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Berners-Lee on the TLD Explosion
kmccammon writes "Tim Berners-Lee recently released a white paper outlining a number of justifications for stalling (at least temporarily) the expansion of the top-level domains. Among the reasons cited: bad economics. As evidenced by the .biz and .info debacle, more top-levels does not necessarily mean more domain name availability. All it really means is that every .com/.net owner now needs to rush out and buy the same name under each new TLD. Thus, the 'value of one's original registration drops. At the same time, the cost of protecting one's brand goes up.'"
I want to register microsoft.sucks
...automatically get first crack at the new TLD's similar to their .com or whatever?
.com .net and .org are really all that matter. The average joe equates .com with the internet.
but I don't believe that one needs to snap up every version of domains saying apple, home, or even localhost. More TDL's give more people the right to a short easy to remember name.
The grass is only greener, if you don't take care of your own lawn.
I've found that the vast majority of sites using new, alternative domain names are pure garbage. Most are sketchy e-commerce stores with terrible domain names and even worse web design; in other words, I'd never, ever buy from them. Some .info sites worked out well (z80.info, for example), but .biz and the like is bad FrontPage heaven. Some of the national TLD's have found good non-commercial use, like the many personal .nu sites out there, but again, the level of trust goes down with a commercial site under these domains. Has anyone observed anything similar?
Screw it all...I want my IP Address to be used again!
If you want to find me I can be reached at 127.0.0.1 - How is that for "protecting my brand" ?
I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours. -- Hunter S. Thompson
My reason for limiting tlds is that there is too much to keep track of already. Has anyone ever tried to get lists of domain names for each tld? It is a daunting problem. More tlds means more hassle for those people trying to set up search engines. I recently did a recursive "dig axfr" on all open nameservers to get lists of domain names to scan, and having more tlds would only complicate matters. Now I am faced with filling out hundreds of arcane online forms to get the definitive lists of domain names from the root registrars. What a hassle, and all to stop spammers/hackers from getting the lists. The internet is NOT open.
I always thought that intrusive regulation of a free market was more "bad economics" than letting the system guide itself.
Forget domain names for a moment. Think generally. What stops anyone from choosing a business name that unlawfully incorporates another company's name? What stops anyone from creating the "Kodak Cafe" or the "Microsoft Bar and Grill"? The answer is: trademark law. Why isn't this enough? Why make such a big deal about trying to solve a problem that's already solved? Create all the TLDs that you want. I guarantee that if someone other than Kodak tries to register Kodak.blah, the registrant of Kodak.blah will be shut down. It's a non-issue.
I think the nail has already been hit on the head here so no need for comments, move along.
vampirical
This is not clearly stated in the summary, but for those who don't already know, Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee is the one who has singlehandedly invented the World Wide Web and has written the first browser and server. See this.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
Very funny kmccammon; the "White Paper" has a green web background.
------ Michael A. Romig
My rant on the subject:
http://www.archeus.plus.com/colin/dns/
Again...
Deleted
.... Crap... That's it.
.net version of it.
In all seriousness, this needs to not happen. I can tell you all sorts of horror stories of my own regarding a rather well know domain name and not owning the
Ted Tschopp
Fantasy remains a human right; we make in our measure and in our derivative mode... -- JRR Tolkien
Traditional TLDs have passed into everyday english. When you phone someone and say "hey here's my email: xyz at something dot com". People on the other end kind of expect a "dot com" to end the email. They can tolerate a "dot net" or "dot org" because they're very common (less so for emails). National TLDs are common too, for the nationals concerned, and other people in the world who see them regularly.
But "john at cia dot info"? "robert at shackled dot mobi"? these extensions are so uncommon nobody wants them in their emails, or FQDNs, because almost invariably people go "uh?" hearing them. They just don't stick.
New TLDs are a catch-22 problem: people won't use them because they sound alien, and they sound alien because people don't use them.
It's HIGHLY unlikely w3.org is gonna get slashdotted, this is just a waste of /.'s bandwidth.
