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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.
Is is just me, or is seeing a new four characters after a url not actually all that amazing?
Thinking about this, its the tipping point I feel from the internet being a military network and a academic and a research network, to a full blown business network with significant commerical interests.
I don't know how to feel strangely, because we have known it will eventually happen, but it seems a little bit has been lost in the process of change.
I'm not against change, I just ponder where we are heading...
`find / -name "*your_base*" -exec chown us:us {} \;`
Some registrars are offering ".sex" domain. However : .SEX ISN'T A TLD AND IT PROBABLY NEVER WILL.
.sex domain, the registrar send you a little pluging for Internet Explorer. That plugin adds lookups for .sex site on the registrar's name server. So it works. It works for you, it works for whoever installs the plugin.
When you buy a
But it won't work for all the rest of the world. You'll be charged $75 for a domain that nobody will see.
Take care, there are a lot of registrar registering ".sex" domains, saying that "they soon will be available as real TLDs". But that's untrue. Nobody knows whether it will even happen. But your credit card will be billed.
{{.sig}}
OF course they don't. Anything that actually fit in would cause too much argument and never get in.
So the only new tld's suck.
LIke '.biz'. Yeah.. that's useful..
There's already hundreds of thousands of web sites that already fall under the wrong TLD category because current TDL's are too vague. These two only make it worse. There is nothing wrong with adding TLD's, but we need them to be MORE specific to prevent ongoing domain name conflicts. Dot info and dot biz... besides the fact that they seem rather "immature" and "umprofessional" respectively, they don't help clue me in much on what I'm looking at. "What's the difference between a COMmerical site and a BIZiness site? Isn't somecompany.com also a BIZiness?" "Is this ORGinzation just about INFO?"
.TLD. scheme to include regions? www.somecompany.com.east/west/se/etc.
These domains add confusion and too much generality. At the risk of a TLD being too long, why not create a ".store" for retail fronts, or ".gr(ou)p" for non-established organizations (that one would be great for OSS developers). How about extending the concept of the
I may just be blowing my horn here, but these things are just plain dumb. Some of my suggestions here may add some confusion, but won't adding to the mess also do that in a less constructive way?
Why bother.
Once you get the 'dot' TLD, you can finally move slashdot to slashdot.dot. That will be even more fun to say around the uninitiated.
It won't help clean up the .com domains. The reason is becuase most sex sites don't conflict with domain names that businesses want for their web sites. For example, does IBM in contest for hotsex4uandgoats.com? No. Do sex sites have domain names like microsoft.com? As amusing as that would be, the answer is also no. .sex, while making porn smucks look a little harder for the wares they seek, wouldn't benefit the rest of us. And if it was official, it'd be something our browsers would search through if the domain we were looking for was unavailable. It'd annoy me greatly if a route to debian.org was unavailable and my browser defaulted to debian.sex and a web site containing photos of Ian's and Debra's love life.
Why bother.
The only people I have seen bullying anyone have been the rogue TLDs.
There are plenty of name squatters who have bought up new.net swampland who would like their real estate to be connected up to the interstate. So they yammer on with squeals of complaint.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
http://www.info.info
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?
.com domain lately? Everything, and I mean everything, is taken.
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
Does this mean that it would finally be http://www.goat.sex instead of http://www.goatse.cx? It would truly be the end of an era on slashdot if that happened :-)
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.
This is an EX-PARROT!
Isn't one of the biggest selling points for traditional TLDs the fact that they are easy to remember? Sure there are many country specific TLDs, but usually they are used by people in your/nearby countries......
How many people are going to remember that my site is not www.thinkbrown.com but instead www.thinkbrown.info or www.thinkbrown.TLDoftheday?
Heck, why don't we go one step furhter, I want to define my own TLDs.
I don't buy into the arguement that traditional TLDs are all taken.... just stop the domain squatters and you'll be happy.
===> An eye for an eye makes everyone blind - MG
Comment removed based on user account deletion
If 90% of these new TLD's are simply going to refer back to the .com of the business that snaps them up, like I suspect (dell.info->dell.com), and if those .com's aren't really changed in any way (no reason they should)...
