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ICANN to Incorporate TLDs Already In-use?
An anonymous reader asks: "I recently found an article at cnn.com about ICANN considering new top level domains. Some of the proposed TLDs have already been introduced by YOUCANN such as .xxx and have been available to the public at select registrars such as new.net for quite some time. If ICANN incorporates already existing TLDs how will this impact those who have already registered for domain on these TLDs? What implications does this have and how will the ramifications impact how businesses view and utilize the web?"
Simply put, if ICANN adopts a TLD that duplicates a TLD that "unofficially" is being registered by another registration system, then we'll have a fracturing in the standards just like in the way that it's almost impossible to tell who the heavyweight boxing champion is. Whenever you have multiple self-appointed authorities, you're bound to have conflicts.
At the technical level, most users see the domain-name world through the eyes of the DNS servers at their ISP, so in order for a new TLD to be valid for that user the ISP must honor it. However, this can be overridden by using a secondary DNS server or modifying the hosts file on the users side, so we may end up seeing a wave of malware trying to monkey with a users DNS settings so that their sponsor's regisitry becomes the first one consulted. Some of the other registrars have already resorted to distributing such software in order for their domains to be valid for anybody.
At the legal level, an "I got here first" principle will be claimed in trademark lawsuits by the business interest behind these rogue TLD operations. That's going to be a bit of an iffy question, if trademark law really applies to an entire TLD, especially when ICANN is the generally accepted certifying body for TLDs.
So in the end, businesses who don't want a domain name to "fall into enemy hands" are going to have to register the same domain twice, because when this dispute is finally settled, one of the two registrations will be null and void, but it'll be hard to tell which.
Seems to me like the domain name system may get pushed over the edge on this one. It was bad enough when US businesses started to buy up top-level domains from countries that were lucky enough to have two-letter TLDs that had cute meanings to US audiences. This would even further create a "wild west" nature for domain names. ICANN's authority is downright questionable at times, and now they're about to have conflicts with pretenders to the throne.
This really aren't new. I mean, they're new to most of the world, but there ARE alternative root servers people can use. Check out open rsc.org they tell you how to change your name server. There was also an article at wired a few years ago that talked about the .biz not really being a new domain. .biz was being used on orsc, and then icann started to use it after orsc. Anyway, just don't think you don't have options.
What the hell is this even talking about?
ICANN is taking applications for registratars to oversee newly created TLDs again. However, a "parallel universe" of "unofficial registrars" already exists consisting of registration services that use various tricks to get their TLDs to be recognized by some subset of the browsing universe. The question is, if ICANN certifies a TLD that already exists "unofficially" to a different registrar, what will happen to the already existing namespace?...
It seems to be two overlapping namespaces headed for a train wreck... leading to questions over how much authority ICANN really has, and what will become of the pretenders to ICANN's throne. We're likely going to end up with multiple domain sellers claiming the root title over the same namespace, and that'll make a mockery of the whole DNS system.
*Shudder* Their software has been responsible for more screwed up computers in my (university student-serving) helpdesk then virtually any other piece of crapware. I like the idea of getting rid of ICANN, but New.Net is infinately worse.
Simply put - more confusion.
;-)
Those who hold existing domain names are going to try and get the new ones with their domains. And cybersquatters and others are going to try and do the same thing.
Now, the interesting question would be, if I'm a porn site for petite teens, can I legally have the domain, www.microsoft.xxx?
No, that would create http://bigm.ess
I've got more mod points and GMail invi
As far as I can understand they're running a parallel, alternate-universe DNS structure because they're fucktards.
If ICANN incorporates already existing TLDs how will this impact those who have already registered for domain on these TLDs?
Um, ICAAN will just ignore the other registrars?
Um, ICAAN will have a meeting in [nice country to visit]?
Um, ICAAN will see if we need another museum TLD?
And so on..?
