New ICANN TLDs Are Live

BenBenBen writes "According to this story on the BBC, several of the new ICANN top level domains now have sites available. Examples are visa.info and afilias.info. " I'm still waiting to get my 'dot' TLD. The article doesn't say much new except it tells us a few biz and info sites that you can use if you just wanna see a new TLD working. I gotta say, it's pretty surreal.

Comments

Isn't everything on the net about information?

[hendridm]

Yeah, which is why a lot of sites don't belong on a dot com. Are half of the news sites y'all visit ORGanizations or COMmercial companies? Do they support the NETwork infrastructure?

I think they were created for two reasons:

1. To increase sales for registrars.
2. To help people find shorter names for their web sites.

Have you tried to search for a .com domain lately? Everything, and I mean everything, is taken.

So young, and already abused.

[Starship Titanic]

Well, I was browsing through the new .info whois, and decided to check out sex.info. Of course, it's already registered, no surprise there. However, apparently, it wasn't registered under the "Open Registration" rules, but as a trademark. Yes, boys and girls, this is what the whois info shows:
Trademark Name: SEX
Trademark Date: 2000-01-04
Trademark Country: USA
Trademark Number: 2306348
As a search on The USPTO shows, a very specific rendering of "sex" is trademarked by a Jaime M Cerrato, to be used for "games, playthings and novelty items, namely, mechanical pull toys." This trademark was used by Hera Ventures and Investments, Ltd. to register sex.info. Somehow, I doubt the only thing that site is going to be doing is selling "mechinal pull toys". Dirty trick or outright fraud? I don't know, but it's obviously abuse.

How do you think companies will react?

[avij]

As the article implies, this will most probably lead to existing companies reserving more domain names in new TLDs. Let's take an example, say, Finnair, our beloved Finnish airline.

finnair.fi already belongs to Finnair
finnair.com as well, as they're doing business in many countries so they'll need an "international" commercial domain
finnair.aero just because they're dealing with aviation
finnair.biz because they're doing business
finnair.pro - well, they're professionals after all
finnair.info, timetables anyone?

Nice move, ICANN.

Re:New TLDs need to be reconsidered

[Anonymous Coward]

In fact I think we should get rid of .com, .net, .org, .edu, and .gov and stick them under .us. It seems to work for the UK and Australia. A company should have to register a .com.ccTLD for the countries they exist in. The Internet is not just the United States anymore.

1) COM/ORG/NET were always international domains, however they've always been managed by the US governenment

2) COM is popular in the UK and Australia.

3) Country code domain policy is under local administration. There is no such thing as .COM.US or .COM.CX, and nobody can force them to create subdomains like that. .US for example is a complete mess and is generally only available to local governments.

4) GOV/MIL/EDU are historical accidents that show a bias towards the government that built the Internet. There's no feasible way to obsolete these domains, and until you think of one, forget trying. How many UKians are even aware of MIL anyway? Most USians aren't (goarmy.com).

5) The Domain system was never intended to be the greatest rational hierarchy or a means of locating information -- it was always intended to be layered with other directory systems (Yahoo, Switchboard, 'Internet keywords', whatever). Get that through your head.

6) Trying to reform the domain name system at this point is like trying switch over to metric time. Unless you have a time machine and can go back to 1988 and discuss it with Jon Postel, forget about it. Now.

7) Adding a couple new TLDs does seem like a pointless exercise, or even extorition by the registrars. However, keep in mind that these are just a test run for planned massive expansion of TLDs. Given enough of them, it will be virutally impossible for a company to buy all of them, or for squatters to eat up the namespace. I'm not going to make a judgement of whether this is a good idea, only that it's too early to tell. (see #5) One point is that it's culturally and techincally very difficult to contract the namespace, but it's easy to expand it.

Re:Why This Is A Bad Idea...

[Inoshiro]

The difference is that one should be .foobarfoods, and the other should be .foobarcomputers.

.foobar should list all demains which involve foobar, kinda like how alteon.com lets you see both the Alteon pharmacuticals group, and Alteon web systems.

This is how two entities with trademarks to the same name, but in different fields, can co-exist peacefully.