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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.
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!
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)
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.
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