ICANN Officially Approves .jobs and .travel TLD's

EyeMyke writes "As reported on News.com, ICANN has approved the .jobs and .travel domains, and is pending decision on .asia, .mail, .tel, and .xxx. One has to ask 'Will these new domains actually prove useful, or is ICANN just avoiding the real issues confronting them in regards to regulating domain registration?'" We've covered both of these domains before, but it would seem they are even more-approved now, or at least the process is important enough to warrant an official announcement from ICANN.

Comments

Are these really useful?

[BluhDeBluh]

Does anybody really use their last lot of domains, such as .info and .coop? I very, very rarely see either getting any use, to be honest.

Not enough

[ites]

TLDs should not be restricted in this way. It creates an artificial shortage which simply acts as a tax. Is there any technical reason why TLDs cannot be created by anyone with the capability?

TLDs should be optional

[tehshen]

It's always annoyed me how companies must register two or three domains, to pull in the users that only know .com. If you are a .org (like Slashdot) it's best to register a .com as well, so lost visitors get to your site that way as well; if you're a .co.uk (like the BBC) you also need a .com for the same reason. It shows that the TLD idea wasn't thought through, or was designed to make people register many domains, generating loads of money (not best for the end-user).

Citing monster.com as an example again: it is a jobs site, so it should get a .jobs domain. But not many people have heard of .jobs, so it has to get a .com as well. But why do we need these - what's wrong with 'http://monster' by itself? It should go to the main monster jobs page. If I wanted country-specific sites, I would go to the monster.co.uk or monster.de subdivisions. Categorising things by their status just confuses things.

I shouldn't care whether the site I want is a network, a company, or a non-profit organisation; usually I just want to get to the site.

Re:TLDs should be optional

[Tom]

It shows that the TLD idea wasn't thought through, or was designed to make people register many domains, generating loads of money

No, it shows that the TLD idea is from a time when net users were expected to have minimum tech knowledge. Once AOL entered the picture, the idea became too complicated for the average luser and broke down.

At this point...

[brainnolo]

At this point the tld does not make any sense anymore. Sites are (were) classified in 2 big categories:

- By language (.it, .de, .au, .uk, etc..)
- By kind (and assumed language was english (.org, .com, .net, .edu)

The first category is ok and works well. But then we come to the second. Having these 4 original category: .com, .org, .net identified Commercial sites, Organization sites (usually non-profit), .net i really never understood and .edu represent educational institues. So the .info was missing (but is largely unused) and they added it. Now .travel, .jobs etc are just confusing. How do i distinguish a travel agency from a informational site on travels from the TLD if they have the same TLD? This put in the same category completely different sites. I really thing the travel agency should be .com and the info site should be .info. Also .biz for me is a misterious entity because it could be interpreted as .com.

So why can't people just use the 2nd level domain to describe who they are? The TLD is already composed of enough entries to distinguish the category.

Slashdot should be .info in my mind. Or .dupes, but that is another story.

.SEX, .XXX, .KIDS Restrict Freedom of Speech

[Ron Bennett]

Below is one of several posts I made on Domain Name Policy List back in 2000 and to the Public Comment Forum regarding New TLD Applications.

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Date: Fri, 13 Oct 2000 23:52:50 -0400
Sender: Owner-Domain-Policy
From: Ron Bennett
Subject: [ICANN COMMENT] .SEX, .XXX, .KIDS TLDs Restrict Freedom of Speech
To: DOMAIN-POLICY@LISTS.NETSOL.COM

First the problems with the proposed .SEX & .XXX TLDs:

The proposed TLDs .SEX and .XXX seem well intentioned as a way of partitioning off adult oriented materials from minors, etc.

But how does one exactly define adult oriented materials? -especially considering the internet is an international medium. What is considered adult oriented here in the United States isn't elsewhere and vice-versa.

And what happens when ICANN or whoever decides to go the next step and restricts adult oriented materials to *only* certain TLDs - for example .SEX and .XXX only.

And how would such content restrictions be enforced?

In the end TLDs such as .SEX and .XXX will probably result in ICANN dictating content too.

In regards to problems with the proposed .KIDS TLD:

Many of the same points above apply to .KIDS too...

How does one exactly define kid oriented materials? -especially considering the internet is an international medium. What is considered adult oriented here in the United States isn't elsewhere and vice-versa. For example, nudity in many parts of the world such as parts of Europe and Japan is not considered harmful to children. On the other hand, violence aimed at children is widely tolerated in the United States, but not content containing nudity.

And how would such content restrictions be enforced?

And as I said above, in the end TLDs such as .KIDS will probably result in ICANN dictating content too.

TLDs should be used to better categorize content, but not to restrict it. While .SEX, .XXX, and .KIDS TLDs are well intentioned, all three of these TLDs are all primarily intended to *restrict* content as opposed to merely categorizing it. It's very important to keep this distinction in mind when considering new .TLDs.

Bottom line is that TLDs should be for categorizing content, not restricting content which is what the proposed .SEX, .XXX, and .KIDS TLDs would do and thus they should *not* be added.

Ron Bennett
bennett@wyomissing.com

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More posts and comments by others involved in domain name policy regarding these issues:

http://www.circleid.com/article/530_0_1_0_C/

Re:.xxx is potentially bad news.

[houghi]

You can usually tell from a domain name if you should be loading the url or not

whitehouse.org
nice-tits.org

Both not really the sites you might expect

Re:www.jobs

[AndroidCat]

Firefox is playing silly buggers behind your back. When www.jobs doesn't answer (try ping), Firefox adds .com and tries again. www.jobs.com is owned by Monster. Firefox should update the URL you typed in to let you know that it fixed it for you. (Can't remember what IE does.)

It only seems to do that on domains that are entered by hand. It didn't do that when clicking on the URL that you posted.

The really sneaky thing is that whenever a .jobs server goes down or there's a typo, Monster will get the traffic instead, and will no warning (in Firefox) to the user.