Perhapse adding the DNS group as an optional component to URLS such as
//foo` being defined either in the HOSTS file or some other new system file
"http://ICANN`slashdot.org"
"http://OpenNIC`computers.geek"
With "foo" in
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
I would have pointed you to this link at cexx.org for info on how scummy new.net is, but if you visit it you'll see that new.net's scumball lawyers forced them to take it down! Instead, see this link for new.net info & removal instructions.
In summary: FSCK NEW.NET!
The ICANN has authority over domain name assignments for most top-level domains (*.com, *.net, *.org, country codes, new stuff line *.info, etc.) and has been assigned the power to create new TLDs.
Other groups have decided they want their own TLDs, so they set up their own name servers (which resolve host names into actual computer IP addresses) with the addition of databases for, e.g., *.web, *.sex, etc. This is unnofficial but technically extremely easy.
ICANN is thinking of asserting its given power over all registries and creating its own official databases for the currently unofficial TLDs. This can cause conflicts with people who have taken domain names with unofficial registries. The fault in my opinion lies with the unofficial registries for advertising an incompatible solution (to use these new names, you need to change your Internet connection settings), but the people who have registered will be in trouble if ICANN starts resolving these new domains and returning "no such domain" for ones that are unofficially registered (and of course vice versa).
This is pure speculation, but my guess would be that ICANN would have no problems with launching domains that already exist on alternative registries. The reason they might do this is simple posturing. If they acknowleged that these domains already existed and refused to "step on" them, they'd be giving legitimacy to these alternate registries. While I have no problem with making room for other registries, ICANN probably does, as it appears to undercut their self-appointed position (with the help of the U.S. government) as the Internet's governing body.
So, to answer your question, I think ICANN would happily launch these TLDs without any consideration at all that they already exist. And yes, this will create a definite conflict with those other registries, technically speaking, since two identical domains can't exist for everyone on the Internet.
Look, this was bound to happen sooner or later, and it's going to come down to a showdown. Do we want a showdown with ICANN and the possibility of overthrowing it as the Internet's governing body? If so, this is the time to get serious about it, since anyone who is running alternative TLDs will either have to get organized and fight or get stomped into the ground. I hate to put it that way, but that's where this is going if ICANN decides to implement these new TLDs unilaterally without any regard to what's already out there.
Extracts:
A new top-level domain doesn't really exist on the Internet until it is added to the root servers, so that any system anywhere on the net that is seeking that domain can find out from the root where the specific DNS servers for that domain lie.....
the operators of the root servers have a great deal of political power over the domain name system. Presently, these servers are operated by Verisign, but their policies are determined by ICANN, the organization set up to administer Internet naming and numbering schemes. Since ICANN has attracted a great deal of criticism (much of it highly deserved) for its biases towards large impersonal bureaucracies and against individual Internet users, various people have come up with the idea of "fighting back" against ICANN by setting up alternate roots.....
Setting up an alternate root turns out to be a very simple matter. The Internet has always been sort of a "do-it-yourself" thing, not centrally controlled or administered like a proprietary online service.....
a naming or addressing system only makes sense if everybody uses it consistently. If every telephone company had a different idea of how the country and area codes ought to be allocated, so that if your long distance service was with AT&T, "1-212" would reach New York City, but with Sprint the same prefix would reach Los Angeles, then telephone numbers would be in a state of chaos....
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I say we just memorize IP addresses from now on. From "Hey, run a Google on him." to "Hey, run a 24.175.19.234 on him."
Karma: Bad (mostly due to all those "In Soviet Russia" jokes)
Many of the legitimate registrars on the Internet are pretty scummy, and ICANN is coming close to the bottom of the barrel, but they can't touch New.net for pure scam-artist nastiness. Anything that's bad for New.net, their "buisiness plan" and their damn spyware is good for the Internet at large. I would love to see them forced to shut down because there are actual, legitimate TLDs that conflict with their offerings. Unfortunately, they'd probably just update their "client software" to check their DNS servers before anything actually legitimate (like, say, the customer's ISP or a root-level nameserver). Anything bad for New.net is good for the Internet at large. They are nothing but scam artists selling something they don't own (new domain names), and deserve everything ICANN in all its fascist idiocy can throw at them. There aren't many people or companies in the world I would wish that upon, but New.net has made the list in spades.
