would be a market.
Why not just throw in "puppy kickers vs noble citizens" while you're at it? the range of suggested exclusions looks like it spans the whole spectrum of entrenched, new, corporate, civic and public health concerns and definitly some would favor a "more" free and open internet than others. To put the whole range short of internet anarchist (those who prefer an anarctic internet, not a political appalation) as "intrenched interests" and the "no rules except first comes first served" crowd as moderates is just insulting to the intelligence of your readers.
yeah, /. has an agenda, and I know that when I come here, but could you lay the propaganda a little less thick next time? Some people want lots of limits. some want a few, some want a different few. You want none. Don't let your position blind you to the existance of a range outside of it, it just makes you look foolish.
Kahuna Burger
...will work for Chick tracts...
"There should be a geographical notation TLD - sort of a business.city.state/province.country"
.com domain, not a .nj.us domain. What we need to do is have it enforced.
This already exists! It's just that everyone wants a
Anyone who 'claims ignorance to the net' should have their business license revoked and the owners shot.
Peace,
Amit
ICQ 77863057
[o]_O
This is a blatant abuse of their power and position, and is completely wrong... but to whom are they accountable? As far as I can tell, they're the top of the food chain in this situation. If you can't trust the police, who do you get to police them, right?
There are two major products that come out of Berkel
...When starting a new country, make sure that you don't pick a name that has the first two letters of someone else's country, or you might not be able to get a TLD for it! And then, no digital e-commerce revolution for you!
Depending on where you live, you don't have control over your baby's name either. France has strict laws, so does Norway and maybe Germany.
ICANN mentions "aso", "dnso", "icann", "internic" and "pso" as reserved for their own use as second-level domains. But www.aso.com is already "Aircraft Shopper Online", and www.dnso.com is a very nice anti-ICANN site. OK, www.icann.com already belongs to ICANN, and www.internic.com looks pretty official. (www.pso.com, on the other hand, is one of those spartan "under construction" doodads).
(I haven't checked the longer "IANA" list, but there are probably a few of these that are already taken, and not just in .com.)
Anyway, I can see why ICANN might want to shut down the "Gnomes of Zurich" (who claim credit for dnso.com), but what about those poor guys selling aeroplanes? Are they being forced to relocate?
Does this mean I can't register IANAL.com?
Maybe if IWAL (I was a lawyer) I could get away with it.
Tyranny, I tell you! Tyranny!
-- Chris
-- Chris
$email=~s/[^a-zA-Z0-9@.]//g;
-- Chris
-- Chris
$email=~s/[^a-zA-Z0-9@.]//g;
I think it is reasonable for a domain name that contains a trademarked word within X levels of a TLD to be reserved for that trademark holder. Why not? That TM holds up in any other media and as much as I love the anarcy of the Internet, these companies have a point and have rights to whatever they may trademark.
But the rules must be precise - no fuzzy "well its CLOSE to our trademark" BS. Either the word/phrase is in the domain and you own the trademark, or you don't and have no rights to it. And if you want to USE the names, you better pay up like the rest of us!
--
Top Most Bizarre/Disturbing Error Messages
Maybe this isn't such a bad thing.
Admittedly it could cause some serious problems while being phased in. You'd be tossing people out of their domains left and right.
Once you were done, once a certain deadline had passed... You could phase out the trademark system and have everything done via domain name. Want to reserve a name? Forget paying a trademark lawyer $375; just reserve a domain name for $12. It's already taken? Darn.
This seems to limit my free speech if I can't get a domain like productnamesucks.com .
t .html
Instead of being able to let everyone know about how I hate said product name - which I think is still protected under the first amendment - it has to be under a url like: w3.ispprovider.com/~username/speech/ihatehomedepo
It's BS -- who said I would be using the product name to market something? They've already decided what I intended to do with the name before I used it. I know its not illegal to refer to the product name of what I'm bashing.
Get your Unix fortune now!
Can anyone enlighten me?
________________________________________________
________________________________________________
suwain_2
Fact is that the national TLDs are more of a problem than a solution. Most companies have global aspirations. That is why nobody wanted the OSI names that started C=US, what does a company like Nokia put there? Many companies do not want to introduce parochial national issues into their names.
I buy a burger from McDonalds, not McDonalds.US. Even products that are linked to very specific countries such as sports cars are global brands. Everyone knows that no Jaguar is ever going to be built outside the UK and no Ferrari is ever going to be built outside Italy (except for certain F1 machines :-). Even so Ferrari and Jaguar are world brands, not national brands and are managed accordingly.
There is certainly a case for a new directory infrastructure. Folk who want to rip up DNS to build it need to take some reality pills though. Fact is that DNS is the ASCII of the Internet, you might like to change it but you ain't going to.
New directory systems are going to come along. Names and keywords in those systems may well become valuable as the DNS names have. However they will be supplemental, not replacements.
Lots of companies have started directory schemes, most fail. Even the companies 'selling' names into spurious DNS spaces only they and about six other people resolve through have seen revenues shrivel.
To establish a new name space a company is likely to have to meet the following criteria.
Be a significant Internet player (we are talking Microsoft, VeriSign, Cisco level here, large positive cash flow, millions of customers not CMGI or Idealab! startups).
The names must be useable by hundreds of millions of users.
