.biz Open For Biz

Angry Black Man writes: "November 7, 2001 marks a new historic event in domain name suffixes. Neulevel's press release is reporting that the .biz domains went live last night at 12:00." And if you can follow that link, I guess they're live for you too. Anyone going to buy a .biz domain? .info might be used, but .biz just sounds silly/sleazy to me.

Comments

Let me be the first to say it:

[Nailer]

This sucks

Name a business that's not a commercial entity or a not for profit organization. There aren't any. Hence .biz is a redundant domain and a blatant money making scheme for Neulevel.

If namespace limits are a concern, then fix the registration policies in the US. In Au, a clever fellow called Robery Elz banned the registration of generic words, and limited the amount of domains a single company could use. This would go some way towards solving the problem.

So would migrating every .com over to .us or another country code over a five year period. Trademarks are register on a country by country basic and domains should be too.

Or including multipek fields (Apple (computer) as in computer products, Apple (records) as in music) in a new namespace.

Oh well. I think .biz will die in the ass anyway, so my little rant doesn't do anything much any.

Re:Let me be the first to say it:

[Anonymous Coward]

In Au, a clever fellow called Robery Elz banned the registration of generic words

Wouldn't "cyber" be considered a generic word, or is the ban not retroactive?

(for the confused, look at the parents webpage url)

Re:Wait and See

[Anders]

Now the question is...will the existing commercial .com'ers migrate over to .biz? I think it will be some time yet before I try a .biz tld before a .com.

Yeah, but when the time comes and .biz gets well-known, you'd better have your company name registered. I think most of the initial registrations will be of the "better safe than sorry" kind than because .biz is thought to be a clever TLD.

The same goes for other of the new TLDs, of course.

A nice mail I received from VeriSign...

[sl8r]

Check it out:

Dear .biz Requester:

VeriSign understands the personal and professional significance of having a unique online presence. It's our pledge to keep you completely informed about the status of your .biz domain name applications.

As you may be aware, the Superior Court of Los Angeles, CA, issued a preliminary injunction on October 11th temporarily preventing the activation of certain .biz domain names. Consequently, the .biz Registry, NeuLevel, has "frozen" any domain names where:

1) Multiple Domain Name Applications (DNAs) were submitted for the same domain name by one individual.

2) DNAs were submitted for the same domain name by multiple individuals.

3) One or more Trademark Notification (TN) claims and at least one DNA were submitted for the same domain name.

For any "frozen" domain names, the registrant has not been selected and NeuLevel has not yet announced when the random selection of registrants will begin. In addition, NeuLevel has not stated how the frozen names will or will not appear in the .biz WHOis database. The .biz domain names you requested that have been "frozen" are listed at the end of this email.

VeriSign is committed to giving you everything you need for success on the Web. We'll post any updates we receive from NeuLevel at http://newdomains.networksolutions.com. If you have any specific questions or concerns about NeuLevel's domain "freezing" process, please visit www.neulevel.com or e-mail them at support@neulevel.biz

For those wondering what domain I registered: It's my last name. Isn't it so that family names win over trademarks in a domain name dispute?

Here's to hoping it is...

Re:All domains resolve!

[Anonymous Coward]

And they run linux :-) I wonder if netcraft.com is smart enough to realize asdfasd.biz and dilfbg.biz are the same site. If not, then this could be an easy way for people to totally screw up the netcraft survey (I guess they'd have to ban any domains resolving to that IP).

Re:www.microsoft.biz

[halfstar]

hmm... well i did actually register this through joker.com just to see what would happen.
heh

fun and chaos

Re:Oh Puh-leez

[mpe]

Actually, this is a consequence of earlier mess-ups with domain names. I mean, we are currently "blessed" with domain names which are either regionally focussed (.uk etc.) or fall into a few large categories (.com/.org)

Except that .com, .net, .org have in effect been treated as .misc for quite a few years.

In my opinion, regional domain names do not really make sense, since the whole point about internet is its global reach.

On the contrary it's non geographic domains which make little sense for a whole set of things. Especially the sale of physical goods, even for non physical goods such as downloadable software or "ebooks" the physical location of the supplier is an important issue both in what currency you use and in the exact contract of sale which is entered into.
Telephones and "snail mail" also has "global reach", but you don't see demands for everyone to use non geographic telephone numbers and postal addresses (Typically if someone want's a less or even non geographic telephone number or postal address they pay extra for it. Ditto if it has some kind of "vanity content".)

From an Aussie netadmin

[laptop006]

I support Elz, but do you have ANY idea of how F***KED the Australian registry are? They are hell to deal with, and unforunatly Elz just makes it worse, if we had a competent resitrar then Elz's rules would be great. However the Australian government has chosen F**ked resistry over reasnoble rules and forcebly removed Elz's control over the .au

So now i can create new Filters against .biz SPAM.

[Quazion]

Lets say all SPAM from non .biz domains is illegal and its legal from the .biz domain, meaning i would only need to filter .biz mail out.

When does life get so simpel ?

Quazion

The root of the problem

[dirtyhippie]

The root of the problem is the idea that one level of hierarchization is enough to solve everything down to the institution level. It's the same problem as unix, were you have about 10,000 files in /bin /usr/bin and other choice locales in the namespace.

I guess people just have trouble thinking in two dimensions. But honest, people, its easier...
What I'd like to see is at least a two level hierarchy, so you have institutions organized in to logical groups:
www.ford.cars
www.gm.cars
www.dell.comp
www.gateway.comp
www.yahoo.portal
www.go.portal
www.google.search
www.lycos.search
etc. Makes a lot more sense to me, but the trouble is you have a lot more administrative overhead. It also solves the multiple companies with the same name problem.

DH

Re:All domains resolve!

[Erik Hensema]

A much nicer sollution is used by the Danish: go visit dk to register a .dk domain.

I've heard this may fail in msie though.

Re:Oh Puh-leez

[Roblimo]

So true.

The domain I really wanted when I was still active in the limo business was roblimo.md.us because it would have told people where we were (Maryland, USA) at a glance. The old .us domain pattern of including the town and county (roblimo.elkridge.howard.md.us) added too much granularity and was too cumbersome to remember easily, which is why I never got interested in that one.

For local businesses I believe city.state/province.country or just state/province.country is best both for the business owner and potential customers.

I have gotten massive spam urging me to get a .biz domain, but I see no point to having one. I can claim copyright infringement against anyone who uses "Roblimo" in other TLDs if I choose, except perhaps against the Robin Miller in Baltimore, County Cork, Ireland who has a small limo service there, and I think he and I would be more likely to put up a "joint" page than argue, since we're certainly not competing with each other. :)

- Robin

Show.BIZ Troubles

[SL33Z3]

A while ago, I had thought up a domain called "show.com" for a reason I'm not quite ready to release just yet. It was obviously taken. When register.com said I could pre-register show.biz, I was happy as hell. I registered it not even thinking about the fact that I would now own a very popular and much wanted domain for entertainment purposes (showbiz!) It would even appear that there is a copyright on the name "show.biz" for the purposes of entertainment. I have no intentions of using this for entertainment purposes at all, but I already have about 6 Intellectual Property claims against me for the domain. I imagine if I am actually awarded the domain when it is all said and done, I will have lawsuits to contend with.

Anyone got some advice?

Thanks.

Tobin