.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."

Comments

I'm too late

[johnburton]

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.

Free the namespace!

[Ashurbanipal]

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.

Hopefully it will only put a damper on plans to introduce stupid TLDs that perpetuate the expensive stranglehold on naming that ICANN enjoys.

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 .pepsi would be run by PepsiCo.

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.

Advertising? Technical issues?

[Tokerat]

Until this article I had never even heard of a .name TLD. Perhaps if more people knew it existed? Most average people are still stuck on .com anyways. I tell them my website's address, 4am.kicks-ass.net (yay DynDNS), which ends in .net, and they call me up complaining it doesnt' work. Some of them put .com, some of them actually put .net.com, and still others put www.4am.kicks-ass.com. Point being, how many people are going to get bounced e-mails from frank@rizzo.com or frank@rizzo.name.com?

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 .name for), this becomes a little more expensive than simply being "gt3trkj3p6@verizon.net"...