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.Info, .Biz, .Behind The Scenes At ICANN
You may have heard about ICANN's announcement that .info and .biz will soon be available for registration. Naturally, the deal ICANN wants to cut with the .info and .biz people has been negotiated in secret, by "ICANN staff", without public input. (Who needs public input anyway - ICANN's proposed budget for next year eliminates all funding for the At-Large elections.) And of course, by the time you want to register anything in those domains, it'll be gone - trademark holders get a special express line to register domains in the new .TLD's before they are generally available. However, ICANN neglected to mention that they need approval from the Department of Commerce before messing with the root servers. The DoC is in the process of approving Verisign's deal to keep control of the .com registry forever; they're daring to ask Verisign to give up .net earlier, and Verisign is threatening to walk out on negotiations - as if we'd be hurt.
Indeed you would need ground rules for .museum However, if they're going to create standards to get one of these TLD's, why not also do a .porn or .sex so that filtering/etc becomes easier. I've bitched about this before but this roundy-round that we play with trying to filter domains would be crushed out if we could force the porn sites under one tld. People will whine and bitch about "heavy-handed jack-booted censors" but fuck 'em. What do you idiots think is happening right now?
On a similar note, didn't the at large members elect some of the ICANN board members a while back? I thought they were going to. What are those board members doing?
And why the fuck is there no .film tld yet?!? I mean, that's the most fucking obvious one. Need to stop all these convoluted movie domain names.
Gee, it would be a shame if someone registered a .biz domain
with ICANN and then later found out that sometimes when people
type in a corresponding URL, those people end up at someone
else's web site, because someone else already owned that name.
They might get the idea of suing ICANN for fraud.
Seriously, this is something to play up and publicize: that ICANN's .biz domains have a lot less value than ICANN says
they do. Let's drive the price down and make the whole
thing an embarrassment.
perl -MLWP::Simple -le 'srand(time); $id = int(rand(3500000)); $r = get("http://dd.networksolutions.com/t/ts/remove.as p?id=$id"); print "$id $1" if $r =~ /<p align="center">([A-Z0-9_-]+\@\S+)/'
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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?"
Everyone seems to think that once .biz is available, it will change everything. That's not gonna happen!
.tv, .cx, etc. hve not exactly taken off and reached critical mass such that they are widely used for anything serious. People thought .tv would be huge, but it clearly isn't. Of the major networks, only abc.tv resolves (and it's a mere redirection to their main domain). I don't recall going to one .tv site *ever*, and only two .cx sites, one of which everyone knows and the other which was only a friend's hobby site for her poetry.
.cx, there was and is a built in factor telling people that a .cx address is somehow second rate, a joke. At least with .org, .net, and .gov you had major institutions employing the domains regularly and getting you to enter them.
.nom and whatever sex-related domain gets through, if any (.sex, .xxx. .adult, whatever). The proposed .museum seems like a "gimme", but think about it; every major museum already has a domain name in .org or .com and has been using and promoting that name for several years now. Will moma.org change to moma.museum or modern.museum or modernart.museum? I don't think so! Will philamuseum.org change to phila.museum? It's only one fewer syllable!
.com holders to register those .biz names they feel are important -- and then fail to use them to do anything but a redirection to their existing .com site. They won't promote the name; they'll even feel weird about paying the invoice for it every year. And since the trademark holders will get first bite, there won't be any news about domain fights to encourage anyone to think that .biz is real and important.
.biz and the others have already been hobbled by the confusion over them -- adding to their second-class status.
The "speculative" top-level domains such as
The mAsses don't even necessarily understand that if a clause doesn't end in ".com" it's valid and it's a net address. As late as a year ago Jakob "Usabilty" Nielsen was encouraging people to continue to use "www" so that people would understand immediately that you're talking about a web page address.
Furthermore, with only, um, ODDITY sites using
That will only happen with domains where the domain holders will USE and PROMOTE their domain names. The big winners, I would expect, would be
The registrars will promote the existence of the domains and the importance of registering them. So we can expect
And
Point taken.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
If you were a porn operator, you wouldn't want to be easily filtered.
If you were a smart porn operator, you would. One of the biggest problems the porn industry faces is legislation to "protect the children." If porn were easily filterable, then the protecting the children is easy, and no longer a good reason to persecute the purvayors of porn. There's already a huge amount of legitimate demand for porn, they don't need to try to sneak up on you with it.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
The existence of your "smart porn operator" is meaningless in the face of the existence of all the others; ".xxx" or ".sex" only has a use if all porn is there, and that ain't happening.
Porn sites will probably always exist in regular domains. But if they can avoid persecution by the government by switching to a different domain, I think that most would do so. The rest would be left to fend for themselves against whatever legislation Congress dreams up. While it may not be a perfect solution, it's a heck of a lot better than current filtering software. I'm still not completely decided about whether it's a good idea to have a porn TLD or not. It definitely worries me the same way that firearm registration worries me. Such things are usually just the first step in the process of banning them.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Second, the purpose of .biz was to alleaviate the conjestion in the .com domain, yet the trademark owners will go first. Do you think that Apple Moving and Storage, or McDonald's Hardware will get first shot over Apple Computers or McDonald's Resturants? Of course not. The preregistration for biz should only be allowed if you don't already own a 'reasonable' name in the .com arena, and if you already do, well, get in line with the rest of us. And domain names that are not in line with the company name should be disallowed at this time; eg Verizon should not be able to register Verizonsucks.biz, unless they legally change their name to that.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
Under Budget Priorities and Issues...
