Dotless Top Level Domains?

nodnarb1978 writes "As reported on Yahoo, a Dutch company called UnifiedRoot wants to offer top level domains without extensions. For instance, just typing slashdot would bring up this site, instead of slashdot.org. UnifiedRoot is careful to differentiate itself from New.net, but it seems their similar business tactics leave plenty of room for comparison. Another bone of contention is the price: UnifiedRoot wants $1000USD up front for a registration, with an additional $240 yearly renewal. With domain abandonments higher than ever, is this a solution looking for a problem? And would anybody really want to place control of entire TLDs in the hands of one private company?"

Comments

No thanks

[chipster]

The TLD is an important piece of the identifier, IMHO.

Re:No thanks

[hackstraw]

The TLD is an important piece of the identifier, IMHO.

Identifier for what?

slashdot.com
microsoft.net
usps.gov
http://www.army.gov/
http://www.army.com/

Thats right, the .biz domains are 99% spam sites, so that does help things. .edu is pretty pure, .gov is pretty pure, but they like .com like everybody else does. .org is fairly worthless, and if it were an important identifier people would use it more, but .com is what everybody except a slashdotter things is a web address. What about .info or .name? Or .museum?

TLDs _may_ be a useful identifier, but pretty much everybody has to buy most all of the others or sue people to protect their internet name.

As I have said for a very long time, lets do away with TLDs. The only exception might be to make all internet sites, including those in the US (gasp), to use the two letter country identifier to assist in commerce and whatnot. I find it very annoying to look to buy something online and go to a .com address and then find out that it is not in the US (my country).

Good riddance to TLDs. The sooner the better.

Re:No thanks

[Anonymous Coward]

No Thanks? Why would anyone turn down these "Topless Dot-Level Do-maids"?

Re:No thanks

[NickFortune]

TLDs _may_ be a useful identifier, but pretty much everybody has to buy most all of the others or sue people to protect their internet name.

Granted the conventions are routinely flouted, and that those able to enforce them show little inclination to do so. Is that really an argument for making the system easier to abuse?

That's like trying to reduce crime in a high crime area by removing all the locks,

Re:No thanks

[shmlco]

"...use the two letter country identifier to assist in commerce..."

Actually, we need more than those. I'd like to see more domains like sheerdelight.co.us or goldendragon.ca.us. Each state is, after all, responsible for the business names of those who do business within the state, and you just know that a "golden dragon restaurant" exists in every state. As is, the first one who gets there locks out the other 49.

Not to mention the fact that it would vastly benefit local search relevance if I could constrain my results by "co.us".

Re:No thanks

[hackstraw]

Granted the conventions are routinely flouted, and that those able to enforce them show little inclination to do so. Is that really an argument for making the system easier to abuse?

Without TLDs, there is nothing to abuse.

That's like trying to reduce crime in a high crime area by removing all the locks

Its more like trying to make an argument by analogy by comparing apples and black holes by removing the blackness. 99% of the time arguments by analogy leads to dumbass comments like mine to say how poor the analogy is. They are about as effective as TLDs.

Re:No thanks

[baadger]

The solution of course is to ditch .com, and restrict .org and .net and move to country based TLD's entirely. The .com, .net and .org TLD's should be kept for purely international matters that concern everyone on the planet. .com -> .co.cctld .org -> .org.cctld .net -> .net.cctld

People could cope, it's just the politics and legal battles that'd ensue. Sad really.

Re:No thanks

[NickFortune]

Without TLDs, there is nothing to abuse.

Which doesn't necessarily mean that the situation will improve however. If there was no property there would be nothing to steal; that doesn't make communism the best way to reduce crime.

I can accept the idea that a lack of TLDs will make it easier for a corporation to monopolise use of its name across all geographical regions and areas of discourse. I do not necessarily accept that this is a good thing. Certainly it would make it easier to try and stifle discourse by grabbing as many TLDs as possible.

So apples to black holes or otherwise, I rather feel you have yet to make your case.

Re:No thanks

[jacksonj04]

TLDs *used* to be worthwhile, .co.* was for a specific country. .gov.* (Government), .mil.* (Military), .edu.* (Education), .org.* (Non-profit organisation) and .net.* (Network provider) were all you needed. Newer domains like .info and .museum should be strictly country based imho, for example london.info.uk for tourist info on London, or royalarmouries.museum.uk for the Royal Armouries.

TLDs, if enforced, provide structure. It should be a strict name.type.country OR a name.type for international groups and not the abysmal mess we have today. Sadly something went wrong a while back, and now the whole thing is just a mix of country codes used as descriptors (.tv for example), domains sold to every Tom, Harry and Dick who asks for them even if they don't have a damn good reason for being in that TLD or SLD (Charities in .com? They should be in .org or .org.*), and haphazard reselling of subdomains (Such as go.to, where .to is in fact the TLD for Tonga).

Re:No thanks

[Fallen_Knight]

No, the way it is now is perfect, you can use whatever TLD you own for whatever purpose you want to.

Its the internet man, no rules!

Re:No thanks

[zsau]

Also, "haitch-tee-tee-pee colon slash slash slash dot" doesn't have quite the same ring to it as "haitch-tee-tee-pee colon slash slash slash dot dot org".

Re:No thanks

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, it often make sense to pick a TLD from your country, but those cost at least twice as much as a .com or .org TLD, and there still was nothing interesting left...

Re:No thanks

[cbiltcliffe]

I would agree. A lot of sites are known by their whole name, including the TLD. Heck, OOo even names their product with their TLD.

Although I do find it interesting that they say you could just type in 'slashdot' to get to this site, if this was to be implemented. I can just type 'slashdot' right now, and I get to this site. It's that nice "find it by using Google's I-feel-lucky feature" that Firefox has...

Re:No thanks

[cbiltcliffe]

Duuh. I should have said a lot of organizations are known by their full site name.

Startech.com,
OpenOffice.org,
apcplace.com used to be a computer store in my home town. etc.etc.

Re:No thanks

[watomb]

I was so moved by this article I have created my own root company with everything being its subroot DNS server. What do you guys think? www.wa-t.com I am looking for Volunteers please see web site for details. Thanks life is fun Bill

Re:No thanks

[Anonymous Coward]

, .org.* (Non-profit organisation) and .net.* (Network provider)

WRONG. Read the RFCs, in which the late Jon Postel will inform you that .ORG was intended as a catch-all for organizations that don't fit elsewhere, and .NET was meant only for those machines which perform core Internet functionality (such as ROOT-SERVERS.NET or MCAST.NET)

The idea that .ORG is for non-profits is an urban legend, as is the idea that .NET is for ISPs. For fuck's sake, RTFM!

Re:No thanks

[cowscows]

But what about a company like Microsoft, or Apple, or Google, or Toyota, or heck, just about any company out there big enough to span multiple countries? Which state would Walmart get their TLD through? I believe they have their headquarters in arkansas, but I've never been to one in that state. Trying to figure that out would be a pain in the ass. What state is Amazon.com based in? I don't have to know that, I don't have to look it up, and I like it that way.

When I started my personal website, I lived in Maryland. Now I live in Louisiana. Would I have to get my tld changed? Will I have to pay for it? How much should that cost. What if someone already has it? Can I keep the old one?

There are plenty of other ways to make your local search better. Google is good at a bunch of them. Besides the fact that most business websites tend to have addresses on them, there's lots of other ways to get that information and cross reference it all. Phonebooks for example.

Re:No thanks

[spectral]

I'll register the 'dot' TLD and give slashdot one for free..

h t t p colon slash slash slash dot dot dot

Re:No thanks

[shmlco]

In ADDITION to the .com commercial domains, Sherlock. There are thousands of small businesses in every state for every Amazon or ebay. As to personal sites, that's what .name is for. Why are you poluting the .com namespace?

Re:No thanks

[cowscows]

Whatever. Noone would use them. It's too much work for the end user to remember anything more complicated than .com and maybe .net. After that, it's off to Google, which has it all figured out anyways. Technically, it's certainly a cleaner solution, but it just doesn't fit with how people use the internet.

Re:No thanks

[akadruid]

TLDs are very important. However, they're not going to change. It's not news.

a Dutch company called UnifiedRoot wants to offer top level domains without extensions

Yeah, and I want a gold plated toilet seat, baby. It's just not on the cards. With all the money new.net poured down the drain you would think that theses people would have given it up a long time ago.

It'll catch on just like that internet time thing did.

Re:No thanks

[Anonymous Coward]

The solution of course is to ditch .com, and restrict .org and .net and move to country based TLD's entirely. The .com, .net and .org TLD's should be kept for purely international matters that concern everyone on the planet

Great idea. NOT.

International divisions made sense back in the days before the internet. But the internet transcends national boundaries. Where in the world does Slashdot belong? It has readers from all over the English-speaking world. It certainly doesn't "concern everyone on the planet", but equally it would be utterly stupid to try to call it a U.S. site!

The same goes for practically everything. Including commercial sites! Consider Amazon. I've bought books from amazon.co.uk, amazon.com, amazon.de, and amazon.co.jp - and it really irritates me that I have to use four different sites to buy books in four different languages. Why can't I just go to amazon.com and find books in American English and British English and German and Japanese, all side by side?

Seems to me the web should be moving in the opposite direction to the one you're suggesting. Seems to me we should be getting rid of cctlds altogether, because they're pretty pointless: the internet lets you provide your service all over the world, so why the hell would you want to think small and restrict it to one country when you could think big and reach everyone?!

Let's limit country codes to services that are necessarily limited to one country, like government services (i.e. abolish .edu, .gov, and .mil, and let US organisations use .edu.us, .gov.us, and .mil.us instead, to reduce ambiguity). Everything else should be top-level.

Re:No thanks

[shmlco]

It was going to be too difficult for people to remember 10-digit phone numbers too, but the vast majority of people seem to have figured out which ones apply to their location and their state. Just took... no time at all, actually.

And how do people "use" the internet now? A search engine, in which case--and as you said-- it's handled for them, or you give them a card or email with the url. So how is it any more difficult than some urls like www.shared.com/~mlong? Or thenewmovie.movies.com?

Personally, I think a lot of people would use 'em.

And it's NO ONE, not NOONE. I hate that mistake.

Really?

[bogaboga]

Who'd go for this kind of business? Personally, I am not for it.

Re:Really?

[JonN]

The large companies would die for this. Imagine you are a small startup company, or you have a website for your own personal interests. Most can't afford the $1000 startup fee, so all it takes for a large company (think M$) to overshadow your domain, is to get the same one, but without the extension.

Re:Really?

[bananasfalklands]

Been there done it already , Microsoft screwed 'realnames'in the name of office politics.

if people dont renew 'mydogisdead23456.com' so what ? Does it matter ?

Re:Really?

[jaiyen]

I think MS could easily do this themselves if they wanted to, without the need for a third party. If they made a similar system and auto-updated everyone's version of IE to be compatabile with it, they'd have 70%-80% of web users able to use their system and so quite a strong selling point for potential customers. Alternative browser makers would then probably be forced to follow (or risk their users being unable to access a substantial number of sites), reinforcing MS's position further.

Compare that to the service of the company in TFA - from the UnifiedRoot.com website, it seems like in order to use their services your ISP needs to have configured UnifiedRoot TLDs or each individual user needs to change their DNS settings. I don't know how many percent of web users those conditions cover, but it's gotta be pretty tiny in comparision to what MS could do.

Of course, if MS did do it they could be accused of abusing their monoply (kinda similar to the Verisign Sitefinder thing a while back), but then that hasn't stopped them before...

Re:Really?

[znu]

When the rumors first stated circulating about .Mac, and nobody knew what it really was, I speculated that Apple was going to do something like this to create a Mac-exclusive section of the Internet. It turned out the name was mostly just poking fun at .NET, though. Still, it's an interesting idea.

Re:Really?

[divirg]

So UnifiedRoot should just patent the idea and license it to Microsoft.

Re:Really?

[FST777]

Could you please stop posting horrible ideas on a website that Microsoft-executives could read?!?

Re:Really?

[mutewinter]

Are you kidding? Have you been watching what halfway decent domain names have been going for these days? $1000 is a bargain, unless you want your-domain-name.com for $9.

Re:Really?

[mumblestheclown]

Wow, that post was about the best example on Slashdot that I have ever seen of "post some speculative paranoid crap, but slant it against microsoft, and get it modded up to +5 insightful."

Moderators: be very ashamed.

Re:Really?

[Zone-MR]

Not only that, but for a fake-domain-system like this to be viable, it would need recognition from not only the majority of browsers, but also search engines.

If google returned new.net sites in it's SERPS, a lot of people would switch to the new.net servers. If search engines won't find your $1000 domain, and even a small percentage of users will complain about it being unreachable, it's completely usless.

Re:Really?

[TubeSteak]

Don't worry, Microsoft Execs only browse the -1 Comments to find the best ideas.

Gotta love this business model

[tomstdenis]

The fact that a DNS server requires next to no bandwidth, cpu power or other facilities. Then they charge you stupid fees "per year" for the privilege...

I say make all DNS queries recursive [throw out the cache] and make the domain owners earn their money.

I wouldn't mind a slightly slower net if it meant I could piss off some grubby TLD exec :-)

Tom

Re:Gotta love this business model

[Chmarr]

Some of those high fees I'm sure are being used to 'bribe' ISPs - certainly the ISPs mentioned in the article - to change their DNS configuration to point to unifiedroot's DNS servers.

Re:Gotta love this business model

[cperciva]

The fact [is] that a DNS server requires next to no bandwidth, cpu power or other facilities

This depends upon the amount of traffic you're handling. I suspect that the .com name servers spend more than $10/year of bandwidth and CPU time answering requests for google.com.

