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.NAME at a Crossroads
An anonymous reader writes "It seems the .NAME registry is at a
crossroads. They say that things are going far
from well, and so they have started their own registrar that is going to try to
market .NAME domains to individuals, unlike all other registrars. If they
don't manage, this will be the first gTLD to go bankrupt. I guess that
will put a damper on any plans to introduce more new TLDs."
Dang, I've never even *heard* of
Well shucks, I just can't figure out what the problem is...
My name has already gone so I couldn't have it even if I wanted it. There is no point having a variation of it either. I can't imagine how they expect this to succeed. There are far too many people with the same names, You need a proper hierarchy for this kind of thing.
Sig is taking a break!
I guess .net and .org are ok too but only if you also have the corresponding .com.
If you get anything other than a .com then everytime people try to go to your website they are going to type it in wrong until they remember your strange extension.
There is not much incentive for individuals to get this. Broadband seems to be the fastest growing way to establish a full time internet connection. Most broadband suppliers do not want people running servers on their networks. What would be the point of buying your own name when you can't flaunt your vanity by actually using it!
TLDs should be available to anyone who can run a secure, reliable root - this connects profit to performance, so we don't have to rely on the innate goodness of the root nameserver operators. The first thing that'd happen would be that pepsi.com, pepsi.net, and pepsi.org would be obsolete since
With the widespread popularity of search engines, nobody would have any trouble finding anything even if some temporary chaos were engendered.
Spare me the FUD about nameservices not scaling for this; I believe DNS and BIND are quite capable of it.
Until this article I had never even heard of a
Also, once I get this TLD I need to do something with it. After I pay for hosting or a mail server setup (which is what most people woudl probably want a
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
Any TLD authority whose site doesn't work in Netscape 4 looks cheesy to me... (reach for IE) and the one that requires Flash definitely won't be on my list. Period.
17779 eligible voters in a district, 17779 'vote' as one. This is Russia.
Next they will try a TLD with umlauts and maybe some of the cyrilic letters.
And what exactly would be so wrong about domain names in non-ASCII character sets? If you can't read the language, then there won't be anything there for you, so why do you care? If you can read the language, then isn't it a good thing to be able to have a domain name in your own language, without having to transliterate it into a foreign character set?
The web was supposed to facilitate communication, not force everyone into a single character encoding for no better reason than the country that developed it used that one.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
It seems bizarre that anyone thinks they are going to make money with a new TLD, when ".org" and ".net" registrations COMBINED pale in comparison to ".com" registrations. Businesses are scared to register anything other than ".com", so they certainly aren't going to go with a TLD that most people haven't heard of.
.com, .org, and .net for general content. For example, I know that the idea of using ".kids" for kid-friendly websites has been discussed; great idea, but who is going to ensure that ONLY kid-friendly websites use that TLD? Maybe if a coalition of kid-friendly companies (Disney, CTW, etc.) managed it; I could even see them being able to charge a premium price ($500?), because owning a ".kids" site would be a stamp of approval. Pricing it high would also dissuade jokesters from setting up ".kids" porn sites or hosting adult content.
I would say that, in order for a new TLD to really make money, it would have to be issued by companies that are willing to manage the content. In this way, TLD's could be really useful by classifying websites; keep
But, there's is NO FRICKEN WAY another TLD is going to make a dent in the market without adding some additional value in.
The problem is the spam. Very few people want to have their cyber identity tied to their email address in such a direct fashion.
The .name zone has about 10,000 Web pages in it. So you can work out the number of domains they have probably sold.
The big problem that the new registries face is that they thought that starting a new domain was a license to print money for doing nothing. They simply did not expect that there might be some actual work involved.
$35 sounds a lot by geek consumer standards, but you need a minimum of 2,000 names to cover the cost of hiring one person at that price - including salary, overhead, benefits etc. You need a minimum of 5 people to provide round the clock support.
The business models of the new domains expected people to buy millions of them in the first year. They did not understand that maybe it might take five years to build a critical mass.
It is always easier to look at someone elses business, particularly a successful one and decide that it is essentialy easy to run and cost free than to have your own idea. Look at all the folk who blundered into etail thinking that the economics of that space would somehow be different to the economics of mail order, a business notorious for its low margins and high infrastructure costs. Or look at the folk who blundered into home delivery of groceries, an even lower margin business, building $30 million distribution centers to serve markets that could not possibly support the interest payments, let alone register a profit.