Is rather outdated to me. I agree with the idea that the tree structure doesn't fit the net anymore. I'd say we should open it wide- with the new hard drives coming out, all top level DNS servers should have 10 TB of space- and anybody who wants to can start a new TLD company. That way, the price of registration will fall until registering any domain name is trivial- and we'll get human language based domain names as a big plus. Of course, I'm already doing this in the framework- my company, Information-R-Us (link not included in hopes of avoiding slashdoting, my DSL line can't take it) has a domain name that is just a rearrangement of the punctuation- in the .us TLD of course.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
When .biz and .info emerged a couple of years ago, I had to spend a six-figure sum of my company's money to register trademarks, placenames, product names, et cetera ... primarily as a defensive maneuver. We didn't get a cent of value out of those registrations, but we did have to fight several expensive legal challenges (multiple companies may use a word as a trademark in different contexts, so disputes naturally arise).
In my opinion, these new TLDs were successful only as a tool for driving revenue to registrars and especially Afilias and Neulevel (which administer those TLD's).
One thing that confuses me a little is why TLD's need to be restricted in the first place. If anyone was (easily and accessibly) able to create their own TLD and sell (or give away) names underneath them on their own terms, it would reduce the motivation for businesses to go and snap up every single variation of their name under every TLD.
Presumably the people or businesses who snap up the better TLD's and run them more reliably will simply get more people wanting to use them to index their servers on the net. Meanwhile everyone else would still be able to run their thousands of other TLD's under their own terms.
There are already alternative domain registries that do things this way (eg. OpenDNS), but they're immediately disadvantaged because nobody who matters uses their name servers.
I'm not an expert on DNS. Is there some overriding technical reason these days why TLD's need to be restricted to a small and controlled minority? Or is it something else?
...forget the .cx.
I thought that was Al Gore...
The TLD co.uk for Britain! The British are a force not to be neglected!
This is simply not true. Please let me quote the most relevant parts of this Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org]:
I hope the above quotations will clarify the apparent misunderstanding.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
Why bother if they have no value?
Surely if they have brought you no value then they were not worth the effort, and you could have let someone else have them and get use from them?
What a waste.
I think they have it all wrong. YOu don't need to register .net, .org, .com, .edu, .gov, .tv, .whatever...
You simply need to Register your Trademark or Tradename with the appropriate government agency. Yes, it does cost, but less than buying every TLD they decide to come out with...
That way, if someone comes along and buys yourtradename.org, and you have yourtradename.com, you could sue them for infringing on your Tradename...
Once you register it, it is yours, and is stored in a national database...
Personally, I think they could fix the problem if they would simply force people to register TLDs CORRECTLY...
If you are an Organization, non profit, or otherwise, you MUST register in .org, not in .com...
if you are a Network, ISP or otherwise, you MUST register in .NET not in .ORG or .COM
And if you are a commercial business, then .COM or .BIZ or something, but NOTHING else...
This would free up MILLIONS of URLs to be used by those that need them...
If you really wanted to save TLDs, create a .SEX and force all porn to move to .sex not .com, .org or .anything else...
This would free up MILLIONS all by itself...
--E--
Why it wouldn't work:
e .com
Microsoft Produces Operating systems
microsoft.operating-systems.software.com
These operating systems must be paid for (to legally obtain):
microsoft.operating-systems.software.pay.com
The OS is not open source (assuming you don't mean pure ASM code):
microsoft.operating-systems.software.pay.no-sourc
This will get extremely confusing for many users. There will also be disagreements about what fits into what category. Also businesses need a domain name which sounds interesting and attracts the users attention.
Or .lu for Luxembourg. Although very small, Luxembourg is a very important country. Without it, the Europeans wouldn't know where to bank.
- the kinds of domain names you really want to have?
I'm also aware of that new TLD's are in most cases a dead end to improve domain name availability, partially due to all domain parkers purchasing domains they only wish to sell. :-P
.org, and so porn sites can't register stuff like www.whitehouse.com and must stick with e.g. www.whitehouse.xxx? This could make the web much easier to navigate too, as you'd not even have to think about if this is a non-profitable organization or that really is part of a network of web sites (.net).
Anyone have any ideas on how to improve this? Should domain parking in this way not be allowed? However, although that's disallowed, maybe we'd still have problems with e.g. a movie company registering a domain name just for a movie (happens all the time), which happens to have a common name.
