Posted by
ryuzaki0
on from the rollin'-em-out dept.
babycakes writes "Yesterday ICANN unanimously approved a proposal to add a number of new TLDs, to be determined at a later date. Here's the story on InfoWorld and at the BBC."
When will the United States finally have to act like everybody else and use ".us" for sites hosted in the country? I'm sure Microsoft and Netscape would just autocomplete that part, like they do with "http://".
But the British don't have stamps that say "Great Britain" on them even if they did want them, and there is no logic to an international stamp.
The US does have its own tld, and there is some logic to an international tld.
The main problem is that.us was beaurocratically organised, with state, county and district subdomains. I think this has changed now, but a nationwide chain of stores does not want to be restricted to a single state.
Who created it is irrelevant. There are more people on the internet in Europe than in the US. We keep making up names that are English, and yes, while it is a common second language, it's not the best idea. The internet is all about sharing (info, etc), not about the English language's ability to control technology.
We've gone over this a hundered times..porn won't work. Forcing people in one domain is impossible on a large scale (and the censorship, etc), but keeping a domain clean isn't as bad. That's why we've got.kids in the works.
--
GL
Who needs domain names when you've got Google?
by
kusma
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
They should have opened a lot of new TLDs years ago, when good domain names were much more important than now.
Nowadays, I google for websites much more often than using their domain name anyway, and I hope people will rather spend the $50k mentioned in the BBC article on a good website that will be first hit on Google than on a domain name.
Re:Who needs domain names when you've got Google?
by
Zog+The+Undeniable
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
That's £50,000 to sponsor creation of a whole new TLD, not just to buy a domain.
-- When I am king, you will be first against
the wall.
I was wondering...
by
Andy_R
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
how they could decide that new TLDs were needed without first deciding what they would be.
Then I spotted this part of the BBC story:
Under the new plans, any organisation can propose a name. But it must prove that the new domain will represent a well-defined community closely associated with the domain name, and supply a $50,000 application fee. Final approval rests with Icann
Might I suggest that anyone stupid enough to give Icann $50,000 with the nothing in return but a 'we'll think about it' from a notoriously unaccountable organisation that is responsible for the lack of decent TLDs in the first place should be awarded a new.dumbass domain?
-- A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
Define porn. That's the problem with ideas like a.porn or.xxx domain - who defines it? For example, what about nudism? It's nakedness with genitals visible (oh no!). Porn? not a chance, in my book, but what about Ashcroft's book.
Besides, who is going to enforce such a separation? it may not even be constitutional here in the US, and there will always be a country with less-stringent rules that sites can take refuge in.
In short, such a proposal will not work. Get over it. Sex is a fact of life. If you find porn distasteful (I do, personally) DON'T LOOK.
Tar-Palantir
TLDs vs Country IDs
by
Angram
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
They shouldn't make more TLDs. Each country has one, let the individual nations make some lower domains on their own turf. If the US wants Travel, let it have.travel.us and stop clogging up the rest of the world. (It's only "Travel" in English, remember?)
--
GL
Re:TLDs vs Country IDs
by
crow
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
You obviously didn't follow the idea. It's like.kids.us. Instead of registering a second level domain, you register a third level domain. So you might have something like www.travelocity.travel.us. In essence, you could think of "travel.us" as a top level domain, even though technically it's not.
That's how.com should have worked..gov,.mil, and.edu should have been moved under.us a long time ago.
It'd make no difference. A far better use of time would be to stop domain squatting. Far too often I enter a name and come across some random search site with ludicrously high bidding prices for the domain.
Really, if all the domain squatters/speculators were cleared up.org/.com/.net would become far less crowded. The last set of new domain names failed spectacularly - the only one i've ever seen used is.info:.aero anybody? WTF? An entire TLD for a very specific industry?
Which solution would better?
by
Alethes
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Would it be better to have many tightly regulated TLDs, such has only allowing non-profit organizations to use.org, or would it be better to have just a couple of very generic TLDs?