Folk who have .name domains should not be too worried however. The same thing happened to .tv which spent through its initial VC funding at record pace and was bought out for about a tenth of the amount spent on building the brand. Someone will buy .name, although bidding is not likely to be brisk.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
No, it's very stupid and it wouldn't help at all. I don't say this to be insulting, but because this supposed panacea is constantly being brought up by people who can't or won't think things through.
People selling smut want to get it under the noses of as wide a potential audience as possible. Hence the existence of things like www.whitehouse.com. You will not be able to stop them or even put a dent in their operations unless you manage to outlaw porn in general worldwide, which is (A) bad policy, and (B) highly unlikely. If you create a .sex domain, then the porn operators will register in both - it costs them $10 and gets them more exposure.
If you want to provide a child-friendly environment, you can create a domain called .kids or whatever. Require organizations registering in it to either provide references from established child-friendly outfits (school system, CTW, etc.) or to post a large cash "smut bond". Anyone found with porn on a site reachable via a .kids URL (whether it's because they ran an open web proxy, or because they willingly put it up) forfeits their bond and loses their domain.
This works, because you have a finite number of domains to monitor, and you have specific disincentives to leverage. Trying to keep pornographic content out of the "rest of the internet" is an impossible task and only an idiot (or someone with a fat non-outcome-based contract) would attempt it.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
There are two schools of thought here.
The first advocates a "lowest common denominator", where hostnames are explicitly restricted to a subset of the world's scripts. Some will have little or no problems with this (e.g. Americas and most of Europe) while others may have to transliterate significantly.
The second advocates a full internationalization of DNS, allowing hostnames to be represented in any and every script imaginable. Nobody would need to adapt to any lowest common denominator, since they can just use names in their native scripts.
The first approach encourages interoperability at the expense of those furthest away from the standard (e.g. asian scripts). The second approach encourages expanding language barriers into the area of Internet hostnames.
With multiple scripts in DNS hostnames, it's now difficult for me to correspond with an abuse contact at a provider in an asian nation, because I can't type their e-mail address. This is a very bad thing.
I might not have a problem with this approach if the world didn't have this immense reliance on DNS hostnames. If we had another directory sitting atop DNS, mapping real-world names to DNS domains, and a more integrated database of contacts and Internet resources, I shouldn't have to type or cut-and-paste much of anything in the future, and this wouldn't be much of a problem. By the same token, however, users will be abstracted away from DNS hostnames for the large part, reducing this perceived need for hostnames in multiple scripts. We can then go back to technically-oriented reasons for why this is or is not a good approach, and these seem to strongly favor interoperability, which, at the moment, favors a lowest-common-denominator approach.
Dave King, a very common name, but now that I have a modest blog I'm the number 2 Dave King, any one who knows me would be able to add other terms that should make my blog #1, so why would I need daveking.name?
-Peace
Dave
Free as in "the Truth shall set you..."
No offense, but I don't think you really understand the "adult" industry on the web.
.xxx domain, knowing that many people would block it?), but a decent number of false negatives until it caught on.
.kids material? What's okay for 15 year olds isn't okay for 7 year olds. Whose idea of what's acceptable do you use?
.aero?
Not all of us want to spam you with our website.
Not all of us want to trick you into visiting, or deluge you with popups should you ever commit the horror of trying to leave the site.
Not all of us have a blatant disregard for wanting to keep kids out of our sites.
Personally, I'd love to transfer EVERY domain we have over to a ".xxx" or ".adult" or ".sex" or whatever TLD. Existing *.com domains we'd setup to redirect to the *.xxx version.
Yes, something like this would be voulentary, and yes there would be people out there who wouldn't do it. However, I'd love there to be a way that we could easily segregate our adult sites away from the rest of the internet, so that those who DO want to block such things can do with a reasonable accuracy.
It really could go either way. With a *.xxx policy, you'd have very few false positives (who would register and use their
With a *.kids policy, you knot only have to have someone very STRICTLY controlling its use (or it becomes useless), you'd be forced to limit browsers use to just *.kids if you wanted to play it safe. That's not going to leave much of the internet left until it had a real critical mass going.