Should more restrictions about what a company can register be put into place? Controlled TLD's that companies are forced and/or disallowed to register stuff under? So a commercial company that makes a profit can't register under
Or is all this freedom best in the end?
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
You are probably talking about the ARPANET [wikipedia.org] while I was talking about the World Wide Web [wikipedia.org]. Please read this Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org].
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
And what's with all the comments about IP addresses?
Language students: Don't try to learn English here. This ain't it.
Agereed. All of the discussion has been about "brand" and "corporation". Funny, as an American my tax Dollars did a lot for the Internet and funnier still corporations are all that are kept in mind with TLD issues. Corporations get enough as is. Lets look at it from a "person" perspective.
Your rant suggests making more thorough use of the hierarchical properties of DNS. I have thought about the problem, and come to the opposite conclusion: dump the toplevel hierarchy altogether. Start at the top with what are not considered second-level domains, adding some arbitrary mechanism to disambiguate multiple registrations of the same domain (a numbering system or some such.) I mean after all, that's all that .com .net .org are currently used for, as Berners-Lee points out: they are disambiguators. Any meaning previously attached to them is gone...
We've already gotten to the state that "WWW." is superfluous on most addresses now. Make the TLD superfluous. Let Sony addresses all end in .sony. If Sony in Chile wants it's own address, it becomes sony.cl, or sony.us in the United states. Trademark problems can be handled in the local countries courts - if Sony isn't doing business in Chile, certainly another company can do business as "Sony" in that country. What happens today in the B&M world when Sony, as a global corp, decides to do business in Chile? How do they reclaim their trademark from the local company? These issues have been hashed out in the courts, and there are well-defined rules for dealing with them. Why should the web be different?
There will be conflicts, sure, but as someone who tried to register a "Schwab.dom" on all of the likely TLDs, and found Charles Schwab already parked on them, I can't imagine the conflicts being any worse than they are now, and it eliminates one more superfluous piece of information that I have to type in.
And the worms ate into his brain.
Why has parent been moderated as overrated? This is all true. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee
I've been looking for such a list for ages! This is even more useful than the list of country telephone prefixes sorted by prefix!
... for the registry services. This is a very simple way of getting more money out of current customers who truly care about their name. It's very simple economics really. Do you think all of the registrars are out there for the good the people? Internet? Corporations? No, they're out there for their shareholders. They are businesses and need to make money.
As for not buying from the new TLDs, there will be an uneasy settling in period for sure but people will start trusting sites and email from these domains. Blindly trusting a .net, .com, or .org site is asking for trouble anyways. We're long gone from the days of blind trust and faith on the web for practically anything. I think if I keep going down this route, I'll need to find my tin foil hat. :)
CliffH
sigs are like a box of chocolates, they all suck remove the underscores to email me
Do I think Sigmund has a real interest in my former domain name? Only as a speculator. What else can "Buy domains inexpensively! Resell them at competitive prices!" mean?
So what can I do about it? Sigmund is a lawyer with $250,000 worth of infrastructure behind him. I've seen WIPO cases with more going for them lose. The year I spent building that site and name are now effectively Sigmund's and there's nothing I can do about it because I don't have the time, resources or knowledge.
Problems like that need to be solved. Small businesses are going to be driven from the web by practices like that. If they go, so goes the web itself because people are not going to trust a non free media. It's simple banditry and no one does business in a lawless place.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
But not necessarily because one has to register more domain name extension.
If the yearly cost for a domain name was $500 instead of $25, we would see a lot less domains locked by some stupid domain name owners waiting years for someone to bid on their unused domains.
I really have to say that I think the whole idea of TLD's was a bad idea in the first place. We should have just had keywords that linked to DNS so you wouldn't have to remember whether somethign was .org .net or .com It seems that multiple domains are only for people trying to be deceptive and grab traffic from a better-known site. It doesn't help to have somehting like abra.org available instead of abra.net People just can't remember which one it was so they should both lead to the same site, just abra.
It's a real domain name and you can use any .arpa domain delegated to you like any other.
It's horrifically ugly and long, but hey, it's free.
Need Mercedes parts ?
Lee put the pieces together. Brian Reid for his PhD thesis invented Scribe which begat SGML which begat HTML. Einar Stefferud invnted MIME and got Nathaniel Borenstein to implement it. Add the Mac Hypercard ideas to this, shake, bake, and you have a WWW cake.
