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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.
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
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:
http://www.paradigm.nu/icann/icannstage.html
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).
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Have to agree, given Verisign's recent performance with .us domain. Due to some community development projects, I've been attempting to deal with Verisign on various .us registrations.
.com charges, and essentially is squatting on the domain (god knows why, other than perhaps they hate this city).
.com which we can help you with."
.us doesn't work very well...
Their performance?
It takes a minimum of four weeks to get a response to any submission.
In the past four-month period, we've had a problem with an unresponsive city-level subdomain admin who doesn't even office in the respective city, has imposed arbitrary charges for all applications which exceed
The discussion with Verisign has been far from amusing. Four weeks to get a response to a request about the situation, telling us to submit a request with a note about the situation. Request submitted. Another four weeks to have a canned report bounce back saying "this subdomain is already registered" (yea, we knew that, that's why we put the note on there as you asked us to). (Their agreement also says to not bug them unless it's been at least many weeks, since they're busy, you know...)
Another four weeks for a response from an idiot saying "you got the canned response because it is registered."
Another four weeks for a response from someone saying "there's nothing we can do."
Another three weeks for a response from the original person saying "have you tried asking the subdomain company about the situation" (I wouldn't have wasted months dealing with Verisign if I hadn't already discovered that this domain squatting "company" is a one-man band who is camping on the subdomain he's not entitled to).
Finally, after playing in Verisign's voicemail jail for hours, I found someone who gave me the most candid response yet: ".us domains? Well, I wouldn't recommend those because they don't work very well. You should get a
And I wonder why
*scoove*
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?
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.
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?
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.
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...
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...
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 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?
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KMSMA (WWBD?)
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