Re:Gotta love this business model

[mrchaotica]

Then you'd suspect wrong, because the main .com name servers only get requests from other DNS servers. Then those secondary servers (located at ISPs, for example) serve requests from end-users.

Re:Gotta love this business model

[thesandbender]

Hey now... you forgot about the additional hardware costs. Have you seen the amout of silicon GoDaddy is using for their ads? That costs money! (hmmm... would that be considered as dual core?)

Re:Gotta love this business model

[saikatguha266]

Oddly enough, DNS does use a fair bit of bandwidth (~13Gbps at the root servers based on numbers in [1]). Adding a new TLD involves adding an entry to these root servers. The root servers already have a hard time answering queries for ~300 TLD's that are quite cachable (60-85% are queries that should have been cached but are not [1]). Adding thousands of additional TLD's which are harder to cache only exuberates this problem. Add to the fact that the root servers are a central point of failure, and represent a big target for DDoS; they require a lot of extra provisioning and security. Medling with the DNS root is no laughing matter.

Now I don't know how these guys came up with their cost numbers, and whether or not they are justifiable, but I am pretty sure that adding a DNS TLD will cost them a fair bit.

[1] http://www.caida.org/outreach/papers/2001/DNSMeasR oot/dmr.pdf

Re:Gotta love this business model

[ghislain_leblanc]

I suspect you might be wrong. I think that a request to google.com first gets answered by your ISP.

Re:Gotta love this business model

[Anonymous Coward]

exuberates

I think you meant exacerbates , or perhaps aggravates. An otherwise thoughtful post.

Re:Gotta love this business model

[njyoder]

Jesus Tom, this is twice in a week I've seen you get moderated up for blatantly false statements on Slashdot. As saikatguha266 rightfully pointed out, operating the root DNS servers requires a massive amount of bandwidth and has high operating costs. In addition to that, DNS queries are already recursive, so I don't understand what your point is. People who don't even understand how the DNS protocol works, and try to assert that a fundamental component of how it works--recursion--isn't used, shouldn't criticize it.

You're not insightful, you're suggesting making them waste even more money than is already wasted. As someone else pointed out (http://www.bind9.net/dnshealth/), many DNS servers are already improperly configured and as a result, are bombarding the root DNS servers with tons of unnecessary queries. It's a huge waste of bandwidth and resources. If DNS servers were configured properly, respecteced DNS TTLs, cached queries properly, a huge burden would be taken off the root servers, and they could actually lower their prices.

Re:Gotta love this business model

[cperciva]

the main .com name servers only get requests from other DNS servers. Then those secondary servers (located at ISPs, for example) serve requests from end-users.

Sure. And everybody uses the DNS servers of their upstream ISP.

How many bridges did you want to buy, again?

Re:Gotta love this business model

[digidave]

If you just want to run DNS for your own domains try everydns.net. It's free, but I always donate just to keep them running. They run an great service and have excellent support.

Re:Gotta love this business model

[HTL2001]

you may be right for some people here, but I'd say a lot of people realy do just use the default configuration from the ISP...

Re:Gotta love this business model

[Anonymous Coward]

Adding thousands of additional TLD's which are harder to cache only exuberates this problem.

I think you're looking for 'exacerbate'.

Exuberate - To be exuberant (Full of unrestrained enthusiasm or joy).
Exacerbate - To increase the severity, violence, or bitterness of; aggravate.

Also, meddling is spelled with two 'd's.

Re:Gotta love this business model

[tomstdenis]

I'm sorry what? DNS is highly cached. How many times a second do you think slashdot.org is looked up? Now how many times from the .org. servers? I can assure you the former is much larger than the latter. When you run an ISP of a few hundred thousand customers chances are you're gonna have a fairly high cache hit rate.

To show I'm not talking out my ass...slashdot.org is valid for another 7000 seconds. That means whenever I look it up my ISP [or my router] will have most likely cached it.

As to the existing misconfigured DNS servers the solution is simple. Cut off the requesting server, contact the admin and tell them to setup a proper server with caching. Point is with most domains having a TTL of a day there is no reason why a TLD should have a heavy amount of traffic. A DNS request isn't exactly large either so combined with multi-level caching I just don't see it being a huge problem.

Tom

Re:Gotta love this business model

[njyoder]

I'm sorry, but did you even bother reading this guy's post where he quoted actual figures? How does gigabits of bandwidth constitute very little bandwidth? Did you notice the massive amount of improperly configured DNS servers in the studies I showed you? I'm sorry, but the facts are in direct contradiction to your ridiculous hypothesis. I know you're not going to bother addressing facts because they go against your point and instead you'll use your typical tactic of becoming evasive and spewing out random irrelevent bullshit to help preserve your ego.

Your tactic of cutting off DNS servers like that would likely mean most would be cut off, and that's a ridiculous and rather moronic "solution", if you could call it one. You may not see it as being a huge problem, but the studies and figures show that is. What you're doing is is saying "I don't think there should be a problem, therefore I'm going to stick my fingers in my ears and go 'lalalalaalalalal it's not a huge problem because I say so lalalalalala'." Doesn't work that way. Your proposal of cutting off most DNS servers would cause chaos. Even if most servers were configured properly, they would still require a large amount of bandwidth to maintain, unless you're using some weird tom-math whereby gigabits are still nothing.

So, in conclusion, come back to me when you're willing to actually address the facts and not just make up magical "solutions" that involve cutting off most DNS servers on the internet.

Re:Gotta love this business model

[tomstdenis]

1. Tell ISP they're misconfigured
2. Wait a few days
3. If not fixed, release press statement
4. Wait a few days
5. If not fixed, cut off.

It's better than sitting on your thumbs whining and crying about it is it not?

WHY am I the ONLY genious here?

Tom

Re:Gotta love this business model

[njyoder]

Wow, why didn't anyone else think of that?! Probably because it's a really bad solution and would only end up pissing people off, disrupting the service of tons of innocent people without getting anything accomplished. They've tried overly agressive services like that for spam, which just piss people off and as a result few people use those services. While you're at it, take your vigilantism to an extreme, any misconfigured server of any kind gets its DNS cut off, great idea! Nevermind that this would be very, very illegal. You don't even bother thinking these things through, do you?

And you still managed to be evasive, did you read the studies? The large amount of bad requests aren't just due to a lack of caching, if you had read the studies in question you'd know that. No matter how you cut it, running root servers requires a massive amount of bandwidth, even if your "solution" worked, this would still be true. You refuse to address this. But hey, don't let things like facts get in your way.

Re:Gotta love this business model

[tomstdenis]

All I have to say is poor execution is no excuse for monopoly driven pricing.

Let's say I was your source of water to your house. And I decide that eroding water pipes is a problem not worth fixing. The solution is since so much water gets lost in the pipes we'll just raise the price.

Seem fair?

This has secondary effects of wasting bandwidth over the net everywhere. It isn't just the DNS server that carries the traffic but the peering networks, my ISP, etc, etc.

If the root servers don't want to protect themselves why should I pay for it when I want to open a website or service? I use my ISPs DNS server as required by the hiearchy. I'm not circumventing the net.

If my ISP [rogers in this case] isn't following the rules I want to know about it. I pay for Rogers bandwidth as a customer. If they're wasting it on redundant DNS traffic they're wasting MY money.

Tom

Re:Gotta love this business model

[njyoder]

That analogy might work if it weren't for the fact that the root DNS companies in question do not own, control nor have any responsibility for the ISP's DNS servers (the "pipes"). The water companies, OTOH, are largely responsible and do exercise control over the pipes that deliver the water to your house. You're basically blaming companies for something they don't have control over and that's totally irrational. Rogers' problem is Rogers' problem, not the problem of root dns servers. Fuck, while you're at it, in typical Slashdot lore, just throw in a totally random and out of place jab at Microsoft? After all, I'm sure Microsoft is somehow tangentially responsible for this.

Your assertion that the root DNS servers don't want to protect themselves is ludicrous. They simply don't have a viable option due to the existing DNS infrastructure, w hich they don't have control over. They're not going to hold the entire internet hostage (illegally, mind you) for the sake of trying to get people to correct configurations. And even when they did that, it would only reduce the severity of the problem, not eliminate. The point you keep evading is that caching is only part of the problem--they still receive a large influx of bad queries for other reasons and it would still be expensive to maintain.

You don't want monopoly driven pricing? Well then, why don't you actually propose a solution? Because this doesn't actually solve it. DNS is centralized, so it's automatically going to be monopoly driven no matter how well behaved DNS servers are. So why don't you work on your miracle proposal for decentralized DNS? Oh I know why--because shit like that doesn't work. You don't have a solution, you're just talking out of your anti-corporate ass. You're whining becuase you're too damn cheap to pay $8/year for a domain name. Registrars pay $5 per domain, that's their price, it's not high, stop your bitching.

Re:Gotta love this business model

[tomstdenis]

I like you, you like me?

So much hostility for a person in a position of affirmative authority there.

Serenity dude, serenity.

Tom

Keywords

[superpulpsicle]

Now AOL is in trouble as they are no longer the one to use keywords... oh wait...

Re:Keywords

[BushCheney08]

Hey! Quit stealing my thoughts!

Re:Keywords

[Guspaz]

You can, in some browsers, already use keywords as a sort of domain.

Take Firefox for example. I no longer type "slashdot.org" or "teknews.net" into the address bar. I simply type "slashdot" or "teknews". Firefox realizes the domain doesn't exist, and does a Google "I'm Feeling Lucky" search. In most case it sends me to the site whose name ends in that domain.

What about domains where the keyword doesn't link to the domain? Well, if I type "firefox" into the address bar and hit enter, I'm not going to go to firefox.com, but http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/. Now, chances are that that is actually where I want to go.

So, maybe this might make sense from a business perspective, but from a consumer perspective, it is already here.

Re:Keywords

[superflyguy]

Why leave it to firefox when you can set up a hosts list? And why is the geek perspective so lacking on slashdot?

Re:Keywords

[Anonymous Coward]

One word is all you need here: RealNames.

Re:Keywords

[Anonymous Luddite]

If you're usinf FF, try typing "x" into your browser and hit enter. (No it doesn't go to tubgirl or goatse)

I don't know how much x.com cost them, but it's a pretty cool shortcut - I use it all the time..

Re:Keywords

[Anonymous Coward]

x in firefox takes me to wiki.x.org, the top google result. x.com goes to paypal.

Re:Keywords

[Anonymous Luddite]

Funny, I get paypal for "x" every time. We must be using different datacenters for google.

Re:Keywords

[Tony Hoyle]

I get the x.org homepage.... all FF has done is append '.org' onto the domain name.. big whoop.

Re:Keywords

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know how much x.com cost them, but it's a pretty cool shortcut - I use it all the time..

It's not a "shortcut", X.com was an online bank back in the boom days - they merged with PayPal, and then eBay bought them both. You might remember them because they would give you $25USD to sign up, but weren't FDIC insured or anything.

So, it's a result of a merger with a previously independent company, X.com, not some sort of bizarre (x.com == PayPal how, exactly? And they don't advertise it anywhere) shortcut.

Re:Keywords

[Anonymous Luddite]

>> It's not a "shortcut"

hey, If I can type one character into the address bar and hit enter, it's a shortcut for me.

The introduction calls for it

[Bromskloss]

For instance, just typing slashdot would bring up this site, instead of slashdot.org.

This is just how it works in Firefox, with the help of Google, already today. :-)

Re:The introduction calls for it

[Seumas]

Wow. Who moderated this down?! Morons . . .

The point here is that for $1,000 up front and $240/yr, anyone could have the word "slashdot" automatically direct them wherever the registered owner wants without having to worry about silly things like pagerank.

In other words, anyone with $1,240 the first year can own you.

Re:The introduction calls for it

[Mouse42]

No one modded it down... the OP's karma earns automatic -1

Re:The introduction calls for it

[tyroney]

Er, no? If you aren't asking this company's servers to resolve, you aren't going to see the domains they've "owned". When they get a multinational service provider, or multiple countries of digital prominence, then you can start worrying about hostile takeovers.

AOL keywords

[BushCheney08]

This sounds almost like AOL's keywords, except on an internet-wide basis. We really don't need further AOLification of the internet...Also, several browsers already tack on .com if you just type a single word into the address bar.

Re:AOL keywords

[zlogic]

I think many browsers don't add .com to the address but rather do a "I'm feeling lucky" search for the address typed if they fail to load the website directly.

Re:AOL keywords

[mongoose(!no)]

Or some browsers allow you set keywords, such as when I do type slashdot, it takes me here, "home" takes me to my homepage, and "router" takes me to the config page on my router. The biggest problem I see with this idea is no one would know what a single word on a advertisment would mean. Right now if I saw something on a sign somewheres that said "arbitraryphrase", I wouldn't think to go online to look it up. The .com/.net/.org tells people it is a website and to go to. As an advertising agency, I would be wary of not using the tld on an address, especially for online businesses.

Re:AOL keywords

[dbmellst]

Opera does this and also happens to rock the world.

Kinda wondering how this will be supported.

[jZnat]

Many web browsers will (by default) submit a domainless word to a search engine like Google unless the domain is covered by your hosts file. How will this work if we don't get direct access to the root DNS' collective hosts files? How will your browser know the difference between typing in "slashdot" to mean the URL "http://slashdot/" or that you want to search for slashdot, thus the URL being "http://www.google.com/search?q=slashdot"?

Re:Kinda wondering how this will be supported.

[dr_d_19]

Uhm, the same way it does today?

Perform a lookup on the domain, and if it's invalid, to the search.

Re:Kinda wondering how this will be supported.

[LiquidMind]

I will feel sorry for the idiot that buys 'localhost'

Re:Kinda wondering how this will be supported.

[lakin]

Because (i think) the web client tries to dns lookup "slashdot" first. Otherwise, how would new TLDs (.name, .xxx etc) work?