Lee is dead wrong about this issue too. In any other fora I'd explain why but this is slashdot and I don't even need to read thw article let alone explain how.
Need Mercedes parts ?
Having said that if he can bring some light on to the shitty system we have just now it's all good.
Deleted
I don't really need to cite an example, do I?
Duuuuuuuuuhhhhhhhh.
I've been saying that since they suggested .biz and all those other
crap domains. Yet, the fact that this is
bleedingly obvious to anyone didn't stop them
from creating them. In the words of Don
McLean, "They did not listen, they're not
listening still, perhaps they never will."
OK, I'd better stop now, or I'll start sounding too much like Ted Nelson.
fuckwit is not a nice word. Lose it and your rant would look less like a rant.
In any case, I like the idea that I can create my own structure without some librarian's assistance. Something like:
The solution to domain squatting is to punish the squatters, but it seems that the powers that be are not up to the task. Unless you can distribute your system, I don't think it will make a difference. Fred the plumber in New York will have the same kinds of problems under any centralized system. Under yours, he will also have to pay up for his personal site and any other business site he wants to run that's not plumbing.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
There are 3bln+ 6 character domains (assuming 38 legal chars). Why not have an auction system to allocate all the unassigned ones to the highest bidder. We could then have a system to pay out the money as a cashback to everyone who pays for net access. After all, ICANN only "owns" the TLDs because we point our DNS at a server that replicates "their" tree. So one could have an email of me@briansmith or whatever. Just like vanity plates on cars!
to spoil it for everyone.
He had nothing to do with IRC either and still he has invented the World Wide Web nonetheless. Let us give credit where it is due.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
"More TDL's give more people the right to a short easy to remember name. "
Yes, all of those people have a short and easy to remember name, how are you proving him wrong?
Mod parent down for being stupid and proving grand parent's point.
dot com sounded alien back when there was only .mil and .edu, and that didn't prevent it from happening. What people think is not a problem. People will think what they are told to think.
The general consensus among us was that "the war was over, and .com won." It wasn't even worth registering these "new" domains. And if someone else used BigMediaCompany.tv in a way that infringed on our trademark, we'd just sue their pants off.
It was almost like extortion. They could keep creating .TLDs and large corporations would be scared into registering their names in the new domain. It's a guaranteed source of revenue for TLD owners.
Sometimes I wish they kept the original distinctions between corporate, education, networks, non-profits, etcs. I'd say that most .net owners don't confirm to the original spirit of .net.
Best Buy can have you arrested
what ever happened to the whole "all internet porn has to end in .xxx" or ".sex", etc.
.com, you are opening yourself up to legal action
.com site, and someone challenged you, they would lose
seemed like a good idea to me then and still does now
seems easy to enforce... if you distribute porn and you register a
and then it is trivial to keep kids away from it without having to play tread water to keep your lists of porn sties up to date
and no, there is no slippery slope (pardon the pun): sites on breast examination for breast cancer, etc., seem pretty straightforwardly NOT prone to confusion... if you registered someone as a
so what gives? how come this idea seemed to have disappeared?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
and have an infinite number of top level domains?
I've often thought it would be good if there were unlimited TLDs.
For examples you could register: Microsoft.Sucks.
Corporations, rather than registering IBM.COM or IBM.BIZ, I could register HOME.IBM, OR WWW.IBM, or IBM.COMPUTERS or even BUSINESS.MACHINES. If I had a trademark in a different area, say automobiles, I could still register MOTORCARS.IBM.
If you wanted a phrase, you could create subdomains: "US.OUT.OF.IRAQ.NOW", or "SUPPORT.OUR.TROOPS".
This would provide an expanded space for domains so providers could pick distinct, mnemonic names for their services.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Even real businesses would rather use AlterNIC or some other organisation.
The total number of domains registered peaked years ago, and is steadily decreasing. The registrars are frantically trying to devise new revenue streams, most of which involve extracting more money per domain holder.
Registration in ".com" should require that the registration info for individuals match the name and address on the credit card used to pay for the domain. Domains registered in the name of a corporation should be validated against the registry of corporations for the appropriate jurisdiction. That would improve the validity of the "whois" information.