5. Complete the At Large study and implement those recommendations from the study that are adopted by the Board. see note F below.
(f) At Large Membership Project and Study. At its recent Melbourne meeting, the ICANN Board allocated $450,000 in reserve funds to cover the costs of the study of At Large membership which is currently in progress. Of the total amount, $200,000 will be expended in the current fiscal year (in addition to $250,000 in one time funds already expended on the At Large election earlier in the fiscal year), and $250,000 will be expended in the next fiscal year during the months July through November.
The following is my interpretation (and I will probably query Auerbach and the At Large Committee about it, too):
However, I am no ICANN expert. I suggest contacting your representative. Here is what Auerbach, who is less optimistic than I am, posted in the forum:
http://www.atlargestudy.org/forum_archive/msg00063 .shtml
Keep watching the skies...
-l
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Subject: Important Information:
Subject: Important Information:
Subject:
Subject: Important Information:
Transcript of message:
Attention: Internet Domain Registrant
The new top level domain names with extensions .BIZ, .INFO, .PRO,
and .NAME have just been approved by global internet authorities
and will be released soon, but don't wait until then to register.
These domains are available NOW for pre-registration at:
http://www.NewRegistryExtensions.com on a first come, first serve
basis.
"While .com names hold the most prestige, the next frontier is
the new suffixes -.info, .biz, and .pro -likely to become available
later this year..."
-BUSINESSWEEK MAGAZINE, April 16, 2001.
It is expected that over 3 million of these new domain names will be registered in the first few minutes when registration officially opens later this year. If your domain name is important to you, be prepared and pre-register now. Protect your domain name from cybersquatters and speculators. We have the premier pre-registration engine to help you to secure the domain you want. Over 250,000 names have already been queued into our list and good names are going fast. Do not wait until the last minute. Go to http://www.NewRegistryExtensions.com now to pre-register.
##...##
This message is sent in compliance with the new email bill section 301. Per Section 301, Paragraph (a)(2)(C) of S. 1618 and is not intended for residents in the State of WA, NV, CA & VA. If you have received this mailing in error, or do not wish to receive any further mailings pertaining to this topic, simply send email to: off_list_tld@yahoo.com. We respect all removal requests.
##...##
Just why SPAMing?!?!
hany
The only real way to prevent the "domain real estate" stupidity we have now (squatting, disputes, etc.) is to reduce the value of a domain name. This should be done by having so many TLD's available that nobody could possibly want to register the same second-level name in all of them -- nor would it be feasible to do so.
.org is too crowded. There should be TLD's for personal/family sites, BBS's, etc.
Imagine having 50 to 100 TLD's (aside from the country code TLD's of course). There'd be plenty of room for everyone.
Back when FM radio was first introduced, the FCC had a rule which specified that a radio station could not transmit the same programming on its AM and FM stations. This was eventually changed, but it promoted enough differentiation to give FM its own identity. Something similar could be done with TLD's as well.
Personally, I think there need to be more non-profit TLD's available.
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Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
Technically, there is no reason why the domain name system couldn't handle a virtually infinite number of TLDs.
.com,.net and .org now.
Here is how this might work:
Anyone can invent a TLD and register a domain name with that TLD. If the TLD does not exist, the domain will be registered but will not be accessible yet. If enough people (more than 1000?) create and pay for domain under a new TLD it will be created. Nobody owns a TLD - anyone can register any name in it through any registrar, just like anyone can register under
Now apple.records, apple.furniture and apple.computers don't have to argue.
One of the advantages of having lots and lots of TLDs is that trademark owners will find it hard to register their name under all TLDs. This captures the original spirit of trademark law where a trademark is not global - it only applies in a specific area of business or geographical region.
-
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
Other fine HOWTOs are found at ORSC's.
--
Unselfish actions pay back better
There exist many nonprofit and mom'n'pop organizations that operate informational websites under names with wide national or international recognition, but that lack the wherewithal to actually go to the trouble to register the trademark. Those people will almost certainly be screwed by this proces, as it will be the nature of informational sites to want .info domain names that are very broad in scope and are virtually guaranteed to be snapped up by businesses that are probably less deserving of the domain.
.info domains that *exactly* match their trademark, *and* that they not use any .info domain as a mercantile outlet. And if pigs could fly, we'd carry umbrellas.
This process could be made much more fair if it were made clear that for-profit companies could only claim
The application by IOD, a current operator of .web, received an inaccurate assessment and was rejected. However, because of the dispute, ICANN also avoided giving .web to
Afilias, and assigned them .info instead.
ICANN wasn't entirely dismissive of IOD, perhaps because IOD actually paid the exorbitant $50,000 fee and applied for it. IOD has also demonstrated a willingness to fight for .web in their Federal lawsuit against CORE, another .web operator, for unfair competition and trademark infringement.
Inconsistently, ICANN ignored a similar conflict with .biz, and gave it to NeuLevel, ignoring Pacific Root's operation of the legitimate .biz domain for the past six years.
I want flownthe.coop. :)
Sheesh! Cliff, this is just badly researched.
Where .biz is concerned, trademark and intellectual property holders (the people who would probably SUE you if you register their name in the new TLD space) get to lodge their CLAIM to their trademark or IP before registration of any kind starts.
After lodging the IP Claim, they still have to go back to a Registrar and PRE-REGISTER along with EVERYONE ELSE who is pre-registering domain names AT THE SAME TIME.
