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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.
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.
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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.
Can you imagine yourself saying h-t-t-p-colon-slash-slash-slash-dot-dot-dot to unaware cow-orker? Yeah, I know it should have extra slash in the end but it sounds better this way.
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Spelling and grammar mistakes left as an exercise for the reader.
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!
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.
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.