I'd only do this for ".com". Non-business websites that don't want to clearly identify themselves should move to ".net" or ".org". Any business not in ".com" would then be assumed to be fraudulent.
Ok! How about this:
w eiser.corp
. mayor
I think everyone knows what "WWW" means - so why are we forcing everyone to use that term? True, some people use "WWW" instead of "http://". But tell me - do we really need "http://"? Why not just "h:"? FTP would be just "f:". (Not to sound DOS-ish or anything but I believe there are fewer than 26 types of file transfers around so we could reduce this down a bit.)
If we really wanted to reduce the overal complexity of going to a site we should think of it like a microscope. We want to zoom in on where we want to go. So TLDs should be by nation. Such as US or UK or FR or whatever. Next we should go to the state/province level. (And not knowing the province names in France or England - I'll stick with the US names.) So the two digit TLD should be expanded by having such things as USAZ, USFL, and the like. Last, there could be a local or city code. (Although that might be going a bit far.) Alright - so now we have (for example):
h:/us.ibm.xxx
h:/usfl.hp.xxx
So what would the "xxx" be? It should be whatever the item is about. Since both of the above would be corporations it should be "CORP". Like so:
h:/us.ibm.corp
h:/us.hp.corp
What about people? How about citizen? Or just ".CIT"?
h:/us.audacious.cit
h:/usfl.audacious.cit
Businesses are either 1)Sole Proprietorships, 2)Corporations, 3)Limited Liability Partnerships, and so forth. So now we can name them like they appear when you look them up in the phone book.
h:/usca.bradley.llp
h:/us.coke.corp
h:/us.bud
What about colleges?
h:/usca.usca.col or h:/us.usca.univ or even just h:/us.usca.u
City Services?
h:/usfl.tampa.cserv
The mayor's office?
h:/usfl.tampa.mayors.office
h:/usfl.clearwater
Government stuff?
h:/us.gov or h:/us.irs.gov
h:/usin.gov or h:/usfl.tampa.gov
The smaller, two letter TLDs, take precedence and all longer (ie: four letter) TLDs. So they must be first checked before allowing someone to use a name. This prevents duplication. Further, each company only has to register once in each country - just like they do in the real world.
Further, the four letter portion could be broken out by someone and still make it work. Like so:
h:/us.fl.tampa.gov is the same as h:/us.florida.tampa.gov which is the same as h:/UnitedStates.Florida.Tampa.gov
(This is also why maybe the city should be reduced to a two letter code as well. Because then it could just be h:/usfltp.gov.)
So basically, instead of making the TLD on the right end of the line - put it on the left. So the whole thing flows from left to right.
There! How's that for a suggestion?
Someone put a black hole in my pocket and now I'm broke.
This is very interesting. I have read Secrets & Lies: Digital Security in a Networked World by Bruce Schneier and now I am reading New Top Level Domains Considered Harmful by Timothy John Berners-Lee and the later seems to be quite interestingly related to the former. According to Berners-Lee, "The Internet is a net, and the WWW is a Web, but WWW and email use DNS which is a tree, which has a single root." But according to Schneier I also know that security product is a process layered like an onion which is a chain only as secure as the weakest link. Now, I am starting to wonder what would be the weakest link in the chain of onion layers which are the branches of a tree in the web of our network and how could it be related to the "single root" compromise universal vulnerability and if my conclusions are correct then securing the Interweb network is impossible.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
The .sucks tld was proposed by somebody on NANOG and she set up authoritative nameservers for it. It's bee live for a couple of years.
Set up the domain and I'll pass along your nameservers and it'll work for at least the l33t. You have to promise not to tell ICANN though, they have utterly no sense of humor about this.
Need Mercedes parts ?
Would you want Delta faucets to register Delta.* thereby locking out Delta airlines?
The intellectual property laws in each country resolve these sorts of disputes; only low grade morons and some layers think the issue can be addressed in the DNS claiming "consumer confusion"
"Let me ask you this... do you turn on your faucet and ask what time your flight is?" - John Berryhill, ESQ
I fail to understand why TBLee doesn't grok this.
Need Mercedes parts ?