As it stands, most of the existing TLDs are not very regulated, thereby defeating the orginal point of having different TLDs. The other big problem is that existing.com owners get first pick of the new TLDs, meaning that it's just another domain companies have to buy/borrow/steal to prevent supposed trademark infringement. It certainly isn't to make it possible for me to go register amazon.info or yahoo.sex.
Mess, mess mess....
by
jonr
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Mr. Lee never intented that the URL should be visible, and these days, when search engines have become "powerful enough" to find about anything, the domain name isn't that important anymore. Personally, I use Google to search for "someproduct or company" instead of someproductorcompany.com, I started to do this in the glory days of AltaVista. I think we should just allow any 3 letter top domain (aaa-zzz) and be done with it. 4 letters could be used for special purposes (.kids?) and 2 letters for countries. I can't see any technical problems with this, except that IBM would claim control over the.ibm domain.:)
New domains are stupid because they'll either be ignored or else the same company will get all variations.
Better would be to enforce a rule that an individual/company/organisation can only have ONE domain name. That's why subdomains were invented
I don't think this guys topic is especially off-topic.
They have failed miserably to promote the names introduced in 2000. How many web addresses have you seen with.biz or.info... seriously?
I've seen a few small companies here in Scotland with the newest suffixes and I get angry at the marketing company who set them up, before the names have "bedded in".
As a result, these.biz etc websites will be getting very little traffic outside of google's spiders.
I've actually missed a few firms because I was looking for a.com /.co.uk address and never thought of.biz, and I'm a clued up slashdot-using internet professional, so what chance does the rest of userland have?
The trouble with '.kids' is that you end up with the intersection of everybody's ideas of what is suitable for kids. If you've met the kind of religious cunt who glues together the pages dealing with evolution in the family encyclopaedia, you'll see the problem.
Why do we need TLDs?
by
slashzero
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I might be showing my ignorence but why do we need TLDs? Why can't domains be single names and go from there? It just seems like an out dated idea that isn't working. Why can't I just type http://slashdot and be done with it or at the max http://www.slashdot and that's it (although that does look weird). Why do we need all these.com,.net,.org,.museums any how? If we need them to categorize sites by type we would need an infinate number of TLDs to effectively categorize sites. Jesus, look at how many categories yahoo has for instance.
Re:Why do we need TLDs?
by
sql*kitten
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I might be showing my ignorence but why do we need TLDs? Why can't domains be single names and go from there? It just seems like an out dated idea that isn't working. Why can't I just type http://slashdot and be done with it or at the max http://www.slashdot and that's it (although that does look weird). Why do we need all these.com,.net,.org,.museums any how? If we need them to categorize sites by type we would need an infinate number of TLDs to effectively categorize sites. Jesus, look at how many categories yahoo has for instance.
Well, in the ancient days, there was this bizarre idea that the name of something should in some way represent what it actually was..net was intended for network infrastructure. So a company might have a.com domain for its public face, and any infrastructure that it operated that needed to be addressed from outside, say caches or routers or whatever, would all be.net.
That's before idiots decided that.tv meant "television" and not "Tuvalu" or that.to could be come.to instead of Tonga. In short, the system is screwed because the people in charge of looking after it, like ICANN, are idiots. No other word for it, they are utterly incompetent and got their jobs by being "old geezers" who happened to be around when jobs were being assigned, and now they are clinging on to their vestiges of power as hard as they can.
The solution is a free-for-all: you get whatever domains are being hosted on whatever root servers you want to use, no central authority. There's no need for one, there never really was.
Maybe it's because .biz looks just as respectable as .mob... No really, some people just want to have the plain old .com over any new fangled invention (never mind the dot bomb era).
TLDs considered useless
by
n3k5
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I wanted to post something like this (parent) earlier on, but my connection went dead before i hit submit, so I put it here now:
As my friend Billy S. said: "What's in a TLD name? That which we call a foo by any other name would be as easy to google."