The IP Claim system is NOT a domain name registration system in any way shape or form.
Exactly. The whole .biz idea is flawed from the start ... What a scam ... I wish everyone would boycott it but unfortunately as soon as SOME people start using it then we all have to, to protect our namespaces.
And .info ... gawd ... how incredibly lame that is. *Everything* is "info".
I want to see some mainstream news articles that point these things out.
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It's not easy.
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Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
Did ICANN ever resolve the issue that there was a pre-existing .biz domain which the (IIRC) Alternic people were supporting?
.biz domain. I think you want biztld.com, which also has a blurb about ICANN's announcment (not a happy one).
According to their list of TLDs, Alternic does not support a
And the main point is: USE ALTERNATIVE ROOTS
Use em, and encourage others to use em (eg, your ISP, or your network admin).
Just as Linux and BSD's freed us from the hegemony of Micros~1, so the alternative roots can do the same to Netsol/Verisign and the ICANN mobsters.
For that matter, I would like to see /. and other sites register on alternative domains, or even offer up some of their excess advertising inventory to publicise them.
http://www.paradigm.nu/icann/icannstage.html
Second, the purpose of .biz was to alleaviate the conjestion in the .com domain, yet the trademark owners will go first.
.biz is stupid--there's nothing to differentiate it from .com. Now, .pro is slightly more promising...
This is why
Also, first-come-first-served is hardly fair when timing will come down to milliseconds and be determined by your ping time to the registrar. Even without guarantees, corporations aren't going to be stupid enough to not buy their domain names a second time. They also have the money to have 50 trained monkeys click "reload" until they get through and buy the domain. Can you say DDoS? Giving priority at least avoids that initial rush...
I know I'm gonna get called a troll for this, but giving Trademark holders priority could be a Good Thing, under the right circumstances. What the hell am I talking about?
.biz are business-related domains (especially .biz), so it makes sense that businesses should get first crack at them. I am assuming (probably erroneously) that the method used will fairly resolve trademark conflicts (e.g. Apple Computer vs. Apple Records for www.apple.biz), and will be fair to holders of trademarks in all countries, not just the US.
.info and
Furthermore, there needs to be the creation of a TLD only for personal use (no trademark lawsuits or WIPO-whining allowed). If all these things happen, this could actually be a good thing. "If"...
I know, I know, given ICANN's track record, it's not looking good for reason and rationality, but we can hope (and write letters to congress, if you happen to be American).
Here's what they should have done: .us, .fr, etc. .com, .edu, .org, etc. whereever possible.
TLDs are 2-letter by country:
Countries are "naming authorities" which can resolve squabbles over who is entitled to what.
Special TLDs of ".com", ".org", ".edu", ".int" are reserved for Internationally-registered corporate/ nonprofit marks; e.g., apple.com. So most of the important stuff stays as is.
By convention, countries use
Except that most of these are very much Americanisms. e.g. other English speaking countries prefer "co" to "com", etc. They may well not be appropriate in French, German, Spanish, Italian, etc.
In the case of tradmarks you also need to be able to distinguish between the type of business. Since it's perfectly possible for two companies in the same place to have the same tradmarked name.
Well, realistically, NOTHING can be done to increase namespace.
Actually there is something which can quite trivally be done. That is to use the system in the way it was designed.
Folks should just realize that it just doesn't matter all that much.
Sticking in more and more top level domains does matter. Since all of them need alterations to the root servers.
Country-specific domains have been around since almost the beginnig, just that the people in charge never enforced the use of them. .com, .net, and .org just became 'what people use'. When was the last time you've seen a .us domain?
The USA is rather unique in not using geographic domains.
Real men use IP addresses ;)
Their service is abysimal! Tucows/OpenSRS should get control of the .com (and other Verisign) domains! It takes forever to use Verisign's creaky, error-prone, unaccountable "process" to get domains added, deleted, transferred, etc. Contrast that with any OpenSRS registrar, such as domainmonger, where I can make all changes to a domain myself, via an https web form, cheaper that Verisign charges for their "service".
- - - - -
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
I am sick of looking for a free domain and finding its taken by "Dirty Domain Squatters Inc"
You can find more than a hundred "interesting" domain name possibilities at Peckerheads Domain Board.
A dingo ate my sig...
probably the singer..
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
I don't understand in what way .com and .biz are supposed to be different. If something is commercial is it not also a business?
Verisign is somewhat of a joke as is PKI (Bruce Schneier doc) but their financial impact is what's going to give them the upper hand no matter what anyone thinks about them. (1)
.biz TLD, so here's an argument for many to think about where naming is concerned since Apple was cited. Why shouldn't that little mom and pop shop in Littleville USA named Apple have rights to register the domain if they beat Apple to the punch doing so? Shouldn't they have the same rights as the bug boys or are you suggesting that if you have money you should be able to buy your way into something just because government is passing cruddy laws allowing you to do so?
.com, .net, org, $INSERT_YOUR_TLD_HERE, when now it seems they want to for some reason have total control of it all, when they're only supposed to be laying down the law. Funny organization. Even funnier arguments.
FUD comes into the game by Congressmen/women who've forgotten to take vitamin clue, and don't fully understand tech, often becoming confused by most of the matters thrown before them. So most are going to be quick to believe the obscure information Verisign throws at them thinking that Verisign is a martyr or meat behind whatever they (Verisign's people) place in their (congressmen/women's) path.