The puropse of a trademark is to prevent people from using your mark. Never mind the fact the USPTO said you can't do this, you wouldn't want to.
Now if you were talking service marks that's different.
Need Mercedes parts ?
In theoretical terms you are correct. But in practival terms, absolutely not. You're very very unlikely to get a TLD vetted by ICANN unless you have a "sunrise provision".
We've been fighting this (to no avail) for years. The tradmark lobby has been bigger than you, me, NSI and ICANN put together since about 1995. If you look deep enough you'll find trademaek lawyers and nobody else define the DNS landscape.
See http://sunrise.open-rsc.org/
Need Mercedes parts ?
I guess I just don't have the "name recognition" of TBL.
Top level domains don't buy anything any more. They are a waste, an attempt to make the REGISTRY look like a INDEX. By confusing the two, the issue continues to plague everyone.
Maybe since TBL has said it, people will listen now. At least I was able to dissolve an IETF BOF with a single statement. Felt good.
Bob-
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics
people who don't understand the DNS have no business trying to make technical proposals for changing it. if for instance you don't understand how increasing the number of TLDs affects DNS cache locality, and how this affects root server bandwidth and availability, you don't have a leg to stand on.
YOU can't keep track of this so the entire internet suffers? Nice.
Traditionally on the internet problems like this are solved by the creation of new resources, not regulation and limitation of existing ones.
Need Mercedes parts ?
Is it a free market? Is it infrastructure?
To who? To me? To you?
Dude, it's neither. It's a way of referring to services by name instead of number. Any interpretation you put on it other than that is just, well, your iterpretation of it.
DNS isn't this or that, it just is. The only property everybody agrees on is that it should work. After that you're free to look at it any way you wish, although it would be nice if you didn't prevent other people from having a dissimilar view if they're doing no harm.
Need Mercedes parts ?
You didn'y HAVE to do that, you chose to. If somebody used a similar name to yours either the court system takes care of them if they're infringing on your mark or it won't cause they aren't.
.com that will very probably piss you off. But I can legitimatly use them. Take them away from me and I can find 12 more. I can do this all day/week/year.
You tell me what your name is and I'll find you a dozen names you didn't register that are still available in
This kind of thinking is really dumb, offfensive not defensive and just a waste of time, money and resources.
Get a lawyer. If you have one already, fire him, he's an idiot.
Need Mercedes parts ?
What problem are you calling a non-issue? Tim Berners-Lee isn't trying to make the DNS resolve trademark disputes; he wants the DNS to resolve names into numbers and other data, to serve a technical rather than legal purpose. In his plea to ICANN, he argues that the proposed new TLDs are poorly motivated, and that their introduction makes for increased costs and confusion to everybody on the Internet.
The first TLDs were defined as a very general classification of the entities named under them, such as whether it was a government or business entity. That classification remains, although it has been confused by registrations not adhering to it, such as websites under .NET not affiliated with any particular network operator.
If ICANN were to allow anybody to register their own TLDs (requiring uniqueness of the name only), we would effectively be back to the flat namespace we had before the DNS, although this time with potentially millions of domains rather than just a few thousand. Besides, I doubt the root name servers would stand the load. Maybe they could be redesigned, but I don't see the cost of doing it motivated by the dubious benefit of having a "kodak" domain where before we had "kodak.com".
If the grounds for dispute for trademark ownership is whether or not a name may be mistaken for a registered trademark, could education make microsoft.com look so different from microsoft.org that disputes may go the way of the pillow case? Then maybe we'd be doing justice to the expansion of TLD namespace?
Dude, that's even more lame than hosts.txt. If you do the math you'd see there is no data trasnport big enough to prevent the root servers from melting down. Yo could decentralize it by having each host have the entire hosts file. You have a spare terrabyte on each machine that wants to do this, jah, to say nothing of the costs to trnasport the daily updates to that file.
Need Mercedes parts ?
What makes you think it is?
Need Mercedes parts ?
Placing unrealistic obstacles in the way of eveyrbody is not the Internet way. That's the ISO way and look how stunningly successful THAT was.
.net registrations. What they found was dishonest people were able to get .net domregs and honest people were inconvenienced at best and denied at worst.