.info or whatever are going to bother to create a new web site specifically for that domain?
Is this the worlds biggest DNS server? Meta DNS? Seriously, though, how many companies who snatch up an
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.
Follow your Euro bills at EBT
Of course you knwo this is going to lead to a lot of broken code.. which verify's an email to have a 2-3 letter TLD.... lord knows i've beens subjected to it.
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
Well, I was really going to rant about trademarks. TMs is usually the part of IP regime that I find the least problematic, but. There is something strange there.
Here's my story:
I have for several years maintained a site titled "How to use a compass". Since I've been orienteering for many years, and just because I could write this, just because the web allowed me to become a publisher, I did write it up.
It is time for the site to move on, I intend to open it up for many contributors. I intend to get a few excellent orienteers and expeditionists to join me in making this site even better, and I intend to release it under the GNU Free Documentation License (but with some modifications to allow people to print and distribute printouts more easily).
Obviously, I should have a domain for it. While I have other options, what can possibly be more fitting for this site than compass.info? It is the most used compass tutorial on the web, there are a few of them, but most are actually using my illustrations... The site is literally information about the centuries-old gadget called a compass.
However, it has been decided that trademarks owners should have a prior right to our language (eh, well, English is not my native tongue, I'm Norwegian). They should be allowed to grab first, and so, compass.info is gone. Like in some many cases, the compass has been used metaphorically. There is actually very little information about the gadget compass on the web, but there is extensive use of the term "compass" used metaphorically. In fact, this is a problem I've had when designing metadata for the site.
I'm quite confident (yep, I do have some self-confidence :-) ), that if
the delegation of domain names had been based on what merit a site has for
accurately describing what lies in a name, my site would have won... :-)
So, what is it with trademarks that makes them so valuable for mankind that it is more important that the domain name compass.info is used do point to a product that has nothing to do with what has for centuries been known as a compass, rather than an accurate description on how to use this gadget....?
I do not doubt that the American College Testing Program, who has been awarded compass.info has good intentions for it, but still, the question stands, why is it that trademarks should have that level of protection?
I feel there is something wrong about all this. Names are a scarce resource, and should be treated with caution. I feel the use of trademarks needs a review. This isn't what they are supposed to be: My parents went to China and bought "The North Face" jackets with a Gore-Tex membran for just about nothing. While they realize it certainly aren't real North Face jackets, I have yet to convince them it certainly has no Gore-Tex membran. They are going to get seriously wet one of these days... :-)
That's what trademarks are supposed to do for us: protect us from being
sold crap. They're not supposed to be used for grabbing bits and pieces
of living langauges...
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
Let me just talk about .ws for a second. This is the most meaningless TLD of them all. The nodename part of a domainname should specify what the service is i.e. www, smtp, ns, nntp, etc... otherwise we need to create all these others as TLDs as well, which I'm sure everyone would agree is silly.
And to those who have posted that we need regional TLDs, we have those already. The are called country code TLDs. 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.
In summary new TLDs only polute the DNS name space.
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
I think more "ordinary" people should get into running their own nameservers - you want "http://spawnosatans.pants/" to point to the same place as "http://www.microsoft.com/" ? Well you can have it! pop it in your /etc/hosts file as an alias, or even run your own proxying DNS server...
You don't need an addon to windows or linux for this - it's built into the OS, even in Windows - windows has a perfectly normal hosts.txt file, since it's network stack is from BSD.
I'm just kinda surprised this doesn't happen more often - you could have people swapping personal lists of "cool" aliases - "but hyperlinks would stop working if the world didn't all use the same DNS root servers?" - well, maybe, but so what? The fragmentation impact would be much reduced since most web-pages have very domain-specific forests of links, so a short statement of "we use such-and-such's TLDs" on a site would usually be enough to sort things out, since most links would be to other pages within the same "family".
All this could be made very pointy-clicky for the drooling idiots of the world - in fact, it would keep them entertained for hours, making their computer think www.popularfootballteam.com or whatever was called wank.droolers.suck.suck.suck...
Choice of masters is not freedom.