*.Biz I browsed the top post claiming business should have first dibs on registering a
As for ICANN, its truly a shameful organization thats leaning towards catering to their own needs when they had previously set out to make sure no one entity took control of the
venona: hardcore crypto
Want Root?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Why is it that ISPs, DNS and root nameserver admins worldwide are enabling this exploitation of their resources?
.biz from Verisign and receive it from another source (or not at all)?
.biz?
While I can't confess to completely understanding TLD operation, it'd seem that since ISP networks are required to recognize the domains offered by the likes of Verisign, etc., and by recognizing them, establish the value of the name by allowing their millions of business and residential subscribers to access websites using the names, then Verisign and the likes need to pay a license to the ISPs.
In the absence of any alternative, however, the ISP's threat of not recognizing the domains is absent.
So, is there an alternative? Can an ISP decide to not recognize
Or maybe UUNET needs to have its own
*scoove*
Trademarks are only reserved within a givin industry/field. That means that there might be a "Bjork Bjork Games" and "Bjork Bjork Dry Cleaners". Even if you put them both in line before everyone else, who gets BjorkBjork.biz?
-Puk
After proving that it could be easily done, we shut it all down to avoid the risk of polluting the top level servers, but we proved it could be done, and done easily.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I'm all for telling both Verisign AND the ICANN to take a long walk on a short plank. The Internet doesn't need them and the only thing they're good for is pissing everyone off.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
first dibs on show.biz and more.info ...
phil.
Fry: heh, Yakov Smirnoff said it
Leela: No he didn't.
Would it really be a crime to anal-rape ICANN employees and managers? I don't think so. So everybody go out and get yer lube, never mind skip the lube, they deserve the pain as much as I deserve the friction!
The current Slashdot moderation system is made by gay communists!
even though it's not part of the new .biz or .info, I always wanted to pick up "stuckinacabi.net".
That way my email is neafevoc.is@stuckinacabi.net :)
--
Neafevoc
the domain name "mindyourown.biz"
Malcolm solves his problems with a chainsaw,
Malcolm solves his problems with a chainsaw,
And he never has the same problem twice.
Recognition is one thing, namespace collisions are another. ICANN could very well have simply ignored .biz and used another string, one not already operated by another party. That is, after all, what they decided to do in the case of .web. Their decision to approve the .biz was irresponsible. It was meant simply to emphasize that they are in total control of the root and if you don't play by their rules you get stepped on. Classic monopolist stuff.
It is important to remember that not everyone who exists outside of ICANN is a 'wildcat squatter'. Some of this crap exists in the alt DNS community, of course, but most of us are committed to the ideal of a user-owned and operated namespace which exists beyond the control of a single entity. Many of us resent being milked by netsol for what is, after all, a very simple service. Why do domains cost as much as they do? Because the business is, at present, a monopoly. The damn things should cost no more than a dollar or two.
Should the new.net folk be allowed the fifty odd plum domains they have started selling just because they were the pushiest?
Last time I checked they were only claiming 20 TLDs. And, yes, the new.net domains which are not colliders should be recognized, as far as I'm concerned. Of course, new.net does not play nice with other alt DNS groups like OpenNIC. Most of the 20 TLDs they claim were already in operation long before they incorporated.
Claim your namespace.
Well, the "dollar or two" figure was, indeed, pulled out of my ass.
The deposit idea is an okay one. Problem being that many folks in the world don't have that kind of cash available. In some of the OpenNIC TLDs, we simply restrict individuals to a total of 5 concurrent domain registrations.
Claim your namespace.
Claim your namespace.
And to answer your question, no, the issue was never resolved. ICANN very clearly decided to simply ignore the existence of alternate roots and prior claims to TLD strings. (though they are inconsistent in this stance. Their decision not to approve a new .web TLD was clearly related to the existence of a prior claim by Image Online.
Yet another example of heavy handed authoritarianism on the part of ICANN, and yet another reason for all of us who care about the DNS as a public resource to dwitch our DNS to an alternate root system. Visit the OpenNIC to find out how. It's easy.
Claim your namespace.
Feel free to correct me if any of this looks wrong. I am but an egg. You've got IP addresses like 192.100.23.3. This isn't human friendly so each IP is associated with a name. The lists that do the associating of names with IPs are kept at various servers around the world. So far so good? My question is: Why not keep a list on each machine? I mean, the association between foo.com and 123.45.6.7 is arbitrary, right? It's just a matter of the associating list. Your list wouldn't need to be a list of all addresses, just the ones you've visited or otherwise consider worth keeping around. You could also get associations off other machines on the web. Any other machine. Sure, there could still be central servers for handling giant lists but they wouldn't dictate, just provide a common reference, like a dictionary. Individuals could choose whether or not to use the IP-name associations (like definitions in a dictionary. "Dog" doesn't need to represent the 4-legged tailed thing, just if you want to use the word in communication). You, the surfer, could get new IP-name associations from other machines on the web and they could get them from you, just like it works with spoken languages. Would this be a peer to peer domain name system? (And what is the use of .com, .net etc anyway? Catagorizing for efficiency?).
I think this woul decentralize domain name control?
What if the english language was under corporate control. What if every time you read or heard the word "food" an image of a McDonald's Big Mac appeared in your mind; and the definition "2 beef patties, cheese, lettuce, special sauce, ect..." was in all the dictionaries? Are you seeing my point?
Okay, I'm missing one key thing here. I thought the election of At Large Members was supposed to take care of these issues with crap business deals, poor management? What are the At Large memebers doing?