More importantly though, whats the point? As you said, most clients will do a search and most clients will try appending ".com" if it looks like an address, ie "www.slashdot" would get you to "www.slashdot.com", and given that most companies do advertise the www, they could easily just use this form. Of course, things like mail clients dont try google or appending .com, but it would still be a bad idea to use this companies system for mail because people would only be able to send them mail if their ISP supports it (not counting companies which run their own name servers).

Re:Kinda wondering how this will be supported.

[Alioth]

Actually - they don't quite do that.

They do a DNS lookup *first*, then submit the search if the lookup returns NXDOMAIN. On a local network, the domain part may be set by default, so asking your resolver to resolve 'foo' may come up with a valid IP address (and it may not be in the hosts file). This is transparent to the browser - it's not the browser checking what the default domain for the computer is, it's the TCP/IP library for your system. So this system will fit in just fine with that.

Re:Kinda wondering how this will be supported.

[Anonymous Coward]

Many web browsers will (by default) submit a domainless word to a search engine like Google unless the domain is covered by your hosts file.

That's not how it works.

The browser first does a DNS lookup on the string as it is. If it's in your hosts file, that will come up first. But there are other places these can come from. If you're on Windows, an obvious one is from machines on your local network. (WINS) Or you could have a corporate DNS server that covers these names.

So top level domain names wouldn't interfere with that browser function at all, but they would interfere with all of these other things.

Re:Kinda wondering how this will be supported.

[kfg]

". . .if it looks like an address, ie "www.slashdot" would get you to "www.slashdot.com" "

I just got here by typing "slashdot" into Firefox.

KFG

Re:Kinda wondering how this will be supported.

[jZnat]

Oh yeah? I typed "/." and got here! Gotta love those customisable keywords.

Re:Kinda wondering how this will be supported.

[tehshen]

/. for me takes me to the / folder. There could be some problems with that...

Re:Kinda wondering how this will be supported.

[kfg]

I don't use customizable keywords, so "/." doesn't work for me. Firefox queried Google and "clicked" the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button for me.

My point was that ".com" is not the default lookup.

KFG

Re:Kinda wondering how this will be supported.

[Surt]

It won't be supported, any more than aol keywords are supported (in fact, far less than AOL keywords are supported). Basically, these people are ripping off stupid businessmen who missed out on the .com domain goldrush and are afraid to miss out again.

Re:Kinda wondering how this will be supported.

[narooze]

"How will your browser know the difference between typing in "slashdot" to mean the URL "http://slashdot/" or that you want to search for slashdot"

How will your browser know whether to go to a global address or a LAN address in a case where such a TLD has the same name as a host in ones own LAN.

Re:Kinda wondering how this will be supported.

[Plaid Phantom]

Yeah? Well, I used a bookmark you insensitive clod!

Re:Kinda wondering how this will be supported.

[Tim C]

Many web browsers will (by default) submit a domainless word to a search engine like Google unless the domain is covered by your hosts file.

The actual sequence of events is (paraphrased):

1) User types in "foo" and hits return
2) Browser performs a call to gethostbyname(), passing in "foo"
3) OS attempts to resolve the specified host name ("foo") to an IP address
4) if this succeeds, the browser attempts to make an HTTP connection to it on port 80 (if no port was specified by the user)
5) if that fails, or if the call to gethostbyname() failed to resolve the name, then:
6) (most browsers) if the typed in name did not contain a dot, the browser tries again, adding ".com" to the end (so in this case, it tries "foo.com"). Go to 3).
7) if *that* fails, most browsers then (by default) attempt to search for the entered term at a configured search engine (firefox defaults to google, IE defaults to MSN search)

The browser definitely does not think to itself "Oh, that's obviously not a domain and isn't in the hosts file, I'd better search for it!" - it just asks the OS to resolve the entered name (everything between the http:/// (if entered) and the next / (if entered)). If someone has registered slashdot as a TLD and you type in slashdot, that's what you'll get. If not, then the browser will do whatever it does in the event of a name resolution failure (in my case, tell me it failed - I hate that auto-searching crap)

Bottom line is, it won't know the difference, just as it doesn't know the difference now.

Re:Kinda wondering how this will be supported.

[jZnat]

In all seriousness, /. is one of my homepages. So, whenever I'm in a browser restarting frenzy with regards to extension development or something, /. get's a big load from me...

Re:Kinda wondering how this will be supported.

[toddestan]

I will feel sorry for the idiot that buys 'localhost'

No kidding. He'll probably get sued out of existance by people claiming that he copied their entire site.

Re:Kinda wondering how this will be supported.

[cagle_.25]

Heh. IE5 used to try a large number of permutations of prefixes and suffixes. I would watch in wonder when I typed in an inaccessible URL, like "scrod.com", and receive

Trying scrod.com
Trying www.scrod.com
Trying www.scrod.com.com
Trying www.scrod.com.net
Trying www.scrod.com.org
Trying www.scrod.com.edu
...

IE6 seems to have fixed that behavior.

Problem

[Seumas]

I'm a small fry with a non-commercialized, free site and service that can't afford $1,000 + $240/yr.

Big company comes in and wants to roll right over me. It's bad enough when someone takes your domain name (but under .net/.org, etc - instead of your own .com). Imagine when someone decides to pony up the cash to completely wipe you out by taking out a rootless domain in your .com domain's name?

And sure, technically you may be able to fight it in court. But if you can't afford the $1,000 + $240/yr, how the hell are you going to afford an IP / trademark lawyer and a lawsuit?

Re:Problem

[just_another_sean]

I see your point about the money and there is no way I want to see control of TLD's in the hands of a single, private company.

But the concept behind the flat top level namespace actually solves the problem you speak of. Imagine, as a small company, coughing up a reasonable initial and annual fee to register a single domain. No worries that someone will come along and grab .org and .net minutes after you register .com. The worst someone can do to you is misspell yours slightly in hopes people will somehow get to them instead of you through a typo (like "micorsoft.com", I hate these jerks).

IMHO this concept has pros and cons but the flat namespace would be a boon to the little guy when it comes to getting domains that reflect a company's image without having to register 42 of them.

Re:Problem

[Seumas]

Not everyone is a small company, however.

I'll continue with my own situation as an example since it probably represents that of many other people out there.

I operate a very niche auction site that has been around since 1998. It has about 35,000 members. It is completely free. I don't make a dime and the very specialized and unobtrusive advertising I sell on the site goes entirely to pay the hardware and bandwidth fees. I don't charge or make a single dime off of the site (in fact, I've spent about $25,000 out of my own pocket since I started it seven years ago).

Now, if I were a business of any sort making any kind of profit whatsoever, $1,000 up front and $240/yr might be tolerable for one domain. Then again - what if said business has multiple domains?

I have a related but separate site in addition to my auction site that is focused on niche reviews submitted by members. So now to protect myself from being steamrolled by unscrupulous people or businesses, I have to pay $2,000 and $480/yr (or more, if I have other domains)?

I have had interest from a number of well known companies who mad offers for my site. Everything from Hot Topic to venture-capital style companies that buy a domain, invest in it and resell it for a huge profit. Even companies that wanted to buy me out and have me continue working on the project. Or people running related sites or businesses wanting to buy my site.

So they could essentially squeeze me out by, instead of competing fairly or paying me money, spending $1,240? That's hardly fair.

Re:Problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Shh, you just wrecked my master plan:

1. Purchase the Bangbus name from Unified Root
2. Gain mega hits from click revenue
3. ???
4. Profit!!!!!

Re:Problem

[zCyl]

Big company comes in and wants to roll right over me. It's bad enough when someone takes your domain name (but under .net/.org, etc - instead of your own .com). Imagine when someone decides to pony up the cash to completely wipe you out by taking out a rootless domain in your .com domain's name?

Business model:

1. Create company claiming to solve domain problems by offering a new "more important" space for every company to register its name.
2. Charge a lot.
3. Wait for the big companies to register their domain names "just in case", to avoid someone else getting it first.
4. Profit!

(Hey, that one actually works...)

Re:Problem

[Seumas]

Except a .net, .org and .com would run you about $15/yr. Not $1,000+$240/yr.

Re:Problem

[Myopic]

that's not insightful. parent jumped to untenable conclusions.

Re:Problem

[Seumas]

You're right. Nobody squats on domains or domain-rapes by similar domains or domains under other TLDs and they certainly wouldn't jump for the "one ring" domain if they could push you out by putting $1240 at it. Yeah. That would NEVER happen. Absolutely not. Hell no. No way in the world. *cough*

Your username is appropriate.

Re:Problem

[Myopic]

hyperbolic fearmonger

Re:Problem

[Seumas]

Talk to someone who gets their shit jacked domain-wise and tell them they're fearmongering.

Why not

[suso]

one of the guys that I worked with in the 90s always thought that they should just drop TLDs or make is to that everyone could register their own TLDs. I kinda agree with him now. It sure would solve the problem with people registering .com, .net and .org and people going to .com when the address is .org, etc.

Re:Why not

[JonN]

That defeats the purpose of a great system, which takes the form of extensions. The reason for the extentions is to organize websites into their respective topics, so that you will (generally) know either a sites orientation or location. Thinking about eBay, it is much more useful for me to go to eBay.ca then it is for me to go to eBay.com

Re:Why not

[Anonymous Coward]

The reason for the extentions is to organize websites into their respective topics

(/me pounds forehead on desk in despair)
The DNS is not a website catalogue.
The Internet is not the web.

Re:Why not

[suso]

You cannot everyone organized, except by law. And even then its difficult.

Re:Why not

[suso]

$_ =~ s/cannot everyone/cannot keep everyone/;

Re:Why not

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you crazy? Everyone knows that Tim Berners-Lee invented the Internet in 1991 because his Google searches were coming back too slowly on FidoNet.

Duh.

Ahh.

[Anonymous Coward]

Just enter the "toyota" keyword on America Online!

most people use yahoo or google search

[Anonymous Coward]

they dont even know that you can type into the address line of the web browser. their homepage usually has a 'search' box, they type in 'ebay.com' into the search bar or 'cnn.com' and thats how they get to the website they are looking for.

if they type in 'cnn' instead to the search bar it wont matter much if the tld is changed.

although i guess some people would love this feature, especially people trying to run scams ('http://disney' goes to a porn site or someones ebay toy store for example).. which means the major corporations will then pay money to get their TLDs before a scammer can.

maybe.

Re:most people use yahoo or google search

[SpectralDesign]

Yep, we use firefox and no matter how often I tell my wife she can type into the location bar either "www.favoritesite.com" or even just "favoritesite" she always goes to Google (and usually puts in www.favoritesite.com to get a link to, of course, www.favoritesite.com)

She's quite bright, but once traied to use a search engine, she doesn't seem willing to try to learn a new way...

Re:most people use yahoo or google search

[Anonymous Coward]

> She's quite bright

No, she's not. She's quite braindead, if anything.

What's Your Beef?

[Anonymous Coward]

UnifiedRoot wants $1000USD up front for a registration, with an additional $240 yearly renewal.

This seems like a very reasonable price for a TLD. At least to me, it seems reasonable.

And would anybody really want to place control of entire TLDs in the hands of one private company?

The biggest TLD, .com, is in the hands of one private company, Verisign, and it does not appear to be a major issue for anyone. Certainly the .com has not come crashing down because it was in the hands of one private company.

What's your beef? Do you just like to bitch?

Re:What's Your Beef?

[AndroidCat]

This seems like a very reasonable price for a TLD. At least to me, it seems reasonable.

Only if those TLDs are accessable to everyone else without requiring customized DNS settings or flakey plug-ins. Otherwise it's a massive rip-off of gullible fools. An alternative DNS root could be done with one box and BIND. Would that be worth $1000, $240/year?

long domain names

[rd4tech]

by their idea, after 10 years, if one wants to register a domain name, the only left ones will be 20 characters minimum. Some division and grouping SHOULD exist.

Re:long domain names

[RobertKozak]

You really think that if Microsoft.org was available you would be able to hold on to it?

Subgroups aren't solving the problem.

-- Robert

Re:long domain names

[rd4tech]

how about my.com, my.us, my.com.?

Already does...

[mpugh.co.uk]

"For instance, just typing slashdot would bring up this site, instead of slashdot.org"

It already does for me. Thanks to Firefox working like a Google I'm Feeling Lucky search when you don't enter anything other than a search phrase into the address bar :)

Re:Already does...

[Anonymous Coward]

Make it a bookmark with keyword /.
Hey, if you got a proper browser, use it!

Re:Already does...

[demha87]

Yeah, that's what I do. I rely on keywords. /. sends me to slashdot.org -- news sends me to news.com. I even make keywords like newegg to take me to newegg.com. Why? Because if I type newegg, it actually takes firefox a bit longer to search for the site if you don't put an extension, and I don't like waiting.

Oh no!

[Anonymous Coward]

What will become of Slashdot? Slash?

Re:Oh no!

[mordors9]

But that is the problem. That is probably already taken by the lead guitar player (former) of Guns n Roses, or some horror flick.

Re:Oh no!

[sabat]

Actually, it's a hardcore pr0n site.

The dot is useful

[venicebeach]

The dot lets you know you're talking about a website. If you see a commercial and it says "go to getfirefox.com" you know you are supposed to type that into your web browser. If people hear instead "go to getfirefox" that will require further explanation...

Re:The dot is useful

[bradbeattie]

Speaking of Firefox, when I type in "slashdot" Firefox recognizes that it isn't a URL and takes me to the best guess from google. On all the major sites, it works like a charm. In that sense, we have a functional wrapper around around the concept of dotless domain names.

Re:The dot is useful

[Overly Critical Guy]

So instead they say "Website: getfirefox." They used to say "AOL keyword: blah."

I think you're way overestimating the value of the dot. A lot of people don't use the extension anyway. The browser tacks it on.

