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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.
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?
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
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?
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.