Why not use something like this to get rid of TLDs altogether? Instead of
I want to go to "www.debian.org"
why not go to "Debian"? You could also use a mechanism like this to differentiate Apple Computer from Apple Records, and maybe also to localize yourself, e.g., yahoo.com vs. yahoo.co.uk.
I suspect that'll be the Next Big Thing as DNS gets so complicated, fragmented and self-overlapping that remembering conventional URLs ceases to be much easier than remembering numeric IP addresses (or your friends' yahoo/hotmail/AOL email addresses of the week).
Personally, I won't be happy until I can buy clownpenis.fart, but maybe that's just me.
I'm assuming that means something like Microsoft can get Microsoft.info, but not MicrosoftSucks.info, Microsoftblows.info, so on. I don't think that that would be that bad where they get their trademarked domain name, only when it's an exact match to their registered trademark, which has to be registered before October 2000 and must be a nationaly recognized trademark, whatever that means.
At the .biz registry, www.neulevel.com, it says something close to how .biz will be handeling trademark issues. They are haveing the initial trademark(IP) phase starting on May 21st where the trademark owners will get preference. The trademark .biz domain must exactly match a company's trademark claim before they start a dispute process. Their policies arn't as clear as the .info domains.
Personaly, I don't much care about the .biz domains, but I'm looking forward to grabbing a .info domain or two. It looks like the .info folks look like they are handleing the trademark issue pretty well, you get your 'exact' trademark text first. Hopefully it won't turn into a trademark free-for-all.
Insanity is only a state of mind...
Porn sites are the ones that open 8 windows on you, and open a new windows when you close their site, taking you to one of their other sites.
.com, .net, and .org to move into a .sex which can be more easily filtered?
Do you really think they'll stop hanging around
The .museum can be enforced easily. For now, we'll drop that, as there is no debate there. :)
.sex sites? Good luck regulating all of them, across all the nations of the world, all the time.
But how can you control the
Does anyone else feel as I, that this is something like new area codes? Will everyone really jump on these? I suspect people will want to stick with the old, familiar, comfortable '.com' for some time to come.
That said, I still despise the heavy-handed and unfair way in which everything ICANN has done has thus far been handled. Just proves my long-standing maxim that big-bad things will only be replaced by worse.
These people looked deep into my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined.
Voluntarily? No. However, the previous comment included some notion that there would be rules about who would be eligible for a .museum TLD. If there are rules, presumably there would be someone charged with enforcing said rules. Why not a rule (and attendant enforcers) about porn sites? It ain't like it's abrogating anyone's rights to free speech. Indeed, it reflects what most cities do to strip clubs and the like - they relegate them to certain places in the city by crafting rules about where they can or can't be. Wash. DC, for instance, has a rule about not having a strip club within 1500 feet (something along those lines anyways) of a church or school. Seems reasonable enough. And just like the online world, You can always find the strip clubs - just look for triple-parked police cars....:)
"Good luck regulating all of them" - too true I'm afraid but it's a good idea....:) Sure would make life easier for those who want to filter...actually, thinking about it a bit, I wonder if it isn't doable. In my view, the people who stand to benefit the most from easier filtering is corporate America. It isn't your corner library, although they would also benefit. Where I used to work, we had a call-center and our overnight agents would do nothing but browse porn sites. Strictly speaking it wasn't a big deal as there were only a couple of them. However, they shared PC's with the day-shift and from time to time someone would forget to close a browser with buttsex.com in it. We came very close to several lawsuits and had to fire the lot of them. Just by eliminating the possibility of a lawsuit (for that anyways) it would seem worthwhile. Your point is valid however. I don't know how you'd enforce it.
these TLD's? I mean ".aero" ? WTF is that supposed to be? ".Museum"? WHAT??? Are there so many Museums that they need their own TLD? I haven't noticed that the net is overrun by museums desperately seeking attention. Sounds like an attempt to make the Internet look and feel like they want it to instead of how it really does.
Yup. Fully aware of alternic. Alternic failed because it did not have the support of OS vendors. This is what needs to change.
Time to bypass ICANN, the Department of Commerce, and any other organization that thinks they can artificially create scarcity where no such scarcity exists. There is NO technical reason why there can't be MILLIONS of TLD's.
.microsoft root zone. Ditto for all the other manufacturers.
.xxx, .adult, .sex too. then we don't have issues like whitehouse.com.
How can this monopoly be bypassed?
Simple.
Bind needs to be configured to have a different set of name servers for the default root zone. All distributions of Linux, IBM, HP, Sun, SGI, Apple, Microsoft, etc. should use the new set of zone servers in thier DNS server software configs. ICANN will be effectivly ignored, and everyone will be happy (Well, except for Verisign (network solutions) and thier cronies.)
Why should the major OS vendors support this?
I think Microsoft would LOVE to have the
I would like to see redhat.linux, debian.linux, etc.
It would be nice to have all the p0rn secured at
The new TLD group can enforce a REASONABLE set of policies including anti-squatting, require a minimum number of e-signatures for new TLD's (with some exceptions) etc.
While it's not reasonable to flush out a full plan in this post, it's doable. While it may not be perfect, it would be a HELL of a lot better than what we have now...
Sounds a lot like: "Give me money and free slave labour and I'll get it done"...
