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."
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.
A.porn domain would be good, if most of the porn was collected under a single TLD it would be easy to block it at schools and so
blocking via domainnames? I think you'd better block via IP, most of those kids are smart enough to figure this out... Anyway the most illegal porn won't be located under http//www.lolita.porn. but under http://fctnts14d017.nbnet.nb.ca/~xydds/ this is why filtering wont work...
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.
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.
That's a great idea. I just opened a new hotel in St. Louis called Hotel Ectrics Ex in the latin district, but it turns out some bastard already registered hotelectricsex.com. Move all those pervs to.porn so legitimate businesspeople like myself can run our businesses!
I don't think porn sites should be forced into it. It's better to somehow make it cool for porn sites to have a.porn address.
"Cool"? Pornography on the internet isn't a high-school popularity contest-- it's about making money. Making.porn "cool" might get a few porn site operators who still idolize Fonzie, but for the rest of 'em you're going to have to appeal to their pocketbooks.
-- If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
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://".
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://".
It's not mandatory to use the two-letter country suffixes for non-US sites. For example, jungle.co.uk (an online retailer of computer goods and so on) is just a re-direct to jungle.com, even though they do business exclusively in the UK.
Also, the.US domain has recently been opened up to general use. It's available from a number of different registrars, for example here and here and here, to name a few.
Regarding auto-completing parts of URLs, note that the "http" protocol is universal to web sites. (Well, if you count https, but anybody using that for an entire site will have an unencrypted redirect page if they have the first clue what they're doing.) It is interesting, though, to try different browsers with just random words typed into the location bar. Internet Explorer, for example, will interpret "foobar" as a search term and direct you to a MicroSoft owned search engine where it will search for foobar. Phoenix (and most likely NS7, Beonex, and their common progenitor Mozilla) will assume that you meant http://www.foobar.com/ and send you there.
ICANN's a damned monopoly with no interest for the common internet user. We need another top level domain registrar.
Current timetable...
by
briancnorton
·
· Score: 5, Funny
The current decision decided that the new tlds must be implemented in a timely manner... Proposals must be submitted by 2009, and a formal decision can be expected by 2123.
--
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
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
oever
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
With URL's you can access the entire web. With Google, you can't.
In a free world, 'where do you want to google today' might work.
-- DNA is the ultimate spaghetti code.
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
.com worth more
by
QaBOjk
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
What's funny is that a.com domain name has much more value than any other TLD.. but to purchase any new TLD costs 3 times as much as a.com
Re:Previous plans for more TLD's failed
by
dj28
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Mods, please check the links of the people you are modding up. In this case, the link in the parent post goes to goatse.cx. Mindless moderation runs so rampant on slashdot.
" the International Air Transport Association (IATA) stated its case for ".travel," the World Health Organization (WHO) lobbied for ".health," Nokia Corp. for ".mobile" and a group of Internet companies said it wants ".III" for individuals"
IMO most of those are pretty useless. ICANN should be working on revoking the country TLDS's that are being abused (.tk,.tv). Why add more unneeded TLDs that will just confuse things?.III: Of all these proposals, this makes the most sense reasoning wise, but why three I's?.mobile: I'd love to type 'mobile' out with those annoying keypad typing things..travel: Well look who's too good for.com's.health: Same, might be useful for only 'correct' health sites to prevent users from being misinformed, but who decieds that?
Also, Has anyone here actually been glad that.info and.biz are in use?So far I've only seen one.info, and it was misused (No info on the site, it was a network). Still no.biz's yet
-- Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive.
Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
Re:Bad choice of TLDS.
by
Greedo
·
· Score: 4, Informative
You can no longer be sure that something under.ca has any connection with Canada or that something under.ie has any connection with the Republic of Ireland (Eire)..CA domains can (basically) only be registered by Canadian citizens or residents, companies registered in Canada, or holders of Canadian trademarks.
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?)
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.
Re:Which solution would better?
by
mpe
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
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?
Or even you don't get a.com unless you are a commercial business operating in more than one country. A generic TLD would be something like.misc or.etc rather than treating.com,.net and.org as being.misc.
As it stands, most of the existing TLDs are not very regulated,
Indeed some of then have become less well regulated as time has gone on.
thereby defeating the orginal point of having different TLDs.
If domain names were used properly there wouldn't be an issue. The problem is treating a hierarchical system as though it is a flat namespace. No one is demmanding that there be more coutry names for postal mail or more country codes for telephones.
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.
