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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.
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.
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."
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.
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).
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.
And what's with all the comments about IP addresses?
Language students: Don't try to learn English here. This ain't it.
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 ?
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
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$
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 ?
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 ?
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 ?
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 ?
.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
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