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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."

26 of 275 comments (clear)

  1. slashdot.dot by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    It time for a .dot domain!

    1. Re:slashdot.dot by kusma · · Score: 5, Funny

      So it will be H T T P SLASH SLASH SLASH DOT DOT DOT
      Really easy to tell people over the telephone :-)

  2. .porn by martingunnarsson · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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
    1. 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.

      --

      GL
    2. Re:.porn by nick-less · · Score: 5, Informative


      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...

    3. Re:.porn by rmohr02 · · Score: 5, Informative

      I believe it's .kids.us

    4. 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.

    5. Re:.porn by spakka · · Score: 5, Funny
      who defines it?

      The courts. Law is full of 'man on the Clapham omnibus'-style subjective definitions. Why should porn be different?

      Legislators would devise some 'reasonable wankability' test, which the courts would interpret and apply.

    6. Re:.porn by epukinsk · · Score: 5, Funny

      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!

  3. 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://".

    --

    GL
    1. Re:Dot US by sfled · · Score: 5, Funny


      Ok, if we get .us, does the rest of the world get .them?

      --
      I'm not really a web designer, I just play one on the Internet.
    2. 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.

      --
      A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
    3. Re:Dot US by Selanit · · Score: 5, Informative
      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.

  4. 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.

  5. 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.

  6. 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
  7. 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.

  8. Bad choice of TLDS. by irc.goatse.cx+troll · · Score: 5, Interesting

    " 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
  9. 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
  10. 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?

  11. 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.

  12. 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. :)

  13. Wrong Way! by Greyfox · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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?

  14. 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.

  15. 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.

  16. 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.