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Brad Templeton On New Mobile Domains
nfocus writes "CircleID has an opinion piece by Brad Templeton, Chairman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, offering an interesting follow up to the previous discussions here on Slashdot: New Net Battle Over ".mobile" Looming. Brad suggests that 'the only way to get a competitive innovative space is to slowly get rid of the generics and allow a competitive space of branded TLDs for resale. .yahoo, .dunn, .yellowpages, .google, .wipo, and a hundred other branded resellers competing on even footing to create value in their brand and win customers with innovative designs, better service, lower prices and all the usual things. I presume .wipo would offer trademark holders powerful protections within their domain. Let them. ...Let them all innovate, let them all compete.' Also in the article 'The domain will not actually be named .mobile, rumours are they are hoping for a coveted one-letter TLD like .m to make it easier to type on a mobile phone.'"
Call it ".mob"
:)
I call dibs on "smart.mob".
VOS/Interreality project: www.interreality.org
As long as any typos i happen to make on my mobile get redirected to the correct domain, I'm happy.
All errors in this comment are mine. Corrections are considered a derivative work, and punishable under copyright law.
Not having TLD at all... Like http://slashdot
That would be cooler because most modern browser may omit the http:// part. Lots of business would covet those!
--
Error 500: Internal sig error
This sounds like a good idea. It would be really handy for, say, .wipo to be the "official" site address, and cease the lawsuit problems that have occurred with .com
.sex domain?
And, really, the more competition the better. And extra domains would be nice too.
Wouldn't it be handy to have a
Is it me or does this just look like an attempt by the mobile service providers and hardware manufacturers to screw more money out of domain owners?
.mob domain over my .com or .uk etc domain? Simple - to ensure that someone else doesn't. There will be a huge land grab and expensive litigation to follow.
Why would I want to get a
Stop the madness and stop creating new domains without a radical overhaul of the existing ones.
Matt Thompson - Actuality - Insert product here.
I am probably not in the know as I'm in Canada, and I really only have those impressions (along with what I've seen in the US) that I've seen up here... but boy does it suck. Rogers, for instance, tries to charge you by the kilobyte - and then ads useless colour banners with big file sizes to their so-called mobile sites... and then they disable the image-blocking feature on the T68i they sell. Nice huh?
When I can just get some basic info quickly on a mobile phone without hassle - movie times, directions, etc - then I'll be interested. Frankly its a development problem, and a design problem... a new TLD isn't going to help there...
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
he only way to get a competitive innovative space is to slowly get rid of the generics and allow a competitive space of branded TLDs for resale. .yahoo, .dunn, .yellowpages, .google, .wipo, and a hundred other branded resellers
Excuse me, but isn't that exactly what the domain names are for? I want yahoo in my country, I go to yahoo.dk. With a yahoo TLD I'd go to dk.yahoo. This just doesn't make sense. Can anyone think of a good application for a liberated TLD marked where everybody and his dog has their own TLD?
Underholdning.info
if you think a domain extension is key to a successful service
When will people understand that the top level domain is supposed to indicate the type of organisation that holds the domain. They are not supposed to be a tool to classify content of servers, that's the job of search engines and directories.
.com situation.
Allowing companies to create new top level domains will just result in a confused and crowded tld namespace similar to
Seems to me that I could block a large percentage of spam merely by blocking anything with a FROM or REPLY TO of *.biz & *.info. I'm seriously considering it too. More TLD's would just add to the list that needs blocking.
I have yet to use (or find a useful)* website on one of the new(er) TLD's, and they want to add more?
*That's not to say there aren't any, I just don't frequent them.
I don't really see why we need corporate TLDs. www.google.google? It really doesn't make any sense.
.per domain name reserved exclusively for personal, non-profit websites. .com has lost its original purpose (and .net has lost it, even more so.) Users of .org tend to be of more of a non-profit nature than other domain names, but rarely are they actual organizations. We need a return to strictly descriptive TLDs.
Most of all, I'd like to see a
Allowing arbitrary 'branded' TLDs would solve nothing, it's more likely to cause confusion amongst net users and organisations alike.
All you've done is shifted .com up one level so it's chaos at the top level. Fubaring oooh lots of nameservers.
Commercial organisations have shown themselves to be capable only of managing flat namespaces, they appear simply unable to manage heirarchical naming systems in a coherent manner. Whatever you give them becomes flat.
Hmm, where's my DNS rant?
Ooh here it is:
http://www.archeus.plus.com/colin/dns/
Hmm, my stylesheet needs a little work and the email address is old so don't bother trying to mail me.
Deleted
Correct me if I'm wrong but a few years ago a few intelligent computer geek-types came up with a pretty neat way of ensuring that nobody has to remember computers by their IP addresses but by much easier to remember names. It works pretty well and they called it the Domain Name System.