Re:The dot is useful

[martin-boundary]

No, I think you're needlessly complicating a simple issue. Obviously, advertisers will start to say things like "go to getfirefox-dot-com-but-without-the-dot-com", and people will accept that. Of course, things will get complicated when some clown registers the "getfirefox-dot-com-but-without-the-dot-com" domain and sues the advertisers, but that's ok because we'll just get used to hearing "getfirefox-dot-com-but-without-the-dot-com-but-no t-with-the-without-the-dot-com". BTW, as a by-product of this evolution, people will get smarter and we'll colonize Mars earlier.

Re:The dot is useful

[adolf]

No, it won't - or at least, it's not supposed to.

That's why we have URLs to denote what, exactly, is being specified. For example, http://getfirefox clearly specifies that we're to connect to a host named getfirefox using HTTP, implicitly using TCP port 80.

More importantly, the presense of the aich tee tee pee two-dots-over-eachother-what-is-that-a-semicolon backslash backslash combination shouts to the clueless that the forthcoming script must have something to do with that Intar-Web thing.

Of course, nobody uses URLs properly anymore - the marketing people killed that idea a long time ago. And since this latest fuckjob idea of flattening the namespace is also a product of the same sort of marketers, I hereby don't give a shit if their goals conflict and result in alienation of their audience.

They've made their bed, and now they get to sleep in it.

Re:The dot is useful

[g0at]

The dot lets you know you're talking about a website. If you see a commercial and it says "go to getfirefox.com" you know you are supposed to type that into your web browser. If people hear instead "go to getfirefox" that will require further explanation...

Uh. Ten years ago, "getfirefox.com" would have been utterly meaningless. Your first sentence is incorrect. The "http://" is what lets us know we are talking about a web site.

-b

They're not exactly scarce

[msmercenary]

"And would anybody really want to place control of entire TLDs in the hands of one private company?"

Why not? Under this new system, TLDs would hardly be in short supply. I would argue that nobody but this site would have a claim to the .slashdot TLD. By the same token, I could claim the .msmercenary TLD and it wouldn't bother google in the least. Does anybody take up arms that one private company owns the rights to the novell.com 2LD?

The only reason there would be any kind of problem with one private company owning an entire TLD is if they were in artificially short supply (such as the current system), which is not the case when you open it up to the nearly infinite permutations of all alphabetic strings.

Re:They're not exactly scarce

[Seumas]

It doesn't matter who has a claim to a domain. It matters who has the money to register it and whether their victim has the resources to take the issue to court. I've been the victim of malicious slander by downright sociopathic people on the internet before, but I can't afford to get the appropriate legal representation and take the issue to court. I've been the victim of people registering my domain (which is a rather popular auction-related .com) as a .net or a .org or just changing the domain name by one character and offering the same unique service (which would be similar to opening a fast food burger joint and calling it McDonald instead of McDonald's). It even confuses the hell out of people who will email me and complain about something that went horribly wrong at this competing / underhanded site only for me to eventually figure out they were talking about the OTHER site but got confused and emailed ME instead (thus negatively impacting consumer association with my site - which has been around years longer than the other one). But guess what? I can't afford to register the name as a trademark. It's pretty expensive. And I can't afford a trademark or IP lawyer to take such people doing these things to court.

So unless you're well-off, you pretty much have to sit and take it from all sides with no possible recourse.

Additional Installation

[Jeet81]

This would require the installation of software that would work on top of the browser like New.net. And people are even more concerned about installing apps from popups so it's going to hard for them to penetrate through to get a good base of clients. Based on the fact where New.net is right now we can predict where this will be heading to. Anyways I'll switch to a Mac so they don't bug with the popup's forcing me to install their software.

Re:Additional Installation

[Seumas]

Why would that be necessary? Verisign didn't have any problem redirecting 404s to an advertisement a year or two ago. They wouldn't have any problem redirecting (if given a financial reason) to something else, based on the keyword, either.

Re:Additional Installation

[Jeet81]

From what I understand this is not ICANN approved so they won't be doing this at the top level dns servers (verisign got hold of them for their advertisements). So UnifiedRoots will be targeting the clients. I might be wrong.

Re:Additional Installation

[Seumas]

To avoid having a plugin involved (or bribing ISPs to do something in the middle), I'm sure you'd have to get buy-in from existing registrars. I don't see that as being impossible, though. with $1,000 and $240 per year and domain, there's enough cash involved to make the registrar happy and do your own thing. Patent the idea so Verisign can't use it without your approval. Or pay them off so that all non TLD domains are then forwarded to your company's DNS servers and handle all of the non TLD resolution from that point on to the actual destination IP. Any number of things could probably be done. The only matter is one of cash.

Re:Additional Installation

[TheGavster]

This is exactly what Verisign did a couple of years ago, except they're doing more targetting advertisements. I wonder how the rates compare (does anyone know what the rates were like for verisign invalid domain ads?).

The wrong approach?

[tyroney]

Dotless domains almost sounds enticing enough to happen, but at those prices, I doubt the world is going to start redirecting at a great enough rate to make this company's plan viable.

I'd imagine if it does pick up any steam, you'd just find ICANN offering the same thing at a decent price. (or allowing someone to do so)

private company

[baafie]

And would anybody really want to place control of entire TLDs in the hands of one private company?

Uh, you mean, like ICANN?

Browsers already do this

[omeomi]

What's the point? I can already type "slashdot" into any browser I can think of, and I get redirected to slashdot.org. I guess it takes an extra second or so for it to look up the correct site, but it's still pretty much the same thing from a user's perspective...

Re:Browsers already do this

[omeomi]

Konqueror is one that doesn't, and by extention, Safari might not eather.

Safari definitely does, but I don't have KDE installed anywhere, so I'll just have to take your word for it about Konqueror.

other dotless top level domains?

[js3]

how would they prevent other companies from making their own dotless tlds?

Re:other dotless top level domains?

[watomb]

They can't see thats the entire problem. I have just started a company that does the same thing but even better. You can go to my corporate web site. I am building my DNS server for all the new dot replacements. I am looking for some help if there are any volunteers that have a great server we can set it within a week. www.wa-t.com A new net Ok just kind of joking but it seems possible

Who needs ICANN?

[Anonymous Coward]

What do we have ICANN for again? They don't run the servers, that's contracted out to Verisign. They take forever to decide they want .xxx, then Bush says no and they flip flop.

Nobody needs ICANN.

Already Tried?

[Tachys]

This has already been tried http://searchenginewatch.com/sereport/article.php/ 2164841 by Realnames

Re:Already Tried?

[quibbler]

Yeah, the company was called Centraal, the product was "RealNames" or whatever - they were right back then in the middle of the .com bubble. Morons.

Sounds Dangerous to Me.

[hardlined]

What's to stop someone from buying the com domain and using the subdomains to imitate the real domains for example someone buys org and sets up the subdomain slashdot.org

I don't see how you would differentiate between slashdot.org and slashdot.org, one using a subdomain of an extensionless org TLD.

Re:Sounds Dangerous to Me.

[Surt]

Presumably, they'd make org/com/info etc reserved names that you can't register. They'd then be forced to revoke any dotless TLD that became a real TLD later. Presumably that risk will be covered by their contract.

Re:Sounds Dangerous to Me.

[idesofmarch]

I think they would just bar anyone from registering com, org, net, etc. as domains.

Re:Sounds Dangerous to Me.

[TheGavster]

slashdot.org is a subdomain of the top-level domain 'org'. This scheme is trying to sell off rights to additional top-level domains for a grand apiece. As such, com, org, net, uk, etc are already taken.

Honestly, I think it's kind of a bargain. Imagine how much cash you'd get if you had a dollar for every domain registered under 'uk', or even something obscure like 'info'. Whoever gets and squats your 3-5 letter vulgarities will be very wealthy ...

Re:Sounds Dangerous to Me.

[petermgreen]

it WOULD be a bargin if theese names were on the official dns system but they aren't!

and what company is going to wan't to put an internet name that the vast majority of users cannot resolve on thier advertising?

Re:Sounds Dangerous to Me.

[TubeSteak]

You mean like http://news.com.com/ ?

Whenever I get an email/IM link to one of their sites, I always have that moment of suspicion where i think its a malicious executable.

Pure nonsense!

[callipygian-showsyst]

Doesn't anyone remember "Real Names"? A company that sold "keywords" during the dotcom boom to many sucker companies? Of course, without the "Real Names" plug-in, you wouldn't see them.

Agreed!!!

[Midnight Thunder]

The TLDs are VERY important, since they help categorise the structure in terms of a tree and give a clear defintion of who is responsible for which subset of the tree.

Doing what they are doing could potentially screw up internal networks and cause more problems than it solves. Imagine that all your internal hosts have the prefix "internal" and another site pops up called "internal", we would then have the issue of myhost.internal being difficult to resolve. Is it inside the network or outside? I have already have seen something like this happen when internal domains use .local, yet at the same time .local is reserved for use by mDNS.

Re:Agreed!!!

[znu]

This is why it's best to use internal names like "whatever.mycompany.com", even if they're not resolvable from outside the local network. You control mycompany.com; you don't control the top-level namespace, and occasionally stuff will get added to it that you didn't expect.

(If you really want to distinguish between internal and external names at a glance, you can always use the form "whatever.internal.mycompany.com".)

Re:Agreed!!!

[krasmussen]

It all blows up the day some hosting company decides to call themselves "localhost".

Re:Agreed!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

They would in effect be selling an infinate number of TLDs. If you bought wanker, then you could sell bob.isa.wanker

it would be fun to resell off the top of.

Re:Agreed!!!

[FuturePastNow]

What they are proposing will screw up internal networks. If I type "wiggum" into the address bar, I get sent to the admin page for my firewall/router. At the nuiversity I went to, typing just about anything ("webmail", "registrar") takes you to the proper page on the intranet. It's very convenient, but applying it to the whole internet will cause a lot of problems.

Re:Agreed!!!

[Tim C]

Imagine that all your internal hosts have the prefix "internal" and another site pops up called "internal", we would then have the issue of myhost.internal being difficult to resolve.

How so? I can see where you might have problems, but if you have a sane network with all your machines using a single DNS server/set of servers, then they'll all resolve the same host for myhost.internal. If that happens to shadow a myhost.internal out on the internet, well, thems the breaks, should've used myhost.mycompany.com or myhost.internal.mycompany.com as others have said.

(If you don't have a sane network, then you have bigger issues anyway)

Is it inside the network or outside?

Traceroute and tracert are your friends, depending on your platform of choice.

Re:Agreed!!!

[masterzora]

You laugh, but it's all so true. I would definitely pay the required cost to get that domain. Just imagine.... Get a few per page view ads on there and you're rich overnight.

Re:Agreed!!!

[Reziac]

And what about browsers where when you type "example" automagically assume "example.com" ??
What about domain squatters and linkfarms who go forth and gather up all the TLD-less domains?

Even with just those two thoughts, IMO the potential for abuse and hijacking is just too much.

Re:Agreed!!!

[Ekevu]

And then only them would be able to access themselves!

Re:Agreed!!!

[DavidTC]

It wouldn't work. localhost is looked up in the hosts files before DNS.

Re:Agreed!!!

[JasonTik]

Not everyone has a mycompany.com to use for that. What do you recommend the rest of us use? mybox.internal.me.dyndns.org? I like my LAN's .tik tld just fine.

Many users will see 'accounting.internal' and think that it is their company's accounting department. They wont think to use traceroute to check, or anything similar.

Re:Agreed!!!

[masterzora]

The number of times that I alone accidentally type "localhost" onto non-server computers more than justifies it, AFAIAC.

Re:Agreed!!!

[andreyw]

What if you DON'T have an external domain? Say... on my home network I want to use my own DNS, but since I don't intend to host anything I don't need an external domain. \

Re:Agreed!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Make one up for your internal domain (e.g. house.myhouse.org), except that there might be a "myhouse.org" out there, but your home network DNS server won't care.

Personally, I use a domain name that is based off of a Monty Python skit (so all my hosts are hostname.kp.deadparrot.org). My DNS server happily resolves names in kp.deadparrot.org. and doesn't worry that there isn't a deadparrot.org. domain out there.

Re:Agreed!!!

[WuphonsReach]

Aye, we use "intra.companyname.com" as the internal domain (pretty common practice). Makes it easy to spot those internal addresses and you can add static host records without worrying about what the public does or doesn't see. (Our "intra" domain does not get exported outside of the building, so only hosts on the local LAN can resolve against it.)

Re:Agreed!!!

[Feyr]

not really,

at my company we use something.ourdomain.com

the dhcp server supply the ourdomain.com suffix to everyone that asks. the dns resolver is bright enough to look up something.ourdomain.com before asking for "something" alone if you type it as such.

Re:Agreed!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

For obvious reasons, this is AC. Who is the idiot that allowed localhost.net and localhost.com to be registered? "localhost.net." pops up when I type "localhost" in my browser unless I explicitly put "domain ." in my /etc/resolv.conf.

I strongly suspect the former domain's holder of phishing. Have you ever used webmin and typed https://localhost:10000/ into your browser and entered your administrative password without a second thought? If you had a fast internet connection you would never even notice.

Re:Agreed!!!

[xmodem_and_rommon]

but the lookup would still not go to the dns - the host would still get 127.0.0.1 from its internal dns lookup, and would try to connect to a webserver running on itself. If there isn't one, you'll get a connection refused error.

Re:Agreed!!!

[masterzora]

Hmmm... learn something new every day.

Re:Agreed!!!

[MikeFM]

TLDs should be important but they aren't. The majority of domains seem to be held by squaters and for a great number of domains they own the same domain under several TLD's which all point to the same site. (slashdot.net, slashdot.org, slashdot.com) which just sort of makes having the TLD pointless.