(at http://www.jerrypournelle.com/archives/archivesmai l/mail62.html#lemonde) :
[...] A few years ago I was asked what it would take to build a Lunar colony. My answer was: "Two billion if you give me the money and get out of the way. If you advertise a prize for the first Lunar Colony to last two years, that should probably be about ten billion dollars. Alternatively, if you go to the Air Force or Navy with specs you won't change and let them do it black (ie without having to comply with the Armed Service Procurement Regulations, which was 25 linear feet of loose-leaf notebooks when I was in the business, and is now much larger, and includes handicapped access and much else) you would probably get bids at $10 billion; if you make them do the paperwork and follow the ASPRs then probably $25 billion. NASA has already said it will take $85 billion and 20 years if everything goes as planned. With NASA nothing has EVER been cheaper or taken less time than the estimate." I have no real reason to change that now.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Of course, with the hype that we have had with the dot com debacles, it is hard to remember when there were actually endevors when bunches of folks would get together and get something worthwhile done. These days most folks think that the only way that could happen would be at the point of a gun. And that all great endevors are naturally acts of slavery and enslavement. Many are, but not all. The early days of Nasa, in going to the moon, before it becames a boondoggle, for example hand a higher goal.
It is very possible that the great pyramids were built entirely with volunteers.
But the thought is completely unbelievable to modern folks with their fashionably cynical outlook. I can remeber talking with some guy on a talk show about what the big deal was aboutjack kennedy, that he was a womanizer, etc etc etc. He was totally clueless to the notion that kennedy, whatever his faults, had somehow given a breath of life to the dreams that people had, made those hopes and dreams come very much alive, and gave strength to people based on the high mindedness of these ideals. This guy was totally clueless to this, because the biggest dream he had were his fantasies for the weekend. It was outside his reality completely.
This kind of hope and freedom was dangerous, which is why, despite all of his many faults, he had to be struck down by those opposed to it. The dream had to die.
Now in this context you can get a bunch of people willing to accomplish something, and they will not be slaves. But you have to have a legit honest real goal, not a dot-com come-on with carrot and stick. Something practical that you can put you hands own. Something worth living for and giving for and sacrificing for.
I can understand that many folks don't have anything like that. This becomes a road to a smaller, more fragile, more dangerous world.
But this fits into the cynical outlook in the original topic, where we rest assured that the government can be trusted to squash new technology by means of the appropriate government agency.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
There has been a long standing tradition of squashing technology via official bureaucratic incompetance in govern in the USA.
You have to go know your history on this, but it goess back to things like the assembly line manufacture of rifles just after the revolution (date?), Robert Foulton's Steam Engine, and even far more recently as seen in NASA.
For Example, NASA turned from a place to get things done to a place to park the development of technology while developing boondoggles and pork barrels. It has turned into a place to squash the development of space flight. For an interesting take on this, check out Jerry Pournelle's idea that you could have a contest for Business to go into space, or go to the moon, setting up a permanent base, and have a 10 Billion dollar prize for the winner.
So don't worry, the government will take its' time, but will eventually come up with some agency to stall and stop the development of the Internet until it is nothing but a government or private office with the efficiency of the post office and the warmth and caring of the IRS.Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
New.net operates .kids, .xxx, .mp3, .inc and a bunch more without the nod from ICANN. Two days ago, they announced that Prodigy had jumped on board. They also have agreements with Earthlink, Juno, @Home, NetZero, and mp3.com and they claim 34% of Internet users can view their TLDs.
They should offer the .biz && .info domains to present .com holders only if the .com holders wants to GIVE UP their present .com - if not, sorry, get in line.
This is something I haven't understood about the idea of adding new TLDs -- and the ICANN process of adding new TLDs in particular -- from the beginning. Adding new TLDs and then giving big corporate trademark holders first dibs does nothing to alleviate congestion, furthers confusion, but in the process gets the registrars a fair bit of extra cash -- especially since they know companies are responsible for enforcing their own trademarks and will therefore feel compelled to register mcdonalds.biz and coke.biz even though they've already got the .com real estate.
If alleviating congestion is really the goal, wouldn't it make more sense to reduce the number of TLDs? Why not at least get rid of the generic Top Level Domain name space and use the country codes (and .int) exclusively?
After a full expiration cycle (time for domain names to move), the current .com could be subsumed into .com.us -- and similarly for .org , .net , and .edu . If the decision makers in .us or .ru want to have a .biz.us or .biz.ru , then fine, let them add it.
BT.com could go (back?) to simply being BT.co.uk , for example. Companies doing business in multiple countries could establish domain names in each country, but without a .com , there'd no longer be a special .com allure that would lead to any one TLD becoming disproportionately overcrowded.
Somewhat related, but not a necessary part of this: why not treat the country TLD codes similarly to how flags are regarded on ships in international waters? A cruise ship can be manned by people from all over, carry American tourists, and operate exclusively in the Carribean, but be registered in Norway. During the Iran-Iraq war, Kuwaiti oil tankers were re-flagged as American and thus brought under American protection. Let .ca , .us, .uk , and all the rest set their own standards and see who wants a domain under their TLD.
This predicted all this shit....
You know we probably wouldnt need any new TLD's if something was done about squatters - Sometimes I think more domains are held by squatters than are actually being used.
I am sick of looking for a free domain and finding its taken by "Dirty Domain Squatters Inc"
no sig.
If there's no money involved, it suddenly becomes a non-issue.
Maybe now is the time to move to a local naming system - I could be www.justin.christopher.walnut.ca.us, Coca Cola could have www.coke.com.us, etc.
The problem is that change will never happen, because you need a critical mass of ISP's to switch to make it work, and I don't see that happening in the near future.
