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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.'"
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
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.
That is a TLD, and I don't think the current root name servers would cope well with handling hundreds of thousands of them; nor would the current system for managing TLDs and root servers.
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.
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?
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.
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!)