I'd rather have everyone own their own TLD than bother with TLD's which are mostly meaningless. Who cares if you can't tell if single word domains are inside or outside your LAN? Try naming a server com or org now and see what happens. Same difference really. Why not use a fully qualified domain name for all machines? Sub-domains are free anyway so it's no harder to call your machine buttkiss.mynet than it is to call it buttkiss. Your domain server should still recognize that buttkiss should resolve to buttkiss.mynet if there is no buttkiss TLD. It's just getting used to a change and not really an important structural change. How many users really expect it if their DNS resolves google to google.mynetwork.com anyway rather than to google.com? Just to take a guess I'd bet less than 1% of them would expect that behavior.

I do think there should be controls to fight squating of these TLD's. Maybe start with only allowing a company or individual to register only one TLD each and only if they have the trademark on that wording. TLDs to generic to be trademarked, or dictionary words, should be held in trust for public use as current TLDs are. sex or puppy shouldn't be held for normal TLD use. slashdot, microsoft, walmart, sears, and ibm would be fine for company's to control.

Or just create a .priv (privately owned) TLD and set the same rules for domains under it and make it the standard that domains that don't resolve will atempt to resolve under priv. So typing slashdot would end up going to slashdot.priv in the background. Most browsers make some half assed attempt to do that with .com anyway (or a search engine) so it'd be good to standardize the process.

Re:Agreed!!!

[jrockway]

get a dyndns domain, or maybe use "*.andreyw.hiscompany.com".

I really don't see a problem using *.local domains for internal use. The point is that *.local doesn't route off the current link-level network. If you have multiple routed networks, then you can probably afford a domain name.

Re:Agreed!!!

[Col. 2.7.0-default]

This is why you should always use a trailing slash for URLs.

Re:Agreed!!!

[samjam]

Only because /etc/nsswitch.conf says so

And only if resolver lib is being used (which it is for gethostbyname) instead of dns directly

Sam

Re:Agreed!!!

[larien]

Correct; some versions of sendmail automatically go to DNS and ignore the resolver libs. Why, I don't know; that's what gethostbyname() is for, after all...

It's possible to configure the OS to not look at hosts files at all, if you really want to...

Re:Agreed!!!

[DigitalCrackPipe]

After all the stir to add more TLDs, this idea seems rather counterproductive. Also, because browsers currently do a search on partial addresses (i.e. "microsoft" finds the microsoft website), this could lead to a lot of hijacking (linux TLD may also lead to microsoft?).

Re:Agreed!!!

[MoogMan]

Yeah, or "intranet".

This is a bad idea, especially for local hostnames (e.g. cvs-server, exchange, www-staging, etc. etc.).

Re:Agreed!!!

[dkf]

[S]ome versions of sendmail automatically go to DNS and ignore the resolver libs. Why, I don't know; that's what gethostbyname() is for, after all...

It's probably because ignoring gethostbyname() lets you avoid having to use masses of processes to do asynchronous lookups. If you have a reentrant version of gethostbyname, you can use threads instead of processes, but it's still far more expensive than a real asynch lookup that lets the main select() call tell you when the message comes back. I'd even go so far as to advise everyone to use this sort of technique in your own programs, except that discovering exactly how names are resolved is far gnarlier than it appears to be at first glance; IIRC, there's one API configured on at least one platform which is actually done through just stating which dynamic library knows how to handle the whole thing (including which other configuration files to read). Having worked in a place where NIS+ was the way names were resolved, and corresponded with a place that used LDAP (!) bypassing creaky old gethostbyname() (or it's not-quite-improved-enough younger brother, getaddrinfo(), which is at least safely usable from multiple threads at once) is a bad idea. Alas.

Re:Agreed!!!

[andreyw]

Being able to "afford" does not imply emptying out the wallet to buy. I don't want a public domain. Who is to say tomorrow when I get up frazzle.dazzle.microsoft.com won't be taken? In other words, these solutions are ridiculous. How about not breaking TLDs in the first place so I can retain my *.bogodomain?

Re:Agreed!!!

[jrockway]

If owning *.bogodomain is so important then go buy the damn domain. If it's not worth $20, it's not important.

Re:Agreed!!!

[andreyw]

I don't care if it's bogodomain or bogodomainXYZZY, I just want an internal DNS going on. If some numbnut decides to ``get with the program'' and buy his two-piece company the bogodomainXYZZY tld, well, that puts me in a bind - now I have to pick a different domain.

Misnomer

[tverbeek]

Calling these "Top Level Domains" is a bit of a misnomer, because - although technically accurate - they probably wouldn't be used very much in that way. They're domains with a nul top level. If you want to invent and control your own hierarchical TLD (e.g. "dot slash"); just do like New.net, rather than forking over money to these people.

I'm sure this idea sounds nice to people who are too lazy (or confused) to type a TLD, but it would be a nightmare to implement effectively on any large scale. And since the idea A) scales poorly, and B) would completely undermine ICANN's authority (in a way that makes New.net seem harmless), I don't see it lasting very long, either because of non-use on the ISP/client end or getting stomped on (hard) by The Powers That Be.

Re:Misnomer

[tverbeek]

Another thought about why this probably won't catch on: The public won't get it.

The AOL-using masses out there have already been trained too well to put .COM on the end of everything. I have a hard time explaining to people that they don't need to put a WWW. on the front of (for example) MICROSOFT.TODDVERBEEK.COM or a .COM on the end of GRAPHICNOVELS.INFO. If you give them a plain "domain name" such as HOLYCOMICS, they won't know what to do except enclose it in WWW.*.COM

Re:Misnomer

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh no? On the contrary, I'm sure the first thing that will happen if this comes to pass is companies will grab up very short names and then sublet them; acting just like a regular TLD.

Re:Misnomer

[Anonymous Coward]

overly pedantic and literal much?

first thing i thought was.

[know1]

And would anybody really want to place control of entire TLDs in the hands of one private company?"
i sure hope not. that would be like having one country^W^W^W^W^W^W^W company controling the nameservers of the entire internet.

Re:first thing i thought was.

[Anonymous Coward]

^W is an entire word. ^H is one character.

Would have been a good idea originally

[Anonymous Coward]

It would have been nice if the namespace had been designed this way from the start. .com and .net have become so polluted that they no longer signify "commercial entity" and "network", or anything else besides "namespace one" and "namespace two". Countless lusers will register a .net name simply because the .com name they want isn't available, and as a result, lots of people feel the need (legitimately) to register their domain in both TLDs to avoid confusion.

Don't even get me started on all of the .biz/.info/.aero/.museum crap.

Already 7 letter minimum

[NigelJohnstone]

" the only left ones will be 20 characters minimum"
I don't see why.
It's already a 7 letter minimum because all the 3 letter combinations are registered
???.com ???.net etc.

You're freeing up the allocation of the last 4 letters making them more flexible, instead of being from a restricted set (.com .net etc.), so why would it be any worse than it is today?

"Some division and grouping SHOULD exist."
Why? Why not .France and .Tofu and .Canon and .SwimmingPoolsInMexico-are-us?

They don't apply restrictions on choices of trademarks unless they already exist in the same field. Why shouldn't the same rule apply to domain names? The stores aren't called ToyRUs.Commerce or Walmart.Shopping afterall. They don't force you to choose your trademark based on an arbitrary rule.

Why should a self appointed committee decide whether my domain name .Tofu is acceptable or not?

Re:Already 7 letter minimum

[rd4tech]

Why should a self appointed committee decide whether my domain name .Tofu is acceptable or not?
Why should a self appointed committee decide on ALL domain names?

Re:Already 7 letter minimum

[NigelJohnstone]

"So cause there are no 3 letter ones left, they won't allow 4, 5, or 6 letter domain names anymore?"

No, of course you can.

Just as you can have soft.com and microsoft.com, you can have .soft and .microsoft.
The only difference is, under a free choice root you have 5 and 10 letters, under a restricted root, you have 8 and 13 because you have to append some arbitrary root to it.

What's wrong with google?

[oliverthered]

What's wrong with doing a google for slashdot if the user doesn't type in the TLD? It would help out loads by being able list a companies web site even if they don't own their prefered domain name.

Re:What's wrong with google?

[oliverthered]

and how would the new system improve on that? Sure you lucky you have a kormoc.com but what happens when someone else registers kormoc, your even more screwed.

Re:What's wrong with google?

[oliverthered]

Why not display a full search page and not the 'I'm feeling lucky', that's even more usefull if I've typed in cars or something instead of a company name. The new system would take you to MG or VW or foobar inc but not give you the option which.

I'm feeling lucky in Firefox

[HermanAB]

Hmm, Firefox does that already:
Type any bare domain name, 'slashdot' will do, into the Firefox address box and it will do a Google I'm feeling lucky search and go there.

evil

[penguin-collective]

The fact that there is a mandatory suffix for every top level domain is the only thing that has kept the domain name system reasonably sane, both technically and legally. Allowing arbitrary top level domains is plain evil.

Firefox ?

[88NoSoup4U88]

So how are they going to convince Firefox from withholding me from automatically sending me to the 'I am feeling lucky'-Google-link when typing in a word in the Navigation toolbar (as it does right now).
I think this idea makes no sense, aside from trying to grab some quick cash.

The only good thing: Screw M$

[Palal]

Register: "Microsoft" and hook it up to a porn site... watch how long it takes for M$ to take you down.

Who wants to be the first?

[Xaroth]

Who wants to be the first to register "com", and have the entire internet be reduced to a subnet of your domain?

Re:Who wants to be the first?

[jZnat]

I'm sure it'll be slashdotted in mere seconds. Of course, there's also CNet's com.com thing they had.

Re:Who wants to be the first?

[dascandy]

TFA says they prohibit existing ICANN tld's. That doesn't prohibit registering .sex however...

Re:Who wants to be the first?

[Surt]

As funny as these comments are, that is covered in the first page of the article.

Re:Who wants to be the first?

[publius_jr]

RE: your sig
I agree that women suck at 'blocking' what you call 'pop-ups', but do you not ignore their remarkable ability to 'close' them?

Re:Who wants to be the first?

[Kent Recal]

CNet's com.com thing

Easily one of the most retarded ideas a suit ever came up with.

Re:Who wants to be the first?

[Jesus_666]

I'm still waiting for com.com.com.

Hmm... Add a few subdomains to that... alt.names.stupid.com.com.com - classic!

The Dot is Dying

[sabat]

If people hear instead "go to getfirefox" that will require further explanation...

You're thinking like a technologist. Normal people would hear "go to getfirefox" and react by going to Google or Yahoo search and typing "getfirefox". The search would product this (actual Google result for "getfirefox"):

Firefox - Rediscover the web
Official site of the open-source browser. Includes product downloads, release
notes, features overview, and information about switching from other browsers.
www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/ - 29k - Nov 24, 2005 - Cached - Similar pages - Remove result - Filter
Home of the Firefox web browser and ...
Thunderbird - Reclaim Your Inbox - Products
More results from www.mozilla.org

... and they wouldn't even understand that you would personally find the behavior odd or "wrong".

The Dot is dying. It is official; Netcraft has confirmed.

Re:The Dot is Dying

[Anonymous Coward]

"Normal People" wouldn't assume every proper noun they hear is a domain name by default.

Re:The Dot is Dying

[Fnkmaster]

No, you are the one thinking like a technologist. Normal people need a cue that they are supposed to type something into their web browser as an internet address. "Dot com" serves as that cue (and to a lesser extent, dot org and dot net).

If normal people heard "Go to getfirefox" they would say "Where am I supposed to go to get this foxfire thing?".

Normal people don't google something as their first course of action. I do, and you probably do, but most people don't. I find most people are amazed when they email me or ask me questions and I answer them within seconds just by searching on Google or comparable search engine.

Re:The Dot is Dying

[sabat]

If normal people heard "Go to getfirefox" they would say "Where am I supposed to go to get this foxfire thing?".

I suppose I would be thinking like a technologist if every non-techie I have encountered didn't know what Googling was and how to do it. And all of them, without exception, automatically go to Google (or more rarely, Yahoo) and type in whatever they've been told to "go to".

I consistently have this problem, for instance, with my sister: if I tell her to go to Amazon, she automatically goes to Google and types in "Amazon". Since she always finds what she's looking for, she assumes that what she's doing is "right" (and who's to say it isn't?).

Normal people don't google something as their first course of action.

We must know different kinds of people. Or maybe it's somehow a California thing. But every non-technical computer user I know -- from younger people I work with to my 50-something mother-in-law -- will go to Google by reflex.

The way I see it, "normal" people don't understand what the Internet is the way you and I do. They know there's stuff out there, and they learn that Google is their Oracle (no pun intended). Many of them seem to believe that Google is the "official" doorway to the Internet (and they may not be entirely wrong). They find the idea of the Web confusing, and Google (or whichever search engine they first learned about) helps allay that befuddlement.

Re:The introduction calls for it [OT]

[Seumas]

Whatever happened to being able to click on ANY message (not just your own) and seeing the full moderation audit log for that post? I miss that.

Bring on the dumpping of TLDs!!!!

[jackb_guppy]

TLDs are an appendix that needs to cut out!!

I believe each company should own their own TLDs... .IBM, .Mircosoft, ...

I believe the UN should make money from this!!! Yes the UN!!

This way there is not a problem with Trademarks in TLD. The UN will hand out International Trademarks.

Now a country will still rights to their TLDs, so US (or who they wish) can sell to their public. By defination .IBM.US is already mapped to .IBM. So no trademark issues again.

IF there are sub sub then it keeps going down.

Once there is moon base or mars base, then all TLD come under the planetary TLD of EA (Earth), MR (Mars), MN (Moon).

Once there is bases in other solar systems... you get the picture.

