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.'"

Comments

There are only a few that matter

[MacFury]

.com .net and .org are really all that matter. The average joe equates .com with the internet.

Re:There are only a few that matter

[DrEldarion]

Don't forget .gov. People who mix up whitehouse.gov with whitehouse.com are in for quite a surprise.

Re:There are only a few that matter

[LostCluster]

Sony wants to own sony.org so that no not-for-profit group can spring up and name themselves Sony... because the Sony company wants to own that four letter combination outright. They're scared of a non-profit cause springing up at that domain.

Amazon.com I bet is wishing they had grabbed Amazon.org back in the early days. Not that the Amazon.org group is unacceptable to a large number of people, but I'm sure you can find a few people who are offended by them... and that soils the "Amazon" word on the Internet. You get the idea, anything that can cost sales is something a business doesn't want to see happen.

Relative failure of new TLD's

[leitec]

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?

Re:Relative failure of new TLD's

[Kozar_The_Malignant]

All mail from .biz domains goes straight into the dumpster 'round here.

Re:I'm sorry...

[Carnildo]

Whitehouse.com, whitehouse.net, and whitehouse.org say otherwise.

Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee

[Pan T. Hose]

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.

Re:Use IP Addressing again?

[Kaimelar]

If you want to find me I can be reached at 127.0.0.1 - How is that for "protecting my brand" ?

Wait, 127.0.0.1 points to my machine! You're not protecting your brand, you're trying to hijack mine! Just wait until my lawyer hears about this! ;-)

The problem with new tlds is

[Roland Piquepaille]

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.

Re:The problem with new tlds is

[grahamsz]

Tell me about it...

I've got an email address that ends in .ms and it's a pain in the ass giving to anyone - even computer literate people do a double take.

On the upside i get comparatively little spam to that address - i wonder if the spam tools filter out unlikely domains?

Re:Stop and think

[AKnightCowboy]

The problem isn't really big companies that have trademarked names, it's the "little guy" that has webhosting.com or acmenetworking.com. Unless they go buy all the other TLD variations then some smacktard will come along and register acmenetworking.net and acmenetworking.org and start doing business as them.

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.

The concept of TLDs

[Marxist Hacker 42]

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.

New TLDs are just a shakedown

[yelvington]

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).

Re:Use IP Addressing again?

[aoteoroa]

Wait, 127.0.0.1 points to my machine! You're not protecting your brand, you're trying to hijack mine! Just wait until my lawyer hears about this! ;-)

And by posting your address on Slashdot the GP poster is probably planning to DDOS your connection.

You should install An Anti-DoS Tool That Returns Fire that will automatically launch a counter attack for you.

I agree, "little guy" is screwed.

[twitter]

After losing my domain name to the theif who runs this disgraceful site, I'm about to give up on domain names all together. What happened? The name I registered was bombed out by spam, my ISP was uncooperative and sleaze bag, who runs a his own big registrar grabbed it up.

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.

Interesting

[Pan T. Hose]

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.