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Plans For New TLDs

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."

15 of 275 comments (clear)

  1. Dot US by Angram · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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://".

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    GL
    1. Re:Dot US by Andy_R · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Probably around the same time us British start writing our contry name on our postage stamps.

      We set the idea of postage stamps up, so we ended up being the default, just like the US did for domains.

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      A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
  2. Re:.porn by Angram · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

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    GL
  3. 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.

  4. 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?

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    A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
  5. Re:.porn by Tar-Palantir · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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

  6. 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?)

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    GL
  7. So? by IamTheRealMike · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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?

  8. 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.

  9. 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. :)

  10. Stpuid by johnburton · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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

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    Sig is taking a break!
  11. Re:.porn by spakka · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  12. 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.

    1. 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.

  13. Re:DNS is broken, let's just kill it by Dun+Malg · · 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.

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    If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.