Re:Bring on the dumpping of TLDs!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Once there is moon base or mars base, then all TLD come under the planetary TLD of EA (Earth), MR (Mars), MN (Moon). Once there is bases in other solar systems... you get the picture.

Oh great, so IPV6 is going to be obsolete before it even gets implemented.

Re:Bring on the dumpping of TLDs!!!!

[tverbeek]

This way there is not a problem with Trademarks in TLD. The UN will hand out International Trademarks.

Somehow I can't see the U.S. (and other countries) tossing out their national trademark registries to accommodate a international trademark registry based on domain names.

Once there is bases in other solar systems... you get the picture.

To say nothing of the small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri agreeing to interstellar trademarks... especially after all the good ones have been taken!

Re:Bring on the dumpping of TLDs!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

the .ca TLD used to be controlled like this for a long time before they became publicly available.

If your business operated in Alberta, you applied and got a domain like mycompany.ab.ca, in Saskatchewan it would be mycompany.sk.ca

Still tons of these around to this day. I kind of like dthe system. To get a '.ca' required the company to have a national prescence with physical offices in at least 2 different provinces.

Re:Bring on the dumpping of TLDs!!!!

[killjoe]

It doesn't make much sense to have IBM.US because IBM is a multi national company. There should be a IBM.MULTI TLD or something.

The large multinational companies transcend the concept of a country and in many ways are a country on to themselves.

Re:Bring on the dumpping of TLDs!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Once there is moon base or mars base, then all TLD come under the planetary TLD of EA (Earth), MR (Mars), MN (Moon).

What about EA games on Earth (EA)?

Re:Bring on the dumpping of TLDs!!!!

[linuxinit]

In my opinion, whatever.es/de/whatever makes perfect sense. If you are from a Spanish country, or you speak Spanish, whatever.es is a page that is in Spanish. same for .de or any other... If you are from Germany or speak German, whatever.de should be just like whatever.com except in German.

Re:Bring on the dumpping of TLDs!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

But .EA will already belong to Electronic Arts, and .MN will be the state of Minnesota and .MR will be registered to Mr. Ed.

Re:Bring on the dumpping of TLDs!!!!

[jonbryce]

That is what .com is for.

And in any case, if I want to visit IBM, I may well be more interested in my local office, so I might choose to visit ibm.co.uk to see what is available in my country.

Re:Bring on the dumpping of TLDs!!!!

[jackb_guppy]

Why not just use IBM.UK the .CO. in middle is another valueless filler like the .COM

JonN, not JonN.troll or JonN.Programmer...

[NigelJohnstone]

"The reason for the extentions is to organize websites into their respective topics,"

JonN.Troll?
JonN.Programmer?

A website can be about more than one thing, a website can be about something other than Commerce, Network, Organisation, or geographically related, it can change it purpose over time.

Look at it this way, if assigning a rigid set of arbitrary classifications is such a great idea why not do it in other areas? Nobody forced you to choose JonN.SysAdmin or some other arbitrary identifier, why should the same be true in DNS?

They are adding a domain name .Travel for travel related things, why not .Tofu for tofu related things?
Or .Trains? for Train related things?

"Thinking about eBay, it is much more useful for me to go to eBay.ca then it is for me to go to eBay.com"
What about ca.eBay, or LosAngeles.US.Ebay? Wouldn't that make more sense?

Re:JonN, not JonN.troll or JonN.Programmer...

[Trepalium]

What about ca.eBay, or LosAngeles.US.Ebay? Wouldn't that make more sense?

Except is that "ca" Canada, California, Cambodia, or something else? You can't enforce policy on subdomains. ebay.ca explicitly reads eBay Canada. Perhaps a more compelling argument would be to do away with all the gTLDs (.com, .net, .edu, etc) and stick with ccTLDs instead. What about regional small businesses? Are they to be left out of this? There is a LOT of overlap on business names, but mybiz.mb.ca doesn't need to conflict with mybiz.ny.us or with mybiz.com.

Try not to think about a DNS name as a name, but rather an address. Your physical address is very rigidly defined. You start with the name, street address, city, state/province, country (sometimes optional), and postal/zip code. Domain names are simplified addresses for finding certain companies and individuals easier. They are not names or identities, no matter how much you may want them to be.

I good idea

[jbolden]

I kind of like this idea. It creates something like a trademark. Very heavily used websites buy these $1000 domains while normal websites don't bother. Except for the fact that I see no reason this shouldn't go to a good cause rather than some company it actually strikes me as sort of reasonable. Yahoo, Oracle, GM... should own their "trademarks".

To hell with them, I say

[iconara]

The com/net/org/uk/se/whatever TLDs have become quite pointless, so why not? Why should I have to remember if my favourite site happend to choose org, net, uk or se, instead of the ubiquitous com? The TLDs don't add any information. My site is registered under net, even though it's a company, and based in Sweden. I just thought it looked neat.

Perhaps the country codes are apropriate in some cases, but seriously, when did you visit www.volvo.se last? Or ikea.se? I guess you go to their com-equivalents. nu is popular here in Sweden, because "nu" means "now", so you can construct sentences with the names, like del.icio.us has with us. nu stands for Nuie, which is a small island in the pacific. So I would say even country TLDs don't add information.

If two companies or organisations happen to have the same name, how does the current TLD-scheme help? How do I know which has registered com? which has net or org? Most likely one of them would register the name under all the TLDs they could, as fast as possible. Instant TLD pointlessness!

The TLDs don't add anything but confusion, so to hell with them, I say.

T#

localhost?

[comwiz56]

What happens when someone registers http://localhost/ ?

Re:localhost?

[joelsanda]

What happens when someone registers http://localhost/ ?

Argh! And to be caught empty handed ... no mod points to flag this Funny!

Re:localhost?

[jZnat]

Wow, that site has an assload of free porn! And what great taste!

Re:localhost?

[SamSim]

One step ahead of you, buddy! I already have http://localhost/ registered!

Re:localhost?

[superflyguy]

when someone does that, your computer shouldn't even get around to looking up the DNS entry.

Re:localhost?

[[000000]]

Wow its mirrored my Home Network and I have not even registered "LOCALHOST" as a domain yet, Clever stuff! Virtual Mirror?

Re:localhost?

[Anonymous Coward]

I got nothing ... must be slashdotted ... anyone have a mirror?

Re:localhost?

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's a mirror: http://127.0.0.1/

http://com/

[Anonymous Coward]

Time to go register http://com/! Now half of the sites on the internet are subdomains of mine!

If you're nice to me, I might let you have http://net/.

On a side note (I assume the above is disallowed), would com.com, net.com, etc be the only places exempt from the sniping everyone's pointing out?

That would be a trademark violation

[Anonymous Coward]

Except that would be a trademark violation.

That argument only works if its $1000 to register it, if the market opened up and the ICANN obstruction was removed, why would it cost more to register flights.schipol.com instead of flights.schipol?

Re:That would be a trademark violation

[Tony Hoyle]

Trademarks in which country? For what use? - remember even within countries trademarks are limited to specific fields of endevour.

If some chinese company wanted to register the microsoft TLD you really think the chinese gov. give a shit about the US trademark registries?

If a scottish shoemaker wants to call themselves McDonalds they can. They can also register mcdonalds as their domain name without breaking trademark... OK ICANN will steal the domain off them and give to the other one as they can pay more bribe money to the ICANN committee, but legally there's no problem.

Good idea with a problem

[max born]

I've often heard the argument that DNS should lose its heirarchy and just be a one-to-one mapping. Like telephone numbers to names.

However, the good thing about the hierarchy is you only have to register one domain, then you can have as many sub domains as you want without going through your registrar.

With this new system you'd have to register each of your domains seperately, right?

Re:Good idea with a problem

[petermgreen]

erm phone numbers most certainly are heirarcial!

at the top level you have a country code.
then some kind of area code.
then some kind of exchange code (and companies can buy whole exchange codes if they have lots of phones)
and finally a number for the individual phone.

however unlike domain names phone numbers have STRICT length rules (generally numbers are fixed length within a country and theres iirc a standard maximum for the full international number) so if you wan't more lines you have to buy more/bigger blocks.

Re:Good idea with a problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Telephone numbers do have a heirarchy. That guy who owns "1" is making a killing.

worst...

[Wedge1212]

worst idea evar!

Two reasons.

[khasim]

#1. Scalability. Otherwise, all of your addresses have to be searched. With .com/.org/.net, at least they can be somewhat sub-divided.

#2. Non-exclusivity. If someone in England registers a domain name for their business which only operates in England, why shouldn't someone in the US also be able to register that name under the .us TLD? .com and such were fine when the Internet was new and small and less important. But they don't scale very well. Removing them completely would reduce the scalability even more.

Don't Click!

[Anonymous Coward]

That bastard posted a goatse link. Whatever you do, don't click on it.

Re:Don't Click!

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting sex preferences you've got there. :-p

Re:Don't Click!

[JonnyCalcutta]

Its a pity everyone seems to have missed the joke - sorry I don't have mod points.

Re:Don't Click!

[TubeSteak]

I clicked it and got CowboyNeal.
WTF?

UN, ICANN etc.

[Psionicist]

And would anybody really want to place control of entire TLDs in the hands of one private company?

So when the UN wants some control over com, net and org because it's in the hands of one private company, US slashdotters complain because the Internet is "theirs".

Now suddenly when a non-US company offer a service, it's suddently bad for the Internet to give a single private company the control.

Right.

Re:UN, ICANN etc.

[Anonymous Coward]

Dear Slashdot user, you have been downmodded as "flamebait" for expressing an anti-american point of view. In the future, please ensure you only express your opinion if it is pro-America.

What's your point

[NigelJohnstone]

Under the current system you can register my.com my.us
Under a free root system you can register all of the above and many million more. So I don't see your point, since a free root offers all of the same separation possibilities and a lot more besides.

Look at the article, it mentions Schiphol has registered the Schiphol domain, at the moment they would have to buy Schiphol.com Schiphol.net Schiphol.org Schiphol.nl Schiphol.es Schiphol.fr and a few thousand others with a few thousand agencies worldwide just to get the nearest they can to top level status.

Under an unrestricted rootless system they can register .Schiphol which given that they are an airport with World coverage is more appropriate! Why should you have .travel for all things related to travel, but not .Schiphol for all things related to Schiphol?

Re:What's your point

[rd4tech]

you missed my point? :)

simple example for you: local stores registering global domain names.

Re:The introduction calls for it [OT]

[spuzzzzzzz]

I think it disappeared when /. switched to CSS.

Thats not what they're offering

[NigelJohnstone]

"committee decide on ALL domain names?"

You mean ICANN? This company isn't deciding on all domain names, its just offering them for sale.

Abandonment of domains

[NoneExpected]

Does anybody have any stats or links on abandonment of domains?
I googled it, but for something the article stated was at a record high, I can't find a link on it.

I for one, am sick and tired of finding all the domains I want being squatted and filled with "Important Links". And "This domain for sale", starting bid, $5,000.00 USD, right! Let me get my checkbook.

I would not mind seeing a "use it or lose" reg.

How ironic...

[marcosdumay]

And when somebody tries to change the status quo on the DNS, people start complaining: "It isn't broke, don't fix it!"

And no, this is not the first time someone abuses the DNS system, people should know better.

Reality check

[rpetre]

You do, of course, realise that those "no-dot" TLDs will be visible only by the clients of the ISPs that use the alternate DNS root. The ICANN does not include these domains into the root zone and all DNS servers use by default ICANN's root servers ( [A-M].root-servers.net )

I guess there are still a large number of companies willing to throw money into this, so the theory of stupidity-based business models being a guaranteed success is once again confirmed.

Re:Reality check

[ccandreva]

Plenty of people who either forget or don't know what happened to people who bought new.net domains in TLDs that were later introduced by ICANN.

They were screwed.

Pure and simple, it's a big scam.

Re: bs

[FlippyTheSkillsaw]

DNS is pretty much a single point of failure for the current (ignorant) user base. Many don't know, or care, what an IP is.

Yet, I can't remember the last report of root level servers being abused.

On the other hand, charging huge amounts of money to get a domain name means you are taking the internet away from the people and giving it to the corporation.

Expect corporate glee, since that will be 1% of the annual operating costs. Joe Linux with his DSL and web server aren't going to fork over 1000% annual costs just to have the domain name, though.

Speaking of New.net...

[Anonymous Coward]

Why does New.net even bother? So, you can get .xxx or .law or other fake TLDs at their site.. but if any of these TLDs become *real*, then, certainly whoever said owner is in New.net's fake world, would not retain ownership, and would therefore be screwed nicely. I can't believe New.net is still around.

Yes but no

[SamSim]

I concur with many people that this has some pretty obvious drawbacks. But on the other hand, I (and, I believe, a lot of other /.ers) are equally against the new TLDs like .biz and .info and .name and all that other rubbish, because they merely serve to provide still more domain names that small companies need to buy in advance just to be safe when they get the .com to use. There are too many TLDs already.

I would be in favour of freezing the number of TLDs as it currently is and reducing that number wherever possible (although of course a reduction of any kind is unlikely to ever happen). If a TLD-less situation like the one presented here could be used worldwide with all .coms, .nets etc. instantly retired, and no harm done to anybody: sure, I say go for it. As it currently stands, however, this is just making the problem worse - because it's another domain name you gotta buy.

Phew

[GeeksHaveFeelings]

Phew. I thought the title meant Slashdot was going to take "dot" out. And I was going to "welcome" Slash: News for Nerds Stuff that matters, for one.

No real need...and it would confuse...