The concept of searching for content by trying out an 'address' is SO 1990ies... Of course, if I want the site of the Austrian postal service, I can be pretty sure that it will be at post.at and try that first. Other names might not be that straight-forward, but still easier to remember, like bmf.gv.at for the BundesMinisterium für Finanzen, which is part of the GoVernment of AusTria. But you only remember that address if you already found out (with Google etc.) that it's basicly saying 'Bundesministerium für Finanzen', and not the more commonly used shorter term 'Finanzministerium'.
Everything less official doesn't have intuitive domain names any longer because there have been way too much name clashes already. If a new movie about foo is released, the site isn't foo.com, it's foo-the-movie-com, foomovie.com, $$$productions.com/foo or something like that. No one tries any of these, as a search engine query will lead to the target much faster. People who want free pr0n aren't trying freepr0n.com any longer.
By the time anything like.travel will be well known and widely used by the respective sites, people will generally be googling their way to the desired sites anyway. Of course, the intention behind the new TLDs is to make the names intuitive again, like in the old days when you went to pizza.com when you wanted to order a pizza on-line. But with a great amount of TLDs, where do you go to? pizza.food, pizza.delivery, pizza.homeshopping or get-me-some.pizza? Any anyway, how many TV stations actually bought a.tv domain when it was made available from Tuvalu?
So, what's in a name? Nothing at all, it doesn't matter to people anyway. It's just nicer to have something 'human-readable' for writing it down instead of an IP number, but once everyone carries around their bookmarks on PDAs (or wristwatches or smartcards) and does the drag-and-drop instead of the scribble-on-paper thing, even those would be okay as addresses, even if they were in decimal format.
Re:DNS...why do we use it?
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
so please tell me how a dynamically changin IP will work in this grand scheme of yours? or are you taking the same snooty ICANN route that if you cant afford a static IP you shouldn't be on the net?
DNS it needs to be opened up completely. have.0000 -.zzzz tld's and have a free registration, first come first serve.
anything else is just raping and pillaging from the people on this planet... (ICANN- stealing money from people daily!)
MLM for registrars and icann
by
confusion
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· Score: 2, Insightful
At this point in the game, the primary customers of the recent 'new' domains (.biz,.info) are trademark holders who are forced to register yet more domains. Its quite a boon for registrars when the name registrations start slowing down.
I agree with many of the other posters here - dns is outdated and it doesn't fit how the Internet is used any more, particularly with respect to businesses online with trademarks, etc. The downside is that replacing it will happen just shortly after we all convert to IPv6 which should be about 3523 A.D.
No no no
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1, Insightful
What you're suggesting is that we redefine the Internet, a global and completely open network, along ever-shifting geopolitical boundaries.
Consider the insanity of this, please. That's like trying to design a spacecraft after a galleon. It works for Disney, but not in real life.
The country code TLDs are the ones that should disappear.
If you want to punish someone, go after the domain squatters, not the legitimate users of.com/.net/.org.
Re:DNS is broken, let's just kill it
by
Dun+Malg
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· Score: 5, Insightful
A number based system is the only practical alternative: people and companies would publicise their "web number" just as they do their phone...
I don't think moving towards the "phone # model" is all that great an idea. It may be familiar, but it only exists because phones are a legacy system that, as originally designed, could only handle addressing serially and very low speed (pulse dialing). Phones themselves have been moving away from the "phone # model" lately. Between on-board phone # directories and voice recognition dialing, how many people still dial the actual number on the keypad anymore? I know I only enter numbers directly to dial if I'm calling a person/business I've never called before.
This kills almost all the problems with the current crap system of trademarked names and squatting...