Implying that the real idea is to make money out of the registrations. Anyway trademarks are ment to be specific to a specific place and type of business, though this appears to be increasingly ignored.
Of course, that could also be ipv6.geek and hackme.geek (or crackme.geek for Eric Raymond et. al.)
-- Any sufficiently advanced libertarian utopia is indistinguishable from government.
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.:)
Adding more TLDs is going the wrong way. As others have said, there are already the country code TLDs. So phase out the existing.com,.net and.org TLDs and make everyone go by country code. It's easy enough to put your country in your search domain anyway, so that if I said "ibm.com" I'd get ibm.com.us, while someone in Japan would get ibm.com.jp. This would solve the problem of non-multinational companies taking over a domain for all countries, too, AND allow much easier regulation of country specific domains like.kids. Face it, no one in the rest of the world is going to use.kids anyway.
--
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
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!
DNS...why do we use it?
by
Joe+U
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Additional TLD's won't help in the long run, because when it comes down to it, it's just all part of an aging DNS system.
The better solution would be to replace DNS with a better naming system.
Search engines are a good start but they are too hit or miss on many topics. Those with IE/Windows, try using the Google toolbar as your address bar for a week. It makes a decent DNS replacement system (Okay, it hides DNS, it still uses it, but it wouldn't be a big jump to switch Google to an all IP address solution)
Leaving DNS will be a huge task, bigger than changing to IP v6. There needs to be some way to get everyone to install the replacement, or convince Mozilla/Netscape, AOL and Microsoft to include it.
On a side note, at this time, there is only one plugin that has made it this far, and that's Flash. So, it can be done, there just has to be a compelling reason to get people to do it.
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.
Re:voluntary censorship by TLD
by
mpe
·
· Score: 4, Informative
What would really be useful for Internet culture would be a.kid TLD that would be free of content that requires a mature personality to process, such as graphic violence, graphic sex, advertising, etc.
This is sort of the opposite of.porn, with much the same problem of there being no global definition of "child". It would really only make much sense as a secondry or tertiary domain within a geographic TLD. e.g. kid.us, kid.uk, kid.fi, kid.ca.us, etc.
after .biz and .name...
by
X_Caffeine
·
· Score: 4, Funny
...I'm sure they'll come up with some real winners.
.cam - nubile 16-year-old girls with Amazon wishlists, and the FBI spooks who lurk there
.bomb - all venture-capital-rich startups start here for one year. if the company has not purchased any Aeron chairs within that period, they get awarded a.com
.trek - a special little home for people who actually care that Enterprise and Nemesis are completely out of synch with the rest of the series
.slash - a copyright-free zone for hot man-on-man fan fiction. may have a little overlap with.trek
.google - because sooner or later, Google is going to become the Internet anyway
.mac - give them their own damned internet so the rest of us can hear how much prettier, faster and more expensive it is. Pages will only move at 56k speeds, but a special "double-pumped" technology using two phone lines will supposedly make it as quick as DSL.
and most importantly,.troll [-1 not funny];)
-- // I will show you fear in a handful of jellybeans.
I would like to see...
by
anethema
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
.inc.ltd
etc..I think a limited or incorperated company would be happy to have its own Businessname.inc
Plus its short! (unlike SOME i could mention-- nokia.takesmeafuckinghourtotypethisonamobilephone
--
It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
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.
-- If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Re:Nice troll...
by
nagora
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Seeing as how the whole point of DNS was so that people WOULDN'T HAVE TO REMEMBER NUMBERS.
No, it was so the people WOULDN'T HAVE TO TRACK CHANGING IP ADDRESSES. Duh!
It was thought that the ability to have memorable names was a nice side-effect and that it would be managed by keeping different intellectual property claims in separate domains. That worked for a while but once companies started to leak out of.com and into.net and.org the system rapidly fell apart and it now SUCKS. Go on, set up cocacola.info for all your cola-wars stories and see how long you'll last with the "but it's clearly not THE cocacola because it's.info, not.com" argument. How about something more generic like "apple.co.uk" for your orchard business? Or perhaps the world's Mr McDonalds would like a site devoted to their families? Good luck to them!
Recognisable names seemed like a good idea but are not viable in the long run; abstracting IP's is vital.
TWW
-- "Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Slashdot Mirror
It time for a .dot domain!
A .porn domain would be good, if most of the porn was collected under a single TLD it would be easy to block it at schools and so on.