Offer names on a uniform, non discriminatory basis. This means that the registrar does not cherry pick the best names and sell them at vast rents.
Names must be offered on a freehold basis. Many directories try to rent names. So I spend $20 million to advertise a name and you raise the price on me...
Names must be usefull to the end user. Yahoo is no longer any use to me, I no longer find what I want, I find an idiot advertiser that paid Yahoo. If I type in Microsoft it has to take me to Microsoft, not a MSFT hate site. If I type in About Microsoft I get those.
On the TLD side proper, one solution is to simply go to a flat structure. There is no technical reason why the root could not have ten million names in it. The dotcom zone already has that number of entries and works just fine. The engineering required to make it work just fine is non-trivial. But if the world wants to type in www.cnn. or www.google. and have it work there is no technical reason. VeriSign would just love to run it for $6 per name the same price as dotcom.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
I'm not sure if they'd pull the plug or not, but it would be a public relations coup for the alternate domain owners if they did. Can you imagine how much of a black eye the backbone providers would get if they did this? But I can't see them doing this. Why should they care what root servers their customers are pointing to? Now, if you mean that management at the various ISPs would pull the plug on this if they found out their admins were doing it, yes, they probably would, and I'm not sure I'd object to that. If I owned an ISP, and I found out that my employees were doing something without my permission, I'd be pretty pissed off about it, especially something as fundamental as redirecting DNS traffic. But the question becomes how to do this without causing mass confusion. IOW, what exactly are you wanting to do? Create new TLDs? Rewrite the rules for existing TLDs? Both? Overthrow ICANN and replace it with something else? Personally, I think that the main danger is that'd we'd end up with a splintered domain naming system and the chaos that would go along with it. Therefore, overthrowing ICANN would probably be the wisest course of action. If we went that route, then the first step is to set up a rival organization. Get some well-respected folks on board and write a charter that Internet users and admins can support. Build the organization up from a grass-roots level and make no bones about what its goal is: to replace ICANN with or without ICANN's support. And don't be shy about what will happen after that. If the new organization intends to repudiate the agreements that ICANN has made with Network Solutions, then say so. If it intends to throw out the current domain name dispute resolution policy, then make that crystal clear. IMHO, these are all things that people hate about the current situation we find ourselves in. Capitalize on that anger. Point out all the things we've grown to hate about ICANN, then put forward an organization that'll fix these problems. Don't go the "underground" route with this. Let everyone know what your intent is. But above all, keep the new organization unified. The one thing that will scare the hell out of people is the possibility that all you're doing is creating chaos.
That light you see at the end of the tunnel might be from an oncoming train.
In the spirit of free information growth and sharing.
.com enconomy, actual hit's(pagecounts, banner ads) b/c of the misuse of TLD's (i.e. mispelling of popular domains) is becoming less of a means of gaining fincially by page views. Aside from the obvious copyright problems with registering TLD's of trademarked names their shouldn't be any other limits of the possibilities of TLD's.
Why would the banning of TLD make that much of difference aside from the ease of use for the web. When you goto whitehouse.com you obviously know that it is not the offical site for the White House. Ease of use is the only logical reason for limiting of use of TLD's. With the downturn of the current
--- My Karma is bigger than your...
------ This sentence no verb
Only one combination of characters will likely be used, but since the encoding etc. isn't finalized, they don't want people to speculate in, and more importantly don't want registrars to start offering, domains based on a pure gamble that the encoding won't change.
ICANN already owns all the single-digit domains, and the double-digit domains are probably all held by cybersquatters, so I just don't see this as something to be outraged about.
--
Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
- Nietzsche
We may live in democracies, but that is only true for a few days every four years.(barely--witness the American Presidential "elections")
The rest of the time capitalism wins the day, and money greases the wheels of the gears that make it possible to hire (some) of us at inflated salaries.
The Internet no longer belongs to the long-haired phone-phreakers of the days of yore. That is why they *privatized* Internic, because the gov't could no longer subsidize the beast.
We know that webpages and email aren't the internet and that it so much more, which is why we get in a snit about shit pulled by the corporations, but explain that to the majority of users. Napster is about as close as most of them will ever come to realizing the potential of the Internet, and they are more concerned about getting free music. Welcome to the Hive.
(grumble) I must have woken up on the wrong side of the bed today..
What they are proposing is like saying "A child can not be named 'Timothy' because this was the name of Timothy McVeigh".
It's as if saying you can't own your own name.. after all, it is your right, isn't it?
Either way, W's campaign had to sacrifice at least some resources on their part to do this. Those that ordinarily might have bought up these names, other than Gore's campaign staffers at least had the opportunity to do so. Under this proposal, no such equalizing system exists. It's preordained that the powerful will not be "tampered" with.
"Anonymous Coward" is for whistleblowers, not unpopular opinions.
I would oppose reserved names for this reason beyond all others. In the sex.com litigation, a federal judge ruled that domain names are not property like a trademark or copyright. Rather they are a service, like a phone number. Anyone can buy a particular 1800 number as long as no one else is using it first. You can have 1-800-gateway and Gateway computers could not touch you. It should be that way with domain names as well. If a multibillion dollar corporation wants to have all the top level domain names for its trademark than it can shell out the 70 bucks per piece that us regular folks have to. And if they don't want to lease the domain names and pay the money then someone else is gonna do it.