But as usual, because it's a good idea, someone's got to make money from it so in walk the regiment of marketing types with their buzzwords like "product branding", "innovation" and "customer" and try to hijack it.
"Windows - an operating system designed by marketeers" - enough said.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
I think his comment is a little off base.
... a nice, but flawed idea
He says Rather, generics must be shared. Ownership rights can accrue to them only in specific contexts that are not generic. Because the word "Apple" has no generic meaning when it comes to computers, we allow a company to get rights in that name when applied to computers. A different company has those rights when it applies to records.
But with domain names it is impossible to say "take me to www.apple.com for records" so we either allow someone to use a generic name or no-one...which would have caused legal problems with what is defined as generic.
Besides which at the time i would say it was looked on as a technical issue and not a decision with far reaching economical and political effects.
Branding the toplevel would be nice but i know if i am well established at an address (generic or otherwise) I am not going to be happy to restart just so we can level the playing field. Kind of like poor people asking rich people to go socialist for a while untill we all have the same amount of money and then we'll give that capitalism thing another go, nice idea, not going to happen.
All in all i think thats all this is
The Borg assimilated my race & all I got was this lousy T-shirt
stupid idea, but at least it would give control back to ICANN/IANA unless ... Arrrrggggghhhhhhhh!
Let us make a new internet without companies, whiners, spammers and haX0rz.
:-) = I am happy
:^) = I am happy with my big nose
C:\> = I am happy with my OS
Currenty, TLDs tell you nothing about the reputability of the domain owner -- anyone can get a domain at any TLD. Competition between TLDs could be a good thing in this regard. Some TLDs might become very selective of members -- creating TLDs with high reputations. This is in contrast to some domains, like .biz, that appear to be the lairs for so many spammer ecommerce sites (as far as I have seen).
It would be nice to be able to trust organizations that have a particular TLD -- knowing that the could not get and retain that TLD unless they adhered to a strict ethical code and had the organizational resources to support whatever products/services/info they were providing.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Okay, *I* don't like people polluting the TLD namespace. *He* wants more names.
.l (for "L"ame) TLD added, and anything this guy wants to add as a tld can go under there, making him happy, since he gets all his wacky TLDs and the registrars can have their "you just bought blargh.com! Do you also want to buy blarg.wipo.l?" messages. If people get crabby about having to type two extra letters "It's not a *real* TLD!" they can add .l to their search domains and bump up ndots in resolv.conf. Furthermore, the conventional generics can be aliased into the .l domain (.com.l) if people *really* don't want to do another lookup.
How about this -- there be a
Christ, I can't believe there are people attacking the DNS structure again. We have to put up with Verisign and their wildcards, the registrars and their ".aero" TLD, and now more crap.
May we never see th
This has nothing to do with lower prices or competitive services. It's called marketing people, and it *will not* be stopped by common sense or logical thinking. Although I agree that the monopolized status quo is not ideal, the EFF just lost a bunch of credibilty by release that bollocks. What I find particularly disappointing is the emphasis on providers, companies, and resale. Clearly this wasn't designed to help the average Joe manage his own domain at a realistic price... Why should the domain name infrastructure be a market anyway? How about having it simply maintained by a non-profit orginisation and provide services to folks that need them, instead of selling vast tracts of it to the megacorps that can afford it.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
I want a special TLD called ".idiot", with a special discount for politicians of all sorts and anyone involved in ICANN getting a free account.
<sigh>
The downside of opening up the TLD system is the potential for gated communities that fragment the internet. Some TLDs might decide to only accept conections from particular other TLDs. They might do this to weed out spam, viruses, or objectionable material from other countries.
Some countries, like the US, could legislate that all pron and violent materials be relegated to particular TLDs that let parents easily filter out this material. Other countries might have similar rules or use content-category TLDs for censorship purposes.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
But will every new TLD have significant value? I can see .biz as one of the newer TLD's with a bad reputation. .biz looked like a good idea on the surface, away from the over-populated .com space, but it's been ridden with spammers.
.com space, but for spammers, it's just the case on the victums end of "oh, this guy trying to sell me something has this really k3wl .biz address".
:(
These new TLD's are just going to add more ammo to spammers. They have legit uses, especially for those companies unfortunate enough to have their name taken in the
If we create TLD's for just anything, how do we police the damn things? I bet any spammer could come along wanting one of these, and bang, they just made themselves their own abuse contact
Come on, folks. There should be a moratorium on new TLDs until they can fix the ones they have. My domain is a good example (we'll call it Fubar):
.name domain specifically for this purpose now. You should have (for the US) a registered corporation (INC/PC/LLC/etc.) registered with a FEIN which justifies the .com being given to you.
.org site. I'm probably borderline here, as you should have your organization set up as a (name your favorite federal paragraph) non-profit/charitable organization or corporate not-for-profit to qualify.