So what is the process for getting generic words registered. Who will get news.biz or business.info?
Put any well-meaning group of people in charge and it can only result in muddled, inconsistent governance.
Of course, it all won't matter very soon. The Internet goes dead as California loses power this summer.
Is for a not-for-profit organisation (I mean a REAL one...) to have a server set as forwarder (and cache the replies like normal) on each of the root servers, then for that server to simply forward to anybody who wants to run a server and can be vetted as having enough capacity. Perhaps then domain names could be bought like the items they are? A couple of lines in a text file...
See what happens when you get Government involved in things its not supposed to touch? They don't work anymore. The web wont die because of ICANN but we will have one more pain in our butts.
~~Apathy alert: Approaching the Point of No Concearn
So what's the beneficial use of this piece of spyware? URLs that contain New.net's TLDs (such as .kids) are routed through the spyware successfully. However, I suspect that there's a bit of traffic monitoring and submission of logs to a server somewhere. Either way, it's a very bad piece of spyware; the only reliable way to remove it is either by using Ad-Aware or by reinstalling Windows.
It's truly sad when a company resorts to spyware when they can't get their way. ICANN should at least look into this, since it's a blatant violation of their policies.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
I'm at my wits end with NetSol and about to go postal.
Scumbags.
okay, so the at-large scheme will be dropped, the corporate guys will take full control behind a smoke screen of the dept. of commerce.
what else is new? did anyone actually believe that ICANN was going to be democratic?
if we give them the benefit of the doubt, then one might consider that maybe the at-large scheme was a serious experiment.
what exactly did it bring? plenty of bickering among the guys who got in, complaints from the guys who didn't get in and long discussions from a minority that wouldn't have stood a chance to change anything anyway.
so, with the new set of rules, they are only openly admitting what was clear from the beginning anyway. and IMHO, i'd rather go with an organization that makes money from keeping the system running than with somebody who is accountable to the public and prone to party politics and cover-ups.
i think ICANN should be a corporation and we should all be able to buy shares in it. even the guys who are always against everything can then buy shares and make a mess at shareholders meetings. wouldn't that be more democratic?
ever since esther dyson left the top of ICANN it was clear that it would be the end to any hope for having a say...
That's the dumbest one of all. If you were a porn operator, you wouldn't want to be easily filtered. So you'd keep another address as well. So nothing is achieved.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
Please explain www.whitehouse.com in the context of your pie-in-the-sky theory.
The porn industry has a (rather large) least-common-denominator segment which will attempt to gain market share using any and all means possible.
The existence of your "smart porn operator" is meaningless in the face of the existence of all the others; ".xxx" or ".sex" only has a use if all porn is there, and that ain't happening.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
"The government"? There are 200-some independent (or independent-except-for-the-Queen) jurisdictions out there, many of them happy to have porn operators' business if it becomes too much trouble in the US (which I don't anticipate).
Porn is one of those things that, without complete universal disapproval, will always be around. Too many people want it, and they're all willing to be sneaky about it. When I was growing up, there was always a kid in every class who had a dirty magazine in his locker. Not much has changed, and I doubt much will. All the fretting and hand-wringing is a waste of time and, of more concern to me, all-too-frequently serves as an entrée for sweeping censorship that impacts my ability to conveniently get information I do want (like health and political info). Let's focus energy on positive things and let the merely tawdry sort itself out.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
Yet another example of heavy handed authoritarianism on the part of ICANN
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
You can fault ICANN for many reasons but telling the .web and .biz squatters to take a long walk off a short pier is not one of them.
The wildcat squatters were told when they began that they would not be recognized.
Should the new.net folk be allowed the fifty odd plum domains they have started selling just because they were the pushiest?
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
Turn off the root name servers and the Internet grinds to a halt over about 24 hours.
The offer to run .biz for 90% of the VeriSign fee for dotcom is not half as generous as it appears. Serving dotcom is much more expensive because it has more of the high traffic sites. Aslo all the browsers are at this point programmed to look in dotcom as part of the search algorithm. The dotbiz domain will have much less traffic per name so the bid looks pretty high.
Equally the assumption that DNS needs to be hierarchical is now bogus. The fact that dotcom can be supported demonstrates that a flat namespace could be supported - dotcom has consistently contained approximately as many names as all the TLDS put together had 9-12 months before.
Of course in a flat namespace .web and .biz lose interest since comapnies would shift to names like www.microsoft. and www.cnn.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
Very very true. As long as trademarks are an issue TLDs are totally useless and should be abolished. The only good one i hurd was .porn so it could be easily filtered.
My own solution also suffers from the trademark problem, which is fundamentally unsolvable by
technology.
http://www.possibility.com/urlspace/
(site is very slow now)
Ummm... you've just summed up what IS Slashdot... in its entirety...
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
Every ISP that I know of uses the same root servers as the rest of us, or if they don't, they'll still be able to resolve .us, .ca and the like. Country-specific domains have been around since almost the beginnig, just that the people in charge never enforced the use of them. .com, .net, and .org just became 'what people use'. When was the last time you've seen a .us domain?
