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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.'"
.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.
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.
All mail from .biz domains goes straight into the dumpster 'round here.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
My rant on the subject:
http://www.archeus.plus.com/colin/dns/
Again...
Deleted
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.
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.
1. Take a web address (e.g. http://www.slashdot.org/)
2. Look up the IP address (e.g. 66.35.250.151)
3. Convert to Hex (42.23.FA.97)
4. Concatenate (4223FA97)
5. Convert resultant integer to decimal (1109654167)
6. Go to http://1109654167/ in Mozilla
Voila. This only works if virtual hosting isn't being used, and doesn't work in IE. Google is on http://3639556963/, useful if your DNS servers go down.
For those who live in a geographical area other than the US, the local TLDs can be very important e.g. .de for Germans, .fr for the French etc.
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
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 ?
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