.biz and .ws, it just makes the .com TLD more valuable to squatters. Oh, that too.
Fubar.com - owned by namespace, a company who rents email addresses for an outrageous sum. Clearly they should lose their domain, as there is a
Fubar.net - owned by a the Fubar lawfirm. Clearly NOT a network provider of any sort. You should be have a FEIN and corporate papers (they're cheap) indicating that your business is set of for the purpose of providing network services.
Fubar.org - owned by me, Mr. Fubar. Used for personal wmail space and for my political campaign organization. Yes, I ran for elected office last year. I lost. I may run again...eventually. I have also considered hosting the Fubar family genealogy from the
Of course, I'd like Fubar.com for my business, Fubar Engineering, Inc, but I've setteled for FubarEngineering.com. It's a bit cumbersome, especially since I spell Fubar with nine letters.
My point is - until the clean up the process, they shouln't go complicating it any more than it already is. A free-for-all at the top would be disasterous. Not to mention the fact that, like
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Well then, you may as well make it a new protocol:
slashdot://
Here's what I do: Bitty Browser & Andromeda
You know, I've seen press about these new TLD's several times before... There was .bis (or was it .biz?) for businesses...and .tv for television...and something like .info for informational sites.... I don't know how many of these actually went live or not, but I've never seen them in use. All I typically see is .com and .edu these days...and precious few .org or .net - people really don't seem terribly interested in having a variety of TLDs.
yrs,
Ephemeriis
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
DNS is an easily spoofed protocol (and mapping *anything* to an IP address to do authentication is also a bad idea). Using it as an authentication system is an extremely bad idea from a security standpoint. Use certs with SSL if you want server-side authorization.
This sort of thing can be provided by many other mechanisms, but "the existence of a DNS record in a TLD" is *not* what you want.
Oh, and it also isn't hierarchical, which is a fundamental element of DNS.
May we never see th
If microsoft wanted to, they could probably set up an "alternet" where code in IE would check a microsoft dns first and then go on to whatever your isp dns is. Then they could run around with .microsoft or .ms or whatever.
With respect, Brad, that's a terrible idea. To prevent cyber-squatting, companies are going to have to buy all the TLDs relating to their name or their line of business. This is going to cost hundreds of dollars each year for no real benefit.
And WTF is .dunn? In Britain Dunn & Co. is a rather dull gentleman's outfitter. Suits you, Sir ;-)
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
Oh I can see this: "too many connections on Port xcyc8749, cannot handle your request"
All that pressure for nutjobs that can't handle a two or three letter suffix on the domain name. Immense investment, two keystroke savings for things we rarely ever type by hand. What for?
Never change a running.. ah you know the deal
DNS is completely inappropriate for use as a "marketing space" to begin with. This is why we have all of these idiotic lawsuits (and squatting) under the existing TLDs: the domains themselves have been *given* intellectual property status when they do not deserve it. Who deserves apple.com? Apple Supermarkets or Apple Computers? Why?
New TLDs isn't the answer, it's just going to flatten the namespace and give an order of magnitude more traffic to the root servers. Who's going to pay for that? You want to charge new TLD owners $500 a year to register? Who's going to manage that namespace? Is ICANN going to become a registrar, or are we going to start having independent registrars managing the root namespace? Nothing about this looks like a good idea. It might be technically feasible, but it's stretching DNS further than it was intended to go.
A proper solution needs to involve a *proper* directory service. DNS is not a search engine. I shouldn't have to know or guess that apple.com is Apple Computers. Today's search engines search on content and only the quality of their algorithm, the user's ability to research and a bit of luck allow it to point you to authoritative places.
It seems like an X.500 or LDAP directory service does exactly what you'd need here (and conveniently integrates with X.509-style SSL certificates), but it isn't the only solution either. Give users the ability to do a real-world name lookup through a proper directory service, and DNS domains lose their IP value entirely and can end up doing what they were originally intended to do: provide a hierarchial namespace for hosts and services. SSL can be used to start validating this real-world identity instead of just connecting the session with a DNS hostname (which is also part of the problem).
I could query this new directory for "Apple", get back a few matches including the obvious one I wanted, Apple Computers, get a mapping to their DNS domain apple.com, do an SRV lookup against apple.com for an HTTP service, and boom, I have Apple Computer's home page. I don't have to guess the DNS domain and my browser doesn't need to correct my invalid URL.
I really don't see how this is a good idea at all. Making up unlimited top levels is a huge pain in the ass. For anyone out there with an original (not common) domain name and matching company name this makes securing legit traffic and users to your own site very difficult. Used to be you could get the .com.net.org wrapped up. This will be a nightmare for comanies that are trying to keep people from spoofing domains. This is stuff that should be managed in house, like yro.slashdot.org mac.slashdot.org etc.