Yeah, but it's really a strategy of throwing out the baby with the bathwater. People are fiercly competetive over recognizable domain names, so the solution is to make all domain addresses equally grim and abstract? That's a soviet communism solution. <hyperbole>
While we're at it, lets apply this theory to art. Masterpieces of fine art are in finite supply, with not enough for everyone. The price of fine art is so high that many can't afford it. I propose we destroy all art and replace it with sequentially serial numbered sheets of framed (but blank) newsprint paper. That way, everyone will have their own distinct piece of art and no one will have the advantage of better art just because they have more money.
</hyperbole>
Count me out of this movement.
-- If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
I always thought...
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
that microsoft used "msn" for their network services because they wanted a ".msn" TLD some day.
Uh, yes, that's the point. To sell more by putting your stuff where people will expect to find it. That's why plumbers advertize in the Yellow Pages under "plumbing" rather than "photography."
But I thought the internet was all .com!
by
louzerr
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The City of Saint Paul, Minnesota used to use the domain stpaul.gov. We now use the official ci.stpaul.mn.us domain (shut up NeuStar - we own it!). In both cases, one continual uphill battle is getting people to realize there's no '.com' on the end. "How will it know to use the internet if I don't put.com on the end?" - I've heard this too many times!
In fact, I don't think most people (slashdotters aren't most people) know how to type an address into their browser. If it's not linked from their AOL or MSN homepage, it must not exist. (I had a hard time believing this at first, but over time, found it to be true.)
Soooo, I'm not too worried about what people are going to have to type in (most simply won't). I would be extremely amused at all the dom-squatters who would break their bank trying to buy every new domain that they think someone would pay for.
Anyone suggest the '.blog' TLD? How about '.exe', just to see how many firewalls it would trip up?
-- "The large print giveth, and the small print taketh away"
-- "Step Right Up", Tom Waits
Slashdot Mirror
When will the United States finally have to act like everybody else and use ".us" for sites hosted in the country? I'm sure Microsoft and Netscape would just autocomplete that part, like they do with "http://".
GL
We've gone over this a hundered times. .porn won't work. Forcing people in one domain is impossible on a large scale (and the censorship, etc), but keeping a domain clean isn't as bad. That's why we've got .kids in the works.
GL
They should have opened a lot of new TLDs years ago, when good domain names were much more important than now.
Nowadays, I google for websites much more often than using their domain name anyway, and I hope people will rather spend the $50k mentioned in the BBC article on a good website that will be first hit on Google than on a domain name.
how they could decide that new TLDs were needed without first deciding what they would be.
.dumbass domain?
Then I spotted this part of the BBC story:
Under the new plans, any organisation can propose a name. But it must prove that the new domain will represent a well-defined community closely associated with the domain name, and supply a $50,000 application fee. Final approval rests with Icann
Might I suggest that anyone stupid enough to give Icann $50,000 with the nothing in return but a 'we'll think about it' from a notoriously unaccountable organisation that is responsible for the lack of decent TLDs in the first place should be awarded a new
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
Define porn. That's the problem with ideas like a .porn or .xxx domain - who defines it? For example, what about nudism? It's nakedness with genitals visible (oh no!). Porn? not a chance, in my book, but what about Ashcroft's book.
Besides, who is going to enforce such a separation? it may not even be constitutional here in the US, and there will always be a country with less-stringent rules that sites can take refuge in.
In short, such a proposal will not work. Get over it. Sex is a fact of life. If you find porn distasteful (I do, personally) DON'T LOOK.
Tar-Palantir
They shouldn't make more TLDs. Each country has one, let the individual nations make some lower domains on their own turf. If the US wants Travel, let it have .travel.us and stop clogging up the rest of the world. (It's only "Travel" in English, remember?)
GL
Really, if all the domain squatters/speculators were cleared up .org/.com/.net would become far less crowded. The last set of new domain names failed spectacularly - the only one i've ever seen used is .info: .aero anybody? WTF? An entire TLD for a very specific industry?
Would it be better to have many tightly regulated TLDs, such has only allowing non-profit organizations to use .org, or would it be better to have just a couple of very generic TLDs?
