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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.
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}}
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.
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
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 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'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.
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...
Well, it is for "international organizations", but in this context, they have decided to follow the definition used by the International Law on Treaties, in which "international organization" is defined to be "intergovernmental organization", such as the UN, WHO, etc. What they say is that to get a .int, the organization would have to be formed by an international treaty between governments (there is another option: international databases).
However, it should be quite clear that the International Law of Treaties never intended to give a general definition of "international organization", so what has happened is that most organizations that are international has been excluded. I for one think that IAPS belongs in .int.
Now the really bad part of this is that certain organizations has been allowed to get .int though they have not been formed by international treaties, for example YMCA. YMCA has a similar formation history as IAPS, and does certainly not fit the criteria used. I think they do belong in .int, but it kind of makes you wonder what they did to get that name.
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
Not to be confused with the United Nations Special Interest Group for Networking Educational Districts [unsigned.int].
(You may now groan).
:: "I am non-refutable." --Enik the Altrusian ::