In order for region-specific domains to PROPERLY work, ICANN/verisign/et al have to STOP allowing the use of .com/.net/.org (except maybe multinationals), forcing everyone to use their country specific domains. Unfortunately, the predominant mindset in the USA is 'the internet is American, and the rest of the world can use their country TLD's. This has nothing whatsoever to do with ISP's switching.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
I mean, with ICANN being based on consensus building and cooperation, I assume they did resolve the issue didn't they? After all, not resolving the issue would look, well, caustic, pointlessly uncooperative for the sake of, well, spoiling other communities on the Internet. I mean, isn't the whole reason Cerf et al thinks that making ICANN democratically accountable is bunk based on the idea that ICANN is founded on the principles of cooperation and consensus building?
Are we likely to see a major ISP turn around and point their root servers at a rival any time soon, or do we have to put up with this crap forever more?
--
KMSMA (WWBD?)
time to blackhole icann. use opennic and resolve icann .info and .biz to 127.0.0.1
Re: the point made about apple.biz versus apple.com: right on the money. ICANN has created a huge mess that should keep lawyers happy for years...
Here's what they should have done:
Examples:
Oh, yeah, one more thing. All those names are UTF8.
I'm a bloodsucking fiend! Look at my outfit!
There are a lot of individuals and companies who missed out the first time around and didn't get their dot com, so they're stuck with a long address that's not intuitive. Although, I imagine everyone's going to register all the domains like crazy only to realize nobody wants them.
What's the point, if you are going to give all the names worth having out to those who have trademarks on those names? If I have superhappyfun.com, then I get first dibs on superhappyfun.biz, superhappyfun.info. And given the way a lot of these things go, and the indications from ICANN, I could kick off anyone who registers them before me.
.com name, they'll also register it in .biz and .info, and probably point those back to the .com. The only benefit is to line the pockets of registrars.
.com database.
So now when someone registers their
The whole point of new TLD's is to be able to have the same name used in different TLD's so that similarly/identically named organizations can have peaceful co-existence of their websites. The way they are going about this is defeating that, guaranteeing not much more than 2 identical copies of the
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Stay in school, kids! Peace out, Dubya
How about a TLD called dot-idiot for stupid people and useless websites?
Then again, that would fill up in about a minute, requiring dot-moron and dot-huh? to be added as well, maybe even dot-loser.
Visit my site at http://www.pagsz.moron,
-- If any of the above made sense, I assure it was purely by accident.
Time to bypass ICANN, the Department of Commerce, and any other organization that thinks they can artificially create scarcity where no such scarcity exists. There is NO technical reason why there can't be MILLIONS of TLD's.
You are right. You are absolutely right. ICANN has become that "damage" on the Internet that must be "routed around." I think your solution, though, just replaces one group of greedy bastards with another. Be very cautious of anybody who "volunteers" to serve as the new root server out of "kindred feelings" with the "open source community." They will become the next ICANN.
We need a solution that is uncorruptible, or more nearly so. I envision P2P file-sharing (Gnutella, or the like) to replace root servers, with digitally-signed digests of records to ensure uniqueness and authenticity. The only central resource in this scheme is the body that "signs" the domain record to verify it's authenticity.
I think it would work like this:
From there things progress as in normal DNS. The only problem I see is the possibility that a 'leet haxor could create a bogus "[digest].ns" record for debian.org. He wouldn't be able to sign it, so I can know not to trust it, but I would still have wasted the time of retrieving the file. I imagine that a number of "trusted sources" will evolve which check for authenticity before they cache/host a ".ns" file; in this way, bogus records would not propogate throught the net. Of course, this is all automated with a patched local nameserver-- I wouldn't actually do the NS lookup manually.
What do you think? Am I on the right track? My scheme still has a central authority, but it seems that it is one with less incentive for financial gain. SOMEBODY MOD UP THIS THREAD, please, or a similar one, so we can have a little debate on the subject.
I will read follow-ups with interest.
Marc----- Nigel Tufnel and David St. Hubbins say: "It's a fine line between clever and stupid."
Re: Icann, the M$ monopoly, Digital Millenium
Copyright Act, software patent stupidity, the whole DeCss mess.., M$ password backdoors in IE, govt towing the line with spammers and data collectors, politicians for sale to the highest bidder, the napster mess.., H1Bs, NSA cryptokeys
in M$ windows (plus a myrid of other 'call home to papa spyware in it')...etc..etc... it just goes on and on and on..
Is it just me, or does it seem, that '1984' is looking more and more real every day and the govt. has entirely sold us out to the highest corporate bidder. It is like we need an 'open source' GPL political party that is tech savvy, and not sold out to the highest bidder.. If napster could grow to such a force.. why not this?
Is it just me, or is it really that the 'system' has gone corrupt broken beyond repair, and we have to do sometime... all my rights have been trampled on, packaged, and sold to the highest bidding company, and highest bribe (and usually) clueless politician...
What to do? Riot with the Seattlers? start a new internet based grassroots political party?
[actually I am not an anarchist or anything, just a normal guy.. but what I have seen happen, especially in the last year or so, re: the above.. is just truly astonishing... ordinary people have just entirely lost control..]
Re: 1984... with all the M$ backdoors and hacks, I wouldn't be surprised that after we all 'register WinME' with our names & addresses, that Gates could type in our code, and turn on our mic on our PC, and listen/see what we were doing right now... or another one to paralyze all win PCs (watch your heads, there comes the ISS!)... its like 1984, and Lex Luthor all rolled into one...
Maybe I am being paranoid... but somehow I dont think so... it is all starting to get scary.. all this PC internet technology snooping, selling, probing, backdooring, rolled in with corporate greed and political bribes and back room deals..
Opinions anyone? Does this merit its own slashdot topic, as I am surprised it hasn't been discussed yet...