[TechnoGuyRob]

As was pointed out before, if someone in a conversation told you about, say, "sciam", then they'd need to say either "the website sciam", "sciam--the website that is", "sciam as a URL", or something else. If they said "sciam.com" (Scientific American's website) everything would be clear. In the long run, it would only make things more confusing and difficult. Also, if you type in a string in Firefox's address bar and hit Ctrl+enter, it takes you to that string with .com attached. If you press Shift+enter it appends .net, and if you press Ctrl+Shift+enter it adds .org. So really, there's no need for something that, while seemingly makes things simpler, in the end complicates everything.

Re:No real need...and it would confuse...

[Anonymous Coward]

The average user wouldn't know about those key combos to append .com .net and .org. I didn't even know about them.

It becomes a TLD unto itself

[dacarr]

The problem is what I stated in the Subject line - when you remove the top level domain, the domain in this case becomes the top level domain itself. So what they're doing, for all intents, is running an alternate root and charging obscene amounts of money for the privilege of registering on it.

No thank you.

only troubles, no gains

[Anonymous Coward]

${Subject}, then why bother?

Not worth it

[Mr. Freeman]

Is it really worth paying that much money so that customers don't have to type in 4 extra characters?
You'd also have a huge problm with people "impersonating" other sites. And it would be perfectly legal, because anyone can register any non-registerd domain name.

I can't imagine that too many small bussinesses are very fond of this idea.

com?

[FluffyWithTeeth]

What happens if I register com? http://google.com/ would then root to a third level domain on my server...

Wait, I could make money off that! ^W^W^W^W think that could actually be a really useful idea in today's internet centered world!

Re:com?

[Yaotzin]

Write "com" in your address bar and see what you get.

com

Re:com?

[Tony Hoyle]

Wierd... yahoo are .com.org?

Either that or FF did the google lookup *first* which is severely broken behaviour IMO.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Why not a Peer to Peer DNS?

[shapr]

I want a peer to peer DNS service that works like ant trails. You form connections to your peers, and names migrate according to requests.
For example, my peers would people from #haskell, people I know in person, my family, anyone I interact with.
When I look up the name 'slashdot' the request is sent to all (some?) of my peers. I'd get the number one result automaticaly (feeling lucky?) but be able to look at other results. Then I'd choose my definition of slashdot, and that would go into my local cache.
When a name is requested, its time-to-live is reset. If a name isn't requested for a long time, it expires. Locally created definitions would expire but still be saved, as the user may not agree with the community and wish to lock a definition.
New terms are created locally, then during a text chat someone else can look up that term in the originator's cache to see where it leads. Then when they discuss the same thing with their friends, their friends get it from their cache.
Advantages:

• Pull only system, so no spamming.
• expiry system, so definitions of a term can evolve.
• Creation of a name is essentially zero cost
• lookup is totally distributed.

Disadvantages:

• ICANN will hate me.
• How to deal with ambiguity? LaTeX and latex are two different things.

Re:Why not a Peer to Peer DNS?

[Anonymous Coward]

If one of your friends became infected with malware, your whole community would become cheap0 v1agra buy3rs.

Re:Why not a Peer to Peer DNS?

[Tony Hoyle]

I've often thought of something like that... no idea how to do it though (even most p2p systems have a failure point eg. trackers, catalogue servers, etc.). You'd ideally want something that would be able to be completely decentralised.

It wouldn't be any use as a commercial system - if a peer decided to start advertising microsoft.com as his there's nothing to stop him.. so the standard roots would still be needed for authoritative stuff.

Re:Why not a Peer to Peer DNS?

[ZachPruckowski]

Get bookmarks, name them all whatever you want. Then you just open the bookmarks window, and start searching. If you use hotkeys, it's still pretty quick. Then you identify websites however you want to identify them. Nothing complex about it. And I assume your friends can just email you any bookmarks they feel like.

and like new.net

[petermgreen]

a few idiots will buy names in it for brand protection or because they are gullible but i doubt many will seriously use it.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

I've beat everyone to it....

[Anonymous Coward]

I've got "m"!

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

It's stupid.

[BubbaFett]

Two things: I use fake TLDs for private (192.168) networks. They resolve for me and nobody else. I don't want to have to keep changing it every time somebody registers my fake TLD. Secondly, single names are currently reserved for hostnames. When I type in "ssh anduril" I know it's going to hostname anduril and not domain name anduril.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Chocolates.com

[NigelJohnstone]

"local stores registering global domain names."

As opposed to little Micks chocolate store registering chocolates.com? How is it different?

Why should Microsoft not be able to register .microsoft for all thing Microsoft? If any small store does it, MS can sue for trademark infringement. Why should DNS be diferent?

Re:Chocolates.com

[Lehk228]

because it would break DNS horribly. it requires a single group of centalized servers be looked at to resolve any domain name rather than just to resolve a new TLD. the entore point of the current sytem of URL's with a tld is to avoid this kind of crap.

GOOD PRICE

[ImaNihilist]

All domains should be $1,000. That would clean up the internet so fast. You might actaully be able to get a .com domain. Not like now where every 3,4,5, and 6 letter word is taken. 90% which are just squatted by CRAP. GOD DAMNIT.

Also, if you remember when the internet started out there was a single company that owned TLDs: Network Solutions.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Apparently...

[Anonymous Coward]

...Yahoo! own's "com" since when I type in just "com" into the URL, that's what it brings up.

Here's what I've gotten:

com: Yahoo.
org: World Health Organization
net: Microsoft
us: The United States Senate
gov: US Government's Official Web Portal

(Note: before you kill me... yes, I know what's actually going on...)

Won't this create new *TLDs*?

[Pests]

If I can go off and register http://example/ wont I also be able to set up subdomains?

http://forums.mysite/
http://chat.mysite/

and so on? Isnt this just the same as giving people the right to register their own TLDs?

Re:Won't this create new *TLDs*?

[pe1chl]

It is. Only problem is that they are not registered in the official root servers, so nobody will see them.

Registering in the top level should have been allowed long ago, at the day it became apparent that the world does not lend itself to structuring in .com .net .org and countrycodes.

Now it is of course too late. All multinational companies already have registered under all country code TLDs, or are fighting in court to get "their" names registered.

Not all tree are Bonsai Trees

[NigelJohnstone]

"and give a clear defintion of who is responsible for which subset of the tree."

You can have that with an unrestricted root, all you've got there is a Bonsai tree, where every multinational has to contort into millions of little sony.com, sony.fr, sony.net etc. domains. Restricting the number of top level domains simply makes for fewer branches, it doesn't remove the tree.

For example, a company might register .sex and resell domains on that, a competitor may register .xxx and resell domains on that one, yet another may register .sexy and so on. Why should you restrict what top level domains there are? Why force the tree to be a Bonsai?

"Imagine that all your internal hosts have the prefix "internal" and another site pops up called "internal", "

Imagine your internal network is called "travel" and ICANN creates a domain .travel....

Re: bs

[Slashcrap]

Yet, I can't remember the last report of root level servers being abused.

How about last year (or thereabouts) when nine of them were taken down by a DDOS attack?

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Won't work

[Lillesvin]

I'll register the domain 'com'. Then I can start shelling out subdomains like 'microsoft.com', 'ibm.com', 'apple.com'... I think I'll take 'gov', 'net', 'biz' and 'info' too...

Who cares about domain names

[Peaker]

Who ever said that you had to type in a "domain name" anyhow?

The solution is to type something shorter than the domain name, not to make domain names shorter.

And guess what, the solution already works: When I type "slashdot" in my browser I already get to slashdot.

Re:Who cares about domain names

[MikeBabcock]

Google searching and other things aside, Firefox allows for named shortcuts in your bookmarks as well which I use heavily.

Typing in "stocks" brings me to my bank stock investments page, "slash" brings me to slashdot, "news" gives me news.google.ca, etc.

When I bookmark a site I actually plan to use regularly, I add a keyword to the bookmark so I can just type the name of the bookmark and go to that site faster.

Why??

[rolfc]

When I write slashdot in my firefox, it already works!!!
Actually, I think, firefox try .com, .net and .org if you do not write tld. So all you need to do is to get a .com domain and it works.

Re:Why??

[toddestan]

When I write slashdot in my firefox, it already works!!!
Actually, I think, firefox try .com, .net and .org if you do not write tld. So all you need to do is to get a .com domain and it works.

Actually, Firefox does a Google search and takes the "I'm Feeling Lucky" link. Most of the time it sends you to the most obvious site if you type something like slashdot, microsoft, or ebay in. But if you want to have some fun try typing in things like "failure".

I'm buying "COM" and "ORG"!!!

[SUB7IME]

This is a great idea. For instance, I'm going to buy the "com" top level domain and sell subdomains off of my main account. For example, I'll sell you the "microsoft.com" subdomain for $10,000,000. ORG is less valuable, so I'll sell you Slashdot.org for $1.50.

Re:I'm buying "COM" and "ORG"!!!

[tomjen]

That is stupid. What you should do is set up a server with a lot of commercials (popup, popunder, popsideways, flash, addware) and a ton of bandwith.

Then whenever a person types in .org or .com he will get redirected to your site. The money you are going to earn on ads is going to blow your mind.

this is not the right place

[FlippyTheSkillsaw]

DNS is a heirarchical system that has been in use for a long time. It has a clear purpose and that purpose will still be around for years to come. The average user of the internet, though, is not part of that purpose. The average user wants to type in a company name and go to the appropriate website. They don't care if it's a .com or a .gov or anything. Denying this is resisting the change that will inevitably happen.

This is the wrong way to go about it, though. Don't destroy the system we are using. It's not even a viable long-term solution. You can't put spaces in a domain name. You can't put "Circuit City" in as a TLD, so you'll end up with a fusion where whatever you type in will be stripped of non-DNSable letters. Bleh. What we want is to type in "Circuit City" in the appropriate box and below it you will see "circuitcity.com" appear. If you go directly to "circuitcity.com" it will then pop "Circuit City" in the box above it. That's a double effort. Simplicity and security. You don't have to worry that you're at the wrong site.

How will you do this? Not by giving out TLDs. You'll do this with a separate process that is similar to DNS, but is specifically for looking up services by a title. The reference will be cryptographically signed going both directions, so you can be sure that an "authority" gave you the data and you can be reasonably sure that the title is actually associated with the address, whether that is an email address or a web site.

The problem then becomes disambiguation. How many companies are named Enigma? What do you put if you're looking for Apple Supermarket? If that's the case, then why should any of the Apples get dibs on just the brand name?

This should really be a governmental effort. Typing DMV or Oregon Department of Motor Vehicles into the location bar should take you to the appropriate place. I'm not talking about just the US, either.

In short, passing out TLDs is a bad idea for a lot of reasons:
-caters to big business at the expense of the little guys (cost creates barrier to entry)
-conflict resolution will be tough--two companies want .enigma do they just up the price and let the richest win it?
-causes problems with current usage of DNS (.internal and .localdomain)
-still doesn't provide a keyword system that people want
-private control is a bad thing (imagine if an anti-competitive entity were to buy it)

Re: bs

[poopdeville]

http://www.bind9.net/dnshealth/ -- 98% of all queries to the root name servers are bunk.

sure dots are useful, but unnecessary

[fanblade]

Don't forget the days when people didn't know that "dot com" meant a webpage. In the 90's, advertisements were much more detailed about what an address meant. As years went by, the address got shortened more and more:

0. AOL keyword "whatever"
1. Open your web browser and enter "http://www.whatever.com"
2. "http://www.whatever.com"
3. "www.whatever.com"
4. "whatever.com"

My point being, with no TLD extension, people would just back up a step and say:

5. "www.whatever"

Re:sure dots are useful, but unnecessary

[Anonymous Coward]

My point being, with no TLD extension, people would just back up a step and say:
5. "www.whatever"

That couldn't work. It'd be the end of the web. So someone can register a dotless name "whatever" and still add subdomains to it? At best, these dotless domains would be aliases to real domains (which are aliases to IP's) else the DNS would be a nightmare.

Take a simple example.. I register "com". Do all DNS servers then point requests for things like "microsoft.com" and "www.microsoft.com" to my "com"?? YIKES!

the idea is okay, but it cannot be easily incoporated into the existing system - it is a new system all on its own. I can think of a lot of ways this would be a disaster.

and what exactly is this trying to fix? Seems like a money grab that is bound to create a lot of problems that otherwise wouldn't have existed. I don't like it.

Re:sure dots are useful, but unnecessary

[Lehk228]

the idea is not ok, it requires every DNS server to have access to a table of every .* that is registered. the current system is stressed enough with each TLD resolving differnt and only needing a small central repository of TLD's

Re:sure dots are useful, but unnecessary

[Fnkmaster]

Okay, but technical issues and filthy, dirty aesthetics of a borked namespace aside (and those two will stop this dead in the water), saying "www." in front of a web address is 4 syllables, vs. ".com" afterwards, which is two. Why the hell would anybody think that is an improvement? Sorry, this is one of the dumbest ideas I've ever heard.

Re:sure dots are useful, but unnecessary

[TubeSteak]

5. "www.whatever"

I think we've all run into websites that don't work unless you specifically type in either "www.whatever.com" or just "whatever.com"

Anyone want to explain the technical details?

Re:sure dots are useful, but unnecessary

[Have Blue]

If we're talking about nontechnical users, it's more like 10 syllables (double-you double-you double-you dot).

It'd suck...

[Auraiken]

...surfing to something in another solar system. What if the server didn't exist by the time the packet got there? Wow, and imagine having to refresh the page. o_o;

Re:It'd suck...

[BorgCopyeditor]

Refreshing the whole page would take a long time. That's why you use AJAX with SSH wormhole tunneling for distances in the parsec range.

Remember when

[ScottCooperDotNet]

Remember when radio ads directed you to visit ach tee tee pee colon slash slash double-u double-u double-u dot $NAME dot com? People will learn this new method, eventually.

Thats shortsighted

[Anonymous Coward]

Will your firewall router always be called wiggum? Do you never plan to leave university. Things change.

