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

ICANN is a disaster.

[bigtallmofo]

Nothing they do makes sense to me. It seems like they're just creating new TLDs willy-nilly and giving control of them to new companies apparently without the ability to enforce any of the controls they've created. What exactly is the purpose of all these new TLDs?

Isn't the 'sprit of internet naming'...

[Andy_R]

...simply "let's get rich quick"?

I'll believe otherwise when .tv sites start being about the island of Tuvalu.

Here in the uk, (where .co.uk is the normal domain for businesses) we've suffered years and years of the company that owns the (supposedly invalid according to ICANN's rules uk.com domain selling worthless 3rd level domains to people, who unsurprisingly find lots their traffic going to the 'co.uk' with the same name.

99% of my spam comes from people who work for foo.uk.com (where foo is my company's domain) who sign up for junk and get their own address wrong. ICANN doesn't want to know about this flagrant abuse of the system, presumably because there is no financial gain to be had by closing down .uk.com