Martin
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
ICANN's a damned monopoly with no interest for the common internet user. We need another top level domain registrar.
The current decision decided that the new tlds must be implemented in a timely manner... Proposals must be submitted by 2009, and a formal decision can be expected by 2123.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
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
What's funny is that a .com domain name has much more value than any other TLD.. but to purchase any new TLD costs 3 times as much as a .com
Mods, please check the links of the people you are modding up. In this case, the link in the parent post goes to goatse.cx. Mindless moderation runs so rampant on slashdot.
" the International Air Transport Association (IATA) stated its case for ".travel," the World Health Organization (WHO) lobbied for ".health," Nokia Corp. for ".mobile" and a group of Internet companies said it wants ".III" for individuals"
.tv). Why add more unneeded TLDs that will just confuse things? .III: Of all these proposals, this makes the most sense reasoning wise, but why three I's? .mobile: I'd love to type 'mobile' out with those annoying keypad typing things. .travel: Well look who's too good for .com's .health: Same, might be useful for only 'correct' health sites to prevent users from being misinformed, but who decieds that?
.info and .biz are in use?So far I've only seen one .info, and it was misused (No info on the site, it was a network). Still no .biz's yet
IMO most of those are pretty useless. ICANN should be working on revoking the country TLDS's that are being abused (.tk,
Also, Has anyone here actually been glad that
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
With all the lobbying going on in ICANN, it is suprising that there is not a .squatter TLD.
-------
Bite Me Fanboy!!
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
We want dot geek!
.ipv6 or .hackme?
Or how about
Of course, that could also be ipv6.geek and hackme.geek (or crackme.geek for Eric Raymond et. al.)
Any sufficiently advanced libertarian utopia is indistinguishable from government.
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
And people who only regiesters domain names for redirects or "buy this domain for $1000" should be flogged in public!
J.
Adding more TLDs is going the wrong way. As others have said, there are already the country code TLDs. So phase out the existing .com, .net and .org TLDs and make everyone go by country code. It's easy enough to put your country in your search domain anyway, so that if I said "ibm.com" I'd get ibm.com.us, while someone in Japan would get ibm.com.jp. This would solve the problem of non-multinational companies taking over a domain for all countries, too, AND allow much easier regulation of country specific domains like .kids. Face it, no one in the rest of the world is going to use .kids anyway.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
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!
Additional TLD's won't help in the long run, because when it comes down to it, it's just all part of an aging DNS system.
The better solution would be to replace DNS with a better naming system.
Search engines are a good start but they are too hit or miss on many topics. Those with IE/Windows, try using the Google toolbar as your address bar for a week. It makes a decent DNS replacement system (Okay, it hides DNS, it still uses it, but it wouldn't be a big jump to switch Google to an all IP address solution)
Leaving DNS will be a huge task, bigger than changing to IP v6. There needs to be some way to get everyone to install the replacement, or convince Mozilla/Netscape, AOL and Microsoft to include it.
On a side note, at this time, there is only one plugin that has made it this far, and that's Flash. So, it can be done, there just has to be a compelling reason to get people to do it.
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.
What would really be useful for Internet culture would be a .kid TLD that would be free of content that requires a mature personality to process, such as graphic violence, graphic sex, advertising, etc.
.porn, with much the same problem of there being no global definition of "child". It would really only make much sense as a secondry or tertiary domain within a geographic TLD. e.g. kid.us, kid.uk, kid.fi, kid.ca.us, etc.
This is sort of the opposite of
and most importantly,
// I will show you fear in a handful of jellybeans.
.inc .ltd
etc..I think a limited or incorperated company would be happy to have its own Businessname.inc
Plus its short!
(unlike SOME i could mention-- nokia.takesmeafuckinghourtotypethisonamobilephone
It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
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.
No, it was so the people WOULDN'T HAVE TO TRACK CHANGING IP ADDRESSES. Duh!
It was thought that the ability to have memorable names was a nice side-effect and that it would be managed by keeping different intellectual property claims in separate domains. That worked for a while but once companies started to leak out of .com and into .net and .org the system rapidly fell apart and it now SUCKS. Go on, set up cocacola.info for all your cola-wars stories and see how long you'll last with the "but it's clearly not THE cocacola because it's .info, not .com" argument. How about something more generic like "apple.co.uk" for your orchard business? Or perhaps the world's Mr McDonalds would like a site devoted to their families? Good luck to them!
Recognisable names seemed like a good idea but are not viable in the long run; abstracting IP's is vital.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"