That's it. I'm no longer part of Team Sanity.
They're defined as subdomains of .new.net. So that site you just registered is really "www.mygoatpr0n.xxx.new.net"
.new.net added to the end.
.new.net version to never be attempted).
Take a look at their FAQ. To get this to work in linux, you add new.net to your hosts' file's search path, which makes it so if something fails to resolve, it tries again with
ICANN's move doesn't spell trouble for new.net immediately, but the namespace will start to break down when a real www.mygoatpr0n.xxx appears (causing the
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
The reality is that the only thing that makes ICANN any more "official" than any other "rogue" system is that most people use it. But that does not make it correct. Nothing says that we must use the ICANN system. As a matter of fact, it might be better if GNU came up with their own root domain name servers and give people the option to use a DNS system based upon fairness and integrity rather than simply catering to big business. Why not a DNS system that's free and open?
There were quite a few *real* alternate root servers, and some people even used them for a while, Alternic, our own TINC (The Internet Namespace Cooperative), and more. I helped set up one of the first alternate top level domains, the eponymous ".dot"...
.com.
Ancient history. Back when it really looked like Network Solutions was going to end up owning the root lock, stock, and root-servers.net it was important. Now, it hardly matters. The real root of the Internet is
This awful kludge new.net is doing doesn't deserve the time it takes to laught about.
I've been experimenting with alternative roots over the past couple of months.
.geek, .oss, .parody, .indy, .null, and .opennic . AlterNIC and Pacific Root alternate roots seem to be long gone - I haven't been able to find any current information on these alternate roots, and I have yet to come across a root zone file that allows resolution of any of their names (anybody know?).
.biz . The submitter's take that ICANN roots may soon start resolving these independent root operators is either woefully mistaken or badly misleading.
The OpenNIC root zone file seems pretty stable, and resolves ICANN domains along with opennic's own
I tried the ORSC root zone file, which is FAR more extensive, but it seems to be out of date - I couldn't even resolve some ICANN domains with it!
It seems that the YouCANN and ORSC web sites are possibly horribly out of date - can anyone verify that these projects are even active?
Now for a little editorial criticism: I don't see any indication in the article that ICANN is considering "incorporating" alternative TLDs as much as it's considering bulldozing over them, like it has for
Dude. That's why we have archive.org. When stuff is DMCAed or C&Ded, one can usually still get the stuff.
http://web.archive.org/web/20030410191057/http://w ww.cexx.org/newnet.htm
Just make a .sex or .xxx domain and force all of the porn sites to go there. Why wouldn't they want to? Offer free transfer of domains. This way, they, and parents, can keep minors away from these materials just by having a simple app (or even something built in to IE) block .xxx/.sex domains. The best way to get rid of activities like this is to give them their own place to play. An example of this is Diablo II - cheaters had their own open battle.net servers where they could cheat, and normal law-abiding players played on the legitimate servers.
What implications does this have and how will the ramifications impact how businesses view and utilize the web?
.xxx, it won't conflict with UCANN's .xxx, because you can only use one at a time.
.com, and if people are using the UCANN servers, they'd see that .com, not the ICANN .com.
.com, .net, .org, and the other ICANN tld's. Then UCANN adds their own .tld's, ones that ICANN has not assigned. This way, they get the ICANN tld's, plus their own additional tld's. Sometimes, though, ICANN goes and assignes one of these extra tld's, ( like .biz) themselves, and you get a namespace collision. DNS cannot use two versions of .biz. You get one or the other. Since 99.99% of the world uses the ICANN root, 99.99% of the world sees the ICANN version of the new .tld. Then UCANN whines because now their .tld will be pushed out of the way. It irony is, of course, that this same 99.99% of people who have always been using the ICANN root couldn't see the UCANN version .tld at any time before ICANN set it up. The only people this affects are the people using an alternate root, but they've always seen things differently.