> I think that icann should stop bullying people around and let some of the rouge TLD's in.
Yes, but if they allow rouge now they'll end up having to allow all kind of other crazy colors later, so they need to hold the line as long as they can.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
There is propaganda being spread by the authorities, that these new TLDs will solve the problems for trademarks - it is a lie.
THOUSANDs of new open TLDs will not solve any problem - even if every one has 'Sunrise Period'
It will not solve 'consumer confusion', 'trademark conflict' or stop anybody 'passing off'.
Also, as an example on Sunrise, thousands of trademarks using word 'Apple' have no guarantee of being able to use name.
Apple computers will still protect and make claim to every Apple.[anything] - even though they share word with 727 others in the USA alone (plus all those in 200+ countries).
TRUE or FALSE?
No reply required - I know the TRUTH - The solution to trademark problem is at WIPO.org.uk.
There's always http://www.icann.org/tlds/
If you want to voice your concerns about a specific issue with the new domains. Direct contacts, that's evil, I wonder if they will read all their mail.
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
Still won't clean up the rest of the net. Only a proven lack of demand will do that. Too bad there's a new one born every minute.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
There have been other TLDs in operation in
.biz).
limited subsets of the 'Net for some time.
Check out OpenNIC's site for a host of information about an internet namespace that's administered democratically. (There are several such namespaces, many of which are coalescing into a large, collaborative space run by the people,
for the people. OpenNIC is particularly well
run.)
The new ICANN standards actually conflict with pre-existing namespaces (such as
All you have to do is point your DNS server into
the OpenNIC tree...
This morning I had a gnutella connection from a machine at who.int. I tried www.who.int and it works - turns out it's the World Health Organization.
.int and where did it come from? I presume it means "international" but I've never heard of .int before and the article doesn't mention it as one of the new TLDs. I tried www.nic.int, but it's restricted. Anyone know where more info can be found?
What is
Shaun
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
With the market crash .COMs have gone belly up left and right. Valuable .COM addresses are now exchanged for a cup of coffee. More power to people wanting to use a non standrard TLD, but reality says the WORLD, uses .COM. I remember a story here or on Kuroshin about the lack of use on the off brand TLD's.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Oh, Please... We should be so lucky here at slashdot to be able to call up some special forces mo-fo's to clean you guys out with K-Bars and sniper rifles.
Unfortunately, we simply do not have the clout necessary. But, if it makes you feel better, the moderators we send over there will be knocking them down a little lower than -1.
krystal_blade
It will be easy to motivate our fellow man; there is hardly anything people treasure more than not being annihilated.
I'd like to see a .www TLD because it would be funny. Could you imagine the confusion of http://org.slashdot.www? That would kick ass!
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
The FBI is a government agency first and foremost, therefore, it belongs in .gov. St Timothy Christian Academy is a school, first and foremost, therefore .edu is fine, IMO.
Still waiting for a good example...
The unsig!
So presumably Rob would get away with commander.taco.name, for instance.
As for registrations on the third level, technically that is trivially easy. The reason that has been done is so that the second level can be shared for mail purposes. So while under .com only one of Bob Smith and John Smith would be able to get smith.com, and use bob@smith.com or john@smith.com, unless they could agree to share it (or Bob could decide to register bobsmith.com, and get a crappy mail address like bob@bobsmith.com, or similar), under .name they can get bob.smith.name/bob@smith.name and john.smith.name/john@smith.name respectively.
Some data I took out on that this weekend shows that in the US, for the 65000 most common lastnames, 22 million people would be able to get their firstname.lastname.name without doing anything special. If you take into account nicknames, use of initials, use of hyphens etc., that number increases to more than 100 million that can get a nice name-based e-mail address on the form firstname@lastname.name, as opposed to only 65000 if noone share the second level.
If you add in the people with less common lastnames, the number increase to about 170 million in the US alone, before you need to start doing stuff like adding numbers.
Of course, for more common last names, like Smith, using numbers will be necessary quite a lot earlier than for less common lastnames.
(Ob Disclaimer: I co-founded the company that operates .name, but I'm talking only for myself)