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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.'"
...automatically get first crack at the new TLD's similar to their .com or whatever?
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?
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 like .arpa
I actually saw one of those in my referrer logs once.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
Look at extreme situations like handybackup.com vs. handybackup.net. Two ENTIRELY different companies. handybackup.net pirated handybackup.com's software and hacked it to release their "new and improved" 4.1 version, stole handybackup.com's site layout down to the fscking images and is pretty much indistinguishable from handybackup.com except for very minor things like being Novosoft LLC instead of Novosoft Inc. That's just outright fraud.
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).
And face it, Americans doesn't make up nearly the majority of internet users any more.
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.
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.
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 ?
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.
You don't get the idea behind DNS trees. Sony Chili would get cl.sony, Sony USA would get us.sony.
That way they only have to worry about one TLD instead of (like they have now) all the ccTLDs.
bash$
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 ?
That's actually one of the better ideas putr forth here today. There is absolutey no technical reason why there can't be an extremley large number of TLDs, and in fact Vixie and Denninger looked at this in the mid 90's and did the math and found no problem beyonf 100,000 tlds althougjh they were unsude what happened after a million tlds. Now that we have a roughly 30-50 million zone com file it seems pretty clear it actually woudln't be an issue.
If you really wanted to be slick about this you'd get everybody to primary the root zone for themselves to take the load and dependancy off the root servers and distribute the root zone via cryptographically signed usenet postings. This is DJ Bernsteins idea, not mine.
Need Mercedes parts ?