None. This isn't going to have an effect on businesses. Well, about 99.99% of them, anyway.
See, DNS, by design, has a single namespace. That is, blah.foo.bar is unique. There is only one blah.foo.bar, only one right answer. In real life, you can have two people named John Doe, in DNS, you can't.
However, there's no technical reason why you must use the ICANN view of DNS. You can use another DNS root, like AlterNIC or UCANN (or a few others), and what you'll get is a *different* namespace. So now blah.foo.bar points somewhere else. But still to only one place.
So you can use the ICANN root (like 99.99% of the world does) or you can use another root. But you cannot use them at the same time. Therefore, if ICANN chooses to make a
This is why AlterNET and UCANN have always been seen as crackpots, to an extent. They whine and bitch about these things that have no relevance. ICANN is perfectly within reason to define their namespace as they see fit. And so is UCANN and anyone who wants to. UCANN could set up their own
Additional info: An astute reader will notice that things are not quite as simple as "one or the other" as i stated above. You see, what happens is that UCANN will use ICANN's
So, for most people, including serious businesses, nothing changes.
You may not think that colliding other TLDs is a bad idea, but at least realize that they are introducing collisions.
.info, .xxx, .xyz, .foobar, etc..."
.xxx (or whatever) domain yet doesn't take away from the fact that it's the alternate roots are the ones that introduced the collision.
Icann had/has the privilege/responsibility of administering the root '.' domain. They had the power to potentially create any toplevel domain that they saw fit to create, and most people recognized the reality of "icann could create a
For youcann or any other "alternative root" to suggest that icann "introduced the collision" is a deception. The whole top-level namespace was for icann to administer! Just because icann hadn't created the real toplevel
My whole argument is based on the following premise: There must be one view of the domain namespace in order for everybody to be able to successfully communicate using those domain names. The only orderly way to allow for that single view to exist is to have one organization that is responsible for administering that namespace.
DNS is a hierarchical system, and the tree has One Root. (There Can Be Only One!) That may or may not have been the best architectural design that could have been done (Pike & Thompson's paper "The Hideous Name" argues credibly that it was a Bad Idea), but that's the way it is. There's no particularly good reason that, just because there's One Root, that ICANN or Verisign or the U.S.Department of Commerce or Jon Postel's Ghost should be in charge of it, and there are many good reasons that they shouldn't be, but again, that's the way it is. (The mathematical term is "Proof by Vigorous Assertion", and it's worked fairly well here.) In fact the Cabal of 13 Root Server Operators, or some big fraction of them, could theoretically decide to stop listening to ICANN and do something better, but they haven't, in spite of much provocation, and it's unlikely that they will.
There are two basic competitors to the ICANN namespace root. One is the various "Open Root" "Alternate Root" "Orange Root" etc. folks who've sprung up and declared that they can be root just as well as ICANN's preferred root, and at one point as much as half a percent of the Internet occasionally used them to resolve TLDs. If 99.5% of the net doesn't use you, you're not in charge. Some of them have gotten into legal squabbles with ICANN or its predecessors over names that both sides claimed, and they've lost.
The more interesting case is people like new.net, who are selling shortcut namespace for subsets of the DNS hierarchy, roughly equivalent to example.newTLD.new.net. They work for two reasons - one is that new.net has gotten a bunch of major ISPs to buy in and resolve new.net names from their nameservers, and another is that most DNS resolvers have a default suffix, so if the suffix is "3ld.2ld.tld" and they can't directly resolve "example.foo", they'll try example.foo.3ld.2ld.tld, example.foo.2ld.tld, and example.foo.tld, so you can usually trick them into resolving "example.newTLD" as "example.newTLD.new.net". If enough people (or their ISPs) buy into this, you can get yourself a real market in those names, and otherwise you'll have a bunch of grumpy customers who explain that you can reach their website or email at "example.newTLD.new.net".
