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

[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: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.

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.