NSI tried to enforce
As to verifying identity this is at odds with the greater consumer demand for low cost registration. Just how much work are YOU willing to do for six bucks? How often will you reverify the name? While it's possible to verify some US identities with existing services for under a buck this all falls apart once you say "outside the US".
Whois is a convenince, not a technical requirement. At the end of the day the DNS is a system for naming computers on a network, the additional whims and desires various humans put on top of that are the subject of great disagreement.
The internet works by consensue, not truth. Never confuse turh with consensus" - Brian Reid
Need Mercedes parts ?
Back in the day, you had to prove to be educational for .edu (my high school grabbed their .edu before K-12 got sent to the backwaters of k-12.city.state.ud, proof non-profit for .org, and proof network infrastructure for .net... otherwise you got stuck with .com. Everyone wanted .net, .com was for everyone else...
The web changed that a bit...
Alex
.xxx - I hate having to wade through all of those medical sites looking for real naughty bits.
.gog - why go to the site when you can go to google's cache of the site?
.sucks - Want to know the other side of the story? For that matter, want to pay a cybersquatter to make sure that nobody else does?
.con - Make it far easier to scam unwitting illiterate computer users. Only compatible with Outlook.
.© - Hide your most valuable works behind an impenetrable shield of people's incompetence with a keyboard.
The ______ Agenda
They make excellent keywords in spam filters - no false positives so far based on those two (well, for me. YMMV).
Racing is an addiction that makes heroin look like a vague hankering for something crunchy.
.xxx is once again one of the new TLDs being considered by ICANN, but everybody with a brain knows it won't work. Among other things, you'll never get a world-wide definition of "XXX content", let alone a world-wide law for keeping XXX content in a .xxx TLD. (The nations of the world still can't agree on the what's a "good war" and what's a "bad war"; there's no way they'll agree on the difference between "good nudity" and "bad nudity".)
.xxx won't work as advertised. There's also RFC 3675.
.xxx, you'll notice a frightening progression: .xxx supporters say ".xxx will protect children." Saner people point out how it won't. Lusers respond with increasinly draconian suggestions for regulating the Internet, like blocking all connections between the United States and countries that don't abide by U.S. laws about adult content.
.xxx is support for Internet censorship. Please don't encourage those people.
In fact, the TimBL paper we're supposed to be talking about includes a link to one explanation of why
If you look at the recently closed public comment period on
Support for
Proud to be / Smiley-free / Since Nineteen / Ninety-Three
You have to remember that not all nonsense names won't be wanted.
For example, I was able to register a four-letter domain (sgik.org) because it looks like nonsense to most people (except maybe Silicon Graphics, Incorporated), but it's just what I wanted.
Also, it's just not the 26 unaccented letters that are available, but accented letters, numbers, and some punctuation.
Non-latin UNICODE characters are also becoming more widely used.
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
Instead, it would encourage every lunatic and his brother to "create" as many TLDs as they can think of, in case they think of that accidentally becomes valuable. It would just move domain-speculation up the TLD level. We'd have TLDs being created nearly at random, not used, poorly managed, and dropped when "the registry" loses interest. Try to picture an Internet where an entire TLD can become nonresponsive just because the "anyone" who created it doesn't want the job anymore.
The Internet would not be served well by TLDs becoming as undependable as the average domain. While I'm not convinced that ICANN is perfect, I am pretty sure that we need some vetting and regulation of new TLDs to make sure that TLD registries are serious proposals, and not fly-by-night operations.
Proud to be / Smiley-free / Since Nineteen / Ninety-Three
Importance has nothing to do with it. In an "anything goes" TLD system, anything can be TLD, so it doesn't matter what country it is. DNS is just a bloody address. 1234 Anywhere St. If you don't know a site by memory, you go to Google. I do this already, don't you?
-l
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I tried accessing your website, but it appears both your name servers (ns.globalwebpromotions.com [69.31.33.254] and ns2.globalwebpromotions.com [69.31.33.253]) are inaccessible right now. Back in the old days (early 1990's) connectivity was generally worse, and we made a bit more of an effort to set up several name servers on different networks, for backup.
Gradually, those efforts became regarded as unnecessary. Today, connectivity is generally better, but when a link goes down for whatever reason, it all too often happens that a number of domains go down with it.