New.net's FAQ says that if ICANN introduces a TLD name that New.net has been selling, than individual users and ISPs will have to decide who to follow, and that new.net thinks they'll have enough market leverage to dominate. That's a big problem for a new.net user "example.newTLD.new.net" if the ICANN registry sells "example.TLD"; it's a smaller problem for them if ICANN has that TLD but none of the ICANN registries have sold "example.newTLD" yet, so maybe they need to land-rush and buy it from ICANN-space. It's $10-20 for the first year, which is the main risk. They knew the product was limited and somewhat risky when they bought it, and the risks and limitations were disclosed up front.
The more interesting case is what happens if somebody buys "example.newTLD.new.net" first and registers it as a trademark, then somebody else buys "example.newTLD" from ICANN-space, and the first group tries to seize the name, either in an ICANN UDRP arbitration, or else in a trademark lawsuit ignoring the ICANN process. Yes, either approach would be much more expensive than just spending the $10-20 to register the name directly, but sometimes somebody else registers it before you do, either as a bad faith cybersquatting ripoff (like really-distinctive-well-known-name.newTLD), or just because it's a commercially obvious generic name (li
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Being naive, I'm sure, but...
If a person sets up a site on, say, "mysite.ext" - the 'ext' TLD being one managed by an 'unofficial' namespace registrar, then who gets to see that site when browsing to, say, "http://www.mysite.ext/" ?
I probably don't - my ISP, both at home and here at my vacation address, appears to use whatever trickles down from the root (official) nameservers.
So wouldn't that person have to persuade others from using the 'unofficial' namespace registrar's settings/software/whatever to be able to visit their site in this manner in the first place ?
So now we have a situation where there may be "mysite.xxx" already for those who use the 'unofficial' namespace registrar, and in a way another "mysite.xxx" for those who use whatever trickled down from the root (official) namespace registrar.
So the person who wanted to see the 'unofficial' "mysite.xxx", having to change their settings to do so, will still see the site they are used to.
And those who never wanted to see the 'unofficial' "mysite.xxx" to begin with, will be able to see the 'official' "mysite.xxx" without fear of seeing the 'unofficial' one.
The only problem I see, therefore, is the group of people setup to see the 'unofficial' namespaces will be, in a way, unable to see the 'official' ones. But wasn't that basically the risk they took when they went for this solution ?
For what it's worth, I'd imagine that you can always set something up to poll multiple namespaces - or a specific namespace - when consulting a particular URL, and either ask the user which site they want to see if it's new, or take whatever site was stored to file earlier.
Like an extension of the 'hosts' file, if you will.
> What are you talking about? This is not a case of domain squatting.
New.net and YOUCANN are TLD squatting.
One is spyware. Both are moronic and not taken seriously by anyone outside of spammers and people in serious denial.
(Disclaimer: I am not the OP.)
This reminds me of a situation at a former workplace.
This workplace (a major U.S. corporation) has its own telephone network. Dialing local phone calls from the PBX was done by dialing 9-NXX-XXXX. Long distance was 8-NPA-NXX-XXXX, but calling a different facility in the corporation is 8-NXX-XXXX, where NXX in the latter case was a 3-digit code assigned by the company (ours was 639+extension, but to call from the normal phone network was 518-454+extension).
Anyway, the corporate network took advantage of the fact that the area codes always have 0 or 1 in the middle digit, and used this to tell the two apart.
In 1995 or so, NANPA started issuing area codes with non-0-or-1 middle digits. This hosed everything up. As I no longer work for that particular corporation, I don't know what they did about this, but while I was working there (c. 1996), a few of the exchanges became valid area codes, and had to be changed.
Strikes me as the same basic problem.
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