.com owners get first pick of the new TLDs, meaning that it's just another domain companies have to buy/borrow/steal to prevent supposed trademark infringement. It certainly isn't to make it possible for me to go register amazon.info or yahoo.sex.
As it stands, most of the existing TLDs are not very regulated, thereby defeating the orginal point of having different TLDs. The other big problem is that existing
Mr. Lee never intented that the URL should be visible, and these days, when search engines have become "powerful enough" to find about anything, the domain name isn't that important anymore. Personally, I use Google to search for "someproduct or company" instead of someproductorcompany.com, I started to do this in the glory days of AltaVista. .ibm domain. :)
I think we should just allow any 3 letter top domain (aaa-zzz) and be done with it. 4 letters could be used for special purposes (.kids?) and 2 letters for countries. I can't see any technical problems with this, except that IBM would claim control over the
New domains are stupid because they'll either be ignored or else the same company will get all variations. Better would be to enforce a rule that an individual/company/organisation can only have ONE domain name. That's why subdomains were invented
Sig is taking a break!
I don't think this guys topic is especially off-topic.
.biz or .info ... seriously?
.biz etc websites will be getting very little traffic outside of google's spiders.
.com / .co.uk address and never thought of .biz, and I'm a clued up slashdot-using internet professional, so what chance does the rest of userland have?
They have failed miserably to promote the names introduced in 2000. How many web addresses have you seen with
I've seen a few small companies here in Scotland with the newest suffixes and I get angry at the marketing company who set them up, before the names have "bedded in".
As a result, these
I've actually missed a few firms because I was looking for a
The trouble with '.kids' is that you end up with the intersection of everybody's ideas of what is suitable for kids. If you've met the kind of religious cunt who glues together the pages dealing with evolution in the family encyclopaedia, you'll see the problem.
I might be showing my ignorence but why do we need TLDs? Why can't domains be single names and go from there? It just seems like an out dated idea that isn't working. Why can't I just type http://slashdot and be done with it or at the max http://www.slashdot and that's it (although that does look weird). Why do we need all these .com,.net,.org,.museums any how? If we need them to categorize sites by type we would need an infinate number of TLDs to effectively categorize sites. Jesus, look at how many categories yahoo has for instance.
Maybe it's because .biz looks just as respectable as .mob ... No really, some people just want to have the plain old .com over any new fangled invention (never mind the dot bomb era).
I wanted to post something like this (parent) earlier on, but my connection went dead before i hit submit, so I put it here now:
.travel will be well known and widely used by the respective sites, people will generally be googling their way to the desired sites anyway. Of course, the intention behind the new TLDs is to make the names intuitive again, like in the old days when you went to pizza.com when you wanted to order a pizza on-line. But with a great amount of TLDs, where do you go to? pizza.food, pizza.delivery, pizza.homeshopping or get-me-some.pizza? Any anyway, how many TV stations actually bought a .tv domain when it was made available from Tuvalu?
As my friend Billy S. said: "What's in a TLD name? That which we call a foo by any other name would be as easy to google."
The concept of searching for content by trying out an 'address' is SO 1990ies... Of course, if I want the site of the Austrian postal service, I can be pretty sure that it will be at post.at and try that first. Other names might not be that straight-forward, but still easier to remember, like bmf.gv.at for the BundesMinisterium für Finanzen, which is part of the GoVernment of AusTria. But you only remember that address if you already found out (with Google etc.) that it's basicly saying 'Bundesministerium für Finanzen', and not the more commonly used shorter term 'Finanzministerium'.
Everything less official doesn't have intuitive domain names any longer because there have been way too much name clashes already. If a new movie about foo is released, the site isn't foo.com, it's foo-the-movie-com, foomovie.com, $$$productions.com/foo or something like that. No one tries any of these, as a search engine query will lead to the target much faster. People who want free pr0n aren't trying freepr0n.com any longer.
