Loophole found in Internet Domain Naming

kyndig writes "Just what is the 'spirit of internet naming?' ICANN can tell you, as they are the naming experts. In a recent CNN article, ICANN states EnCirca Domain Register is violating the spirit of internet naming by reselling .pro names. The report states that in early 2000, ICANN allowed 3rd level domains (foo.bar.pro) to be sold. Later, ICANN allowed 2nd level domains (foo.pro) to be sold for .pro as well. The restriction to this selling was that a user must have the 3rd level domain first. There are no reseller checks or usage enforcement other than the request to own a 3rd level domain from ICANN. EnCirca president plans to continue reselling 2nd level .pro domains, unless ICANN places a restriction on doing so."

Comments

.pro?

[Underholdning]

Am I the only one who's never seen a .pro domain?
There's one cool thing about this TLD. You have to provide proof of your profession to buy such a domain. Now that's probably the reason why I've never seen a spam advertising a .pro domain.

Re:really?

[TheRaven64]

The reason for a limited number of top level domains is that top level domain lookups require an access to the root DNS servers. There are a relatively small number of theses, and each DNS cache must know the IP addresses of them in order to function. With a small number of TLDs, most domain name lookups can cache the authoritative servers for them. When you look up a .com address, your DNS cache generally already knows where the authoritative server for .com domains is, and so it doesn't need to hit the root servers.

This removes a single point of failure from the domain name system - every single root domain server can fail, and most people will only notice when they enter a TLD which doesn't exist (at which point they will get a DNS failure instead of an nonexistend domain error). Similarly, if the .com servers failed, then you would still be able to access .org domains (for example).

Re:The nature of the spirit of name restritctions

[Arathrael]

Had to read the link myself to understand it, the article summary is less than clear.

Basically, the idea was you could initially only buy third level domains such as IAAL.law.pro, but you had to provide credentials to establish your professional status to buy them.

ICANN then allowed second level domains to be sold - e.g. IAAL.pro - but you had to own a third level domain first and hence have gone through the credential-establishing process.

EnCirca are selling second level domains to be sold without having a third level domain first, thus skipping the credential-establishing bit entirely, and this is bad.

That's as far as I understand it anyway. Does that make sense?

Re:Talk about confusing

[MirthScout]

Actually, I think I know what they are trying to say but it did take me a while to parse it...

Originally you could only buy 3rd level names under .pro. Now they allow you to own 2nd level names that match your 3rd level name.

So, if you own JohnDoe.lawyer.pro you can also buy JohnDoe.pro. But you still can't buy lawyer.pro since that is a profession name and is controlled by the registrar.