Post: Sigged, for your pleasure.
In the early days of the web, everyone had homepages with their chosen host that went something like http://www.hostname.com/users/mysite/ or for the lucky ones http://mysite.hostname.com/
.yahoo, .google, .whateverelse, and suddenly we'll be back to those old days. Domains on some of the new TLDs will be given away, and those ones will get exactly the same reputation as the current Geocities/Tripod type sites.
.tv). Most of the others will be snapped up by porn/spam/fraud operators, and once they get associated with them, no-one else will touch them with a bargepole (.biz anyone?).
Then we all realised that the only way for our sites to be taken seriously was to buy a domain name for them, so we changed to http://mysite.com/
Now this proposal comes along with
Others will be sold for extortionate prices, and there will hardly be any of them sold (like
If we're really lucky, there might be a handful of companies that get themselves a unique-sounding domain out of it, but I don't see how that's going to be worth all the wasted time and effort that this whole saga will cause.
The only reall effect of this will be to devalue the domain levels. And the only people who will benefit will be the registrars for the new TLDs.
(Spudley Strikes Again!)
imagine... a system (not unlike freenet) that you control, besides the keyword to which you are server, the ones to which you are client, and the "popularity" of the link keyword->address is taken into account when a person who never accessed that link use that keyword.
:= XX.YY.ZZ.WW:80 "CarCompanyX Official Website"
:= XX.YY.ZZ.WW:80 "CarCompanyX Official Website" := TT.QQ.RR.PP:8080 "CarCompanyX sucks"
:= AA.BB.CC.DD:8080 "CarCompanyX Official Website"
:= TRUSTED:SIGNED(xxxx-signature) AA.BB.CC.DD:8080 Motive:Misrepresentation
:= XX.YY.ZZ.WW:80 "CarCompanyX Official Website" := TT.QQ.RR.PP:8080 "CarCompanyX sucks" := AA.BB.CC.DD:8080 "CarCompanyX Official Website" WARNING:seems to be misreprestation VOTE:12pro/2con/6abs
:= TAG:Wants-to-judge PUBLIC-KEY:xsdfdsfsdf
Trying to explain myself:
Imagine you are CarCompanyX. You create your page and put in its NuDNS record:
CarCompanyX
You are Joe Bloe. You want to buy a car from CarCompanyX. Your NuDNS server returns <NONE?>; it goes to your peers NuDNS, and returns two options:
CarCompanyX
CarCompanyX
your browser can use the most popular of them or give you a choice.
Now, you are Mary Hates CompanyX and you want to hack the system. so you set up a NuDNS record:
CarCompanyX
CarCompanyX sees this, reclaims to a "court" of trusted (as in cryptographically), show its docs and says "this is not the official". Each member of the "court" makes its judgement, and sets up a trusted entry in its NuDNS records:
CarCompanyX
Now, this board/court must have, like, 10 to 20 members, so when Joe Bloe tries to access keyword "CarCompanyX", his browser can show him the options:
CarCompanyX
CarCompanyX
CarCompanyX
his browser/resolver can (at his option) sort these entries, use only the "official", use the last one, use
other options:
* use special "tags", like:
TAG: Trademark-owner
TAG: Denouncing (or criticism?)
TAG: Personal
in the NuDNS records, let the system and the "court"/board sort it out. The "court"/board does not even has to be appointed/elected. People can put in their personal NuDNS servers:
JoeBloeJr
The system could gather everyone who wants to judge, their last votes, and each person could choose who to trust in his system.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
You're not thinking like a marketing/sales assclown. Making more money is the goal. The unfortunate side effect of breaking the TLD conventions is secondary.
Assclown #1:"Hey, I have this new idea to make more money."
Assclown #2:"Will it affect us personally?"
AC#1: "Probably not, but I'm not sure. We DO get more money out of it, though."
AC#2:"Ok, lets do it. The engineering guys can figure out the hard parts."
High 5's and martini's all around.
Someone should create a free software version of the CNRI's handle system instead. And set up a non-profit ethically oriented organization to back it, rather than allowing a perfectly sensible idea to be hijacked by Esther Dyson and her oligarch cronies at the International DOI Foundation.
.mobile etc. discussion is a move in exactly the wrong direction: away from a decentralized end-to-end architecture, to one where you pay for the priviledge of serving one feudal lord or another. There's absolutely no value in any of this, unless you're one of those dweebs who's every article of clothing is covered with branded slogans. Branding is something you do to cattle.
If you're not familiar, the idea is to assign objects persistent identifiers. URL's can also name things, but persistence is hard to guarantee, because the things they refer to may very well move around. E.G. - a researcher's published work might follow him/her from institution to institution. Keeping the identifier persistent means bibliographic references etc. remain viable.
This whole