By the time anything like
So, what's in a name? Nothing at all, it doesn't matter to people anyway. It's just nicer to have something 'human-readable' for writing it down instead of an IP number, but once everyone carries around their bookmarks on PDAs (or wristwatches or smartcards) and does the drag-and-drop instead of the scribble-on-paper thing, even those would be okay as addresses, even if they were in decimal format.
but what do i know, i'm just a model.
so please tell me how a dynamically changin IP will work in this grand scheme of yours? or are you taking the same snooty ICANN route that if you cant afford a static IP you shouldn't be on the net?
.0000 - .zzzz tld's and have a free registration, first come first serve.
DNS it needs to be opened up completely. have
anything else is just raping and pillaging from the people on this planet... (ICANN- stealing money from people daily!)
At this point in the game, the primary customers of the recent 'new' domains (.biz, .info) are trademark holders who are forced to register yet more domains. Its quite a boon for registrars when the name registrations start slowing down.
I agree with many of the other posters here - dns is outdated and it doesn't fit how the Internet is used any more, particularly with respect to businesses online with trademarks, etc. The downside is that replacing it will happen just shortly after we all convert to IPv6 which should be about 3523 A.D.
What you're suggesting is that we redefine the Internet, a global and completely open network, along ever-shifting geopolitical boundaries.
.com/.net/.org.
Consider the insanity of this, please. That's like trying to design a spacecraft after a galleon. It works for Disney, but not in real life.
The country code TLDs are the ones that should disappear.
If you want to punish someone, go after the domain squatters, not the legitimate users of
A number based system is the only practical alternative: people and companies would publicise their "web number" just as they do their phone...
I don't think moving towards the "phone # model" is all that great an idea. It may be familiar, but it only exists because phones are a legacy system that, as originally designed, could only handle addressing serially and very low speed (pulse dialing). Phones themselves have been moving away from the "phone # model" lately. Between on-board phone # directories and voice recognition dialing, how many people still dial the actual number on the keypad anymore? I know I only enter numbers directly to dial if I'm calling a person/business I've never called before.
This kills almost all the problems with the current crap system of trademarked names and squatting...
Yeah, but it's really a strategy of throwing out the baby with the bathwater. People are fiercly competetive over recognizable domain names, so the solution is to make all domain addresses equally grim and abstract? That's a soviet communism solution.
<hyperbole>
While we're at it, lets apply this theory to art. Masterpieces of fine art are in finite supply, with not enough for everyone. The price of fine art is so high that many can't afford it. I propose we destroy all art and replace it with sequentially serial numbered sheets of framed (but blank) newsprint paper. That way, everyone will have their own distinct piece of art and no one will have the advantage of better art just because they have more money.
</hyperbole>
Count me out of this movement.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
that microsoft used "msn" for their network services because they wanted a ".msn" TLD some day.
Uh, yes, that's the point. To sell more by putting your stuff where people will expect to find it. That's why plumbers advertize in the Yellow Pages under "plumbing" rather than "photography."
The City of Saint Paul, Minnesota used to use the domain stpaul.gov. We now use the official ci.stpaul.mn.us domain (shut up NeuStar - we own it!). In both cases, one continual uphill battle is getting people to realize there's no '.com' on the end. "How will it know to use the internet if I don't put .com on the end?" - I've heard this too many times!
In fact, I don't think most people (slashdotters aren't most people) know how to type an address into their browser. If it's not linked from their AOL or MSN homepage, it must not exist. (I had a hard time believing this at first, but over time, found it to be true.)
Soooo, I'm not too worried about what people are going to have to type in (most simply won't). I would be extremely amused at all the dom-squatters who would break their bank trying to buy every new domain that they think someone would pay for.
Anyone suggest the '.blog' TLD? How about '.exe', just to see how many firewalls it would trip up?
"The large print giveth, and the small print taketh away" -- "Step Right Up", Tom Waits