You'd also have to deal with the sticky subject of what exactly IS
99.99% of the adult webmasters out there would LOVE a way to keep kids out of the sites. We would love a simple check box that every ultra-conservative letter-writing crusader could check that would make sure they never saw our sites. Yes, we use ICRA style tags that are meant as content advisories to browsers, but every attempt at making THOSE known to users have failed.
I can understand some of the reasons people have for not wanting an "adult only" tld, but I think its use would have a much greater public good than... oh, say...
The .name registry has some unique features:
- Customers register 3rd level names (ie: firstname.lastname.name)
- They charge an additional annual fee to have access to the corresponding e-mail address (firstname@lastname.name)
- Customers can't use the DNS services that they use for 'real' domain names
The dotName people had some lofty ambitions when the registry was created. They were hoping that their names would become the standard for unique ids over all kinds of communications -- they'd point to your website, e-mail, cell phone, etc. This sounds like a reasonable idea (a unique communications id), but names are not unique enough...
Is anyone familiar with any similar (but ideally smarter) efforts?
This is something many Slashdot users seem to get wrong: Slashdot users are generally not particularly attractive customers. Sure, there are many people here, but most people here show around for price, complain a lot, are power users that require tons of features normal users aren't interested in, and generally don't like to pay for stuff they can do themselves for free or cheaper.
In other words, while we're happy to take any customer that want our product, and will happily help more advanced users, it would be economic suicide for us to try to cater for Slashdot users instead of people that are less demanding, less price sensitive, more willing to spend and hundreds of times as many.
There are certainly services for which Slashdot users would be the right primary audience, but this is not one of them.
(Disclaimer: I work for Personal Names)
I must admit, I'm not surprised to see .name going tits-up, and I'll be surprised to see how .me.uk plays out over the next year or two. I think this whole notion of trying to cater to individuals is pretty well doomed - there's always going to be too many people with the same name, and they're going to end up as the exclusive preserves of the rich and vain people who happened to get there first. If they really want to sell domains to individuals, give them a bit of character... hands up anyone who wants their own .geek domain?
On a more general note, I may be missing something *really* significant, but I really think that the internet DNS system suffers heavily from piss-poor management. As it stands, we've got all these fairly uninspiring TLDs - .museum, .aero. .info, the list goes on. I can't believe any commercial organisation are going to go for a .biz or a .info domain without trying to get the .com as well. One of my clients provides information publishing services to the media industry, and they're now buying .com, .co.uk, .biz and .info for every domain they register - not 'cos it's bringing them any extra revenue, but because they're worried about cybersquatters and competitors trading on their brand.
Added to this, I really don't think ICANN are doing a particularly good job setting up the 'new' TLDs. I've said this before on /., but why the hell isn't there a .movie TLD? Every mainstream film that's released these days has an official website with a fat marketing budget behind it. Movies tend to have short, easily memorable name, and - more importantly - they're almost always unique names, to avoid people confusing one movie with another. Since films don't really depend on their internet presence for revenue the way many companies do, they'd probably be a lot more receptive to using something other than .com at the end. As long as the registration process was vetted the same way as .edu or .ac.uk, you'd rapidly create a system where a .movie site was guaranteed to be the 'real deal', leaving the fanboys to fight over www.starwarsepisode3.com. I'm sure there's numerous other candidates - .game, .book, .show, maybe .band or .music or somesuch. Certainly none of them can be any worse than .museum - do a Google search for 'museum', and see how many pages of results you have to go through to find a .museum TLD. I got bored after about a hundred results.
.sex and .xxx offer possibilities, too. It can't be that hard for an ISP or hosting company to insist that their customers use a specific TLD for pornographic sites. All concerned parents have to do is block access to .sex and voila! they can sleep at night believing their kiddies are safe from the child-eating internet porn monsters.
At the end of the day, if ICANN want to provide TLDs as a service, they've got to accept that no-one's going to get rich, and if they want to get rich, they should be identifying their potential markets just like any other business and working to meet the needs of those markets. TLDs like .name and .aero just seem like a waste of everybody's time and bandwidth.
-- Open Source: It's mad, but you don't have to work here to help.