Shotgun on "Localhost"!

[neoform]

I hereby put in my bid on the name "localhost".. (i'm so gonna put a nice tubgirl pict on that one)

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Agreed!!! -- sort of

[eth00]

While you bring up an important point there is also another point - that of DNS. If you have a server called "internal" that you can acces anywhere on your network by using that name you have a DNS server running someplace (or a hosts file) on the machines in question. You are going to be able to override the rest of the internet if you do this BUT now these websites will be inaccessible from your own private network since they direct to someplace else.

So though you are right this will cause problems it will be more from trying to reach the websites, not with trying to reach an internal site. So while I am against this because it is going to cause a lot of problems the breaking on intranets is not as big of a deal.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re: bs

[FlippyTheSkillsaw]

Fair enough. I just read about it and they predicted that if the attack would have gone on a while longer, regular DNS traffic would have choked out the remaining 4 servers.

I originally meant 'abuse' in the sense of DNS records being manipulated on a large scale as would be the case if someone managed to get access to the root server data or even manipulate the packets very close to the source.

DoS is another consideration, though and it only further shows my point. It does cost you money to keep service up when the servers are going to be attacked. Root DNS servers will be attacked. It's not just having enough computing resources, but you need to pay people who can respond in a situation like this. The next DDoS attack on root servers will succeed, because the number of drones out there is higher than ever.

If they expect to compete and give out TLDs, then they are going to have to have a setup that can handle a large-scale attack.

I'm not excusing the price by any means. The price has ramifications in terms of the type of customer that will have TLDs. I am just saying that if you have even 10,000 customers around the world in the first year (which seems reasonable) then they will still probably take a large loss.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Ultimate

[fulldecent]

Ultimate domain squatting opportunity.

I'm going to register .con .comn .nret .nety .net .orgt ...
and recieve 10% of the traffic on the internet.

Will never happen.

What Problem Does This Solve?

[rewinn]

Really. What Problem Does This Solve?

The article gushes enthusiastic "Companies can then invent additional Web site addresses in front of their top-level domain (TLD) name, such as flights.schiphol or parking.schiphol but, frankly, companies can already provide webaddresses such as flights.schiphol.com and parking.schiphol.com.

The only benefit is saving the website's customers the effort of typing in ".com" but what is this worth? A great many customers get to a particular site via search engine, link, or favorite anyway ... so there's no savings there.

Furthermore, the ".com" typology distinguishes a company's web presence from its other emanations, such as product or physical existence. For example, we understand without having to think about it the difference between Seattle Mariners and seattlemariners.com (or R.E.Winn and rewinn.com. That's not an insignificant benefit.

But I'm willing to be educated. What is the problem that the proposal would solve?

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Why Not Just...

[Greyfox]

Make creative use of the search path that's already available as part of the whole DNS scheme. That'd be particularly helpful if companies could be persuaded to use the regional DNS registrars rather than .com. That way if I'm in co.us, I can set my search path to that and only have to type in the name for Colorado sites.

Quite frankly Google does a better job of finding stuff than DNS ever will no matter how many kludgy changes they try to shoehorn into the system. Honestly IMHO there's not a lot of reason to even HAVE DNS anymore. Just shut down all the servers, have Google crawl IP addresses instead of names and redirect all your searches through there. And if you ever want to just look at random pages, generate a random unsigned long and drop it in your URL just to see where it takes you (You can do that today, too.)

Re:Why Not Just...

[pe1chl]

Of course that would not work, because the Web in general is only accessible by name, not by IP address.

Think about virtual hosting.

It doesn't preclude that

[NigelJohnstone]

"ebay.ca explicitly reads eBay Canada"

Allowing other top level domains doesn't preclude ebay also owning ebay.ca.

"What about regional small businesses? Are they to be left out of this? "
Why don't they buy smallbusinss.ca just like today? It doesn't go away just because more top levels are allowed. If .CA is genuinely equated as Canada by people then they will go the .ca. If not, then why force them under that domain?

"Try not to think about a DNS name as a name, but rather an address. "
Sony is where on the planet? Tofu is where on the planet, not everything is related to geography, those limited set of rigit domains don't describe even the geography of the world.

"They are not names or identities, no matter how much you may want them to be."

So google.travel is not google? Clearly they are identities, Google.com is not a different identity to Google.biz since Google has a right under trademark law to everything on the Google name regardless of the extension.

Easy to make that scalable

[NigelJohnstone]

"because it would break DNS horribly. it requires a single group of centalized servers be looked at to resolve any domain name rather than just to resolve a new TLD."

So you expand the cluster of root servers to fit demand, you don't query the root servers now, you query only a mirror. Think about it for a second, you type in "getfirefox" now, your browser tries the DNS, finds it doesn't exist, tries www. finds it doesn't exist, tries ****.com finds it doesn't exist, then queries Google. Google handles it as minor traffic, so the DNS would do likewise.

Re:Easy to make that scalable

[Lehk228]

the point is that "just expand the clusters of DNS servers" is expensive and a needless waste of resources.

Mozilla

[ThrashMasterK]

leave the urls with no extension to the browser. this is bs for somebody to take something that is already thought out and fmuck it up. type slashdot into mozilla with no extension and you get slashdot. if and only when you get (in)famous should you get the recognition you deserve.

Works in IE, too.

[SeaFox]

sure, but it's not standard by any means.

Mozilla: http://www.firefox.com/
Internet Explorer: http:///?%20firefox (with a The page cannot be displayed error)

It works in IE, too. Only the keyword is not separate from the title of Favorites entry. So if I bring up the firefox page and then add it to my favorites (shortening the page name down to just "Firefox") I can now type "firefox" in the address bar and it will work. Another limitation of the IE version is it only works on favorites in the root level of the Favorites menu. Organize your favorites into subfolders, and it stops working.

Re:Works in IE, too.

[SeaFox]

The Firefox method is even less standardized (if you haven't actually defined the keyword with a bookmark like the way I explained it in IE, as all it does is run an "I'm feeling lucky" search on Google. So if a type in "miserable failure" it's going to go to GW Bush's biography since the Google result has been googlebombed.

RealNames was doing well

[nickjohnson]

From the founder's weblog, it seems RealNames was doing pretty well at one point:

"We were profitable and growing fast (about 120% a quarter back in Q1 2002.

Secondly, we had an awesome business model. Resellers all over the world were selling Keywords. Most uptake was in China, Korea and Japan where we were the only way to make local languages useable as navigational addresses. We had pretty strict controls on ownership but we were able to segment nations into seperate namespaces. Today we would do local keywords too.

Thirdly, we were doing 1 billion resolutions a quarter in Q1 2002. That was page views that MSN lost to us because we were able to provide direct navigation to a web page from a keyword. Microsoft decided to close us down in order to regain those page views. Search this blog for the story. There is a patent. You (Yahoo) own it through your acquisition of 3721."

http://www.teare.com/index.php/pages/196

There is some merit to the concept -- the web browser would theoretically work better if it had one input box instead of two (the address bar and the search bar)

But it's hard to envision ICANN letting loose of TLD's that freely. The price they want for a domain is rediculous...

can I buy localhost? please? please?

[speculatrix]

I want to buy .localhost. and CNAME it to goatsex or other famous nasty site.

that would finally encourge all the idiot windows lusers which don't know how to set up DNS properly!

Re:Agreed!!! -- sort of

[Bitsy Boffin]

No they wont. Provided it's setup correctly your hosts file or own DNS will return the result you want, it won't lookup the "real" one because it's already got an authoritative answer.

Separate types of TLDs

[Propaganda13]

TLDs are based on location or category. Category TLDs are mostly useless (.travel,.aero,etc) except for .gov and maybe .xxx. I'm still not sure if I see the usefulness of .edu and .mil(wouldn't the be a sub-domain of the .gov?) Com just means you have a website these days. Location TLDs have different issues. If a local canadian company Website has to buy Website.ca for there business and then buy website.com in case they go global. Plus any other TLDs that you can think of. What good did the TLDs do? What about using canada.website.com? The other problem comes from multiple companies in diffent countries with the same trademarked name. Laotian Website bought website.la and then saw .com was taken, so they have make a land grab for other TLDs. Canadian Website sees this and does the same. When I'm in Thailand and go to website.th, which company do I get?

Scam

[Tetard]

Yet another scam. This is nothing new. It just involves getting slimeball ISPs trying to make an extra buck to redirect DNS queries to some UnifiedRoot "root" servers. It's bogus, and it's dangerous. Support nightmare as well.

Bridges for sale

[hummassa]

Most (98%+) of DNS traffic is handled out of the root domain servers. Many ISPs I know of (including the two I worked at) blocked/transparently-redirected outgoing port-53 packages.

Re:Bridges for sale

[cecil_turtle]

Do you have any references to back that up? It seems way off to me. I think you're confusing that with the number of requests that the root servers see that are unnecessary (redundant / could be cached by ISP's) which I believe is 98% -- but that's not 98% of all DNS traffic, not even close.

Check out this, this, this and this; over half of the big ISP's have a cached response for the most popular sites on the net.

Umm...

[Anonymous Coward]

What if I register the domain "org" and create a subdomain on my site called "slashdot"?

I guess they would have to block registrations of domains with the same name as TLDs. Still seems a stupid, pointless idea though.

Or you could save the grand

[Allnighterking]

and just use firefox. With the search set into the bar if I type in Slashdot I end up at slashdot.org. If I type in IBM I end up at IBM. .... dang this sounds like Bezos invented it.

But it already does that

[Fredden]

Try it, open a new tab and type slashdot into the location bar and up and comes this site.

Sys Req: Firefox (but there're probably more out there that do the same)

MSN...

[FuzzyDaddy]

I've always thought Microsoft came up with "MSN" for their services in the hope of someday having a top level domain of their own. It would be an easy three letter one, and they've put a lot of "branding" into it.

Re:MSN...

[pe1chl]

MSN existed before Bill even cared about the Internet and its standards.

Re: bs

[zippthorne]

"DNS is pretty much a single point of failure for the current (ignorant) user base. Many don't know, or care, what an IP is."

Not only do i not care, I don't think I should care. In an ideal net, the domain name would BE the address rather than a pointer to the "real" address. It's not like there's a difference between text and numbers to computers anyway. Nor does the numerical address give away any more useful information about routing that even a poorly designed plaintext address couldn't give. This whole "lets use a fixed length address until it gets filled up and then bicker about another longer fixed length address" cycle is rediculous.

yeah but no but yeah

[swordfishBob]

I'd like to see what proportion of all domains are within .com
Given the way it's used for almost anything and everything, internationally (as it's cheaper than some .com.mycountry domains), I wouldn't be surprised if .com comprised more than 50% of all registrations. In which case, the .com servers are doing near as much work as the root servers, within an order of magnitude. If there is a good case for a hierarchical domain, then it should be strictly enforced
i.e.
to have .com.somecountry you should have a nationally recognised business registration with that name.

Countries should be forbidden from abusing their convenient names (.to comes to mind)

To have .com without any country, you should satisfy some criteria that establish you are a truly multinational commercial entity (business registrations on more than 1 continent, perhaps? not just international shipping)

If all that seems unreasonable, then I say stuff .com as it's meaningless.
Does someone out there have the numbers on the various TLDs?

Re:yeah but no but yeah

[Tony Hoyle]

They tried that with .ltd.uk.. I remember trying to register a company I was at. It was a 3 year old company, registered at companies house, etc.

The .ltd.uk registrars refused registration, because we had used a hyphen in the name and the registration at companies house had a space (you couldn't make it up really!).

To compound the issue they then offered to register us under several *unrelated company names* that they'd pulled out of their ass for a fee. I smelled scam, and backed out.

I presume they pulled that one with everyone, because I've never seen a .ltd.uk domain in actual use (not even spammers bother with it).

Shouln't this be titled...

[NoMercy]

"Dutch company called UnifiedRoot has come up with a hair-brained get rich quick scheme"... Send us $1000 and we'll stick you on our own private root name server with about 0.00001% of the coverage the official root name servers have.

*rolls eyes* Common slashdot, news for nerds please, not tripe.

3. Profit!

[BorgCopyeditor]

I imagine that http://porn/ could be worth a lot.

Unifiedroot root still uses the dot

[watomb]

Even better why not create are own company. Lets call it TombCo and lets have it be the biggest root(DNS) server of them all. Lets not only get rid of the Dot which Unifiedroot does not get rid of but we can creat other symbols that does the same thing. idea www.wa-t.com .company Unifiedroot needs the dot TombCo DNS server only .xxxx website like ICANN which Unifiedroot is part of maps?google by adding new symbols other than the dot you can create many more Domain names

I tried it...

[Ambush Commander]

Wireless Connection Status > Properties > Internet Protocol > General > DNS

I set it to one of their nameservers.

The funny thing is, their little image ( http://www.unifiedroot.com/registrars ) now shows me a "You have access to whole internet" (yeah, like I'd actually care about the 0.0 percent of the web that uses their registrar) but URLs like http://schiphol/ don't seem to work... Anyone else try?

By the way, unless you want to lock out 90% of all possible customers, you'll probably keep your old domain name running (I know Schiphol has).

The Yahoo article is very biased for the move, but the "clinched deals with most ISPs in Turkey" is quite major. This could mean a greater fragmentation of the internet... we know countries can do it, we know that China has done it.

This will only make those working on the cookie problem ( https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=25234 2 and http://secunia.com/advisories/12580/ )... now who's the top level, and at what level do we trust cookies? Choices, choices...

Any one remebers RealNames?

[kbahey]

Anyone remember them?

This seems like RealNames, all over again.

Sounds like the "star registry"

[isdnip]

Sure, this company can come up with its own naming scheme, and charge big bucks for a position in their registry. But so what? It reminds me of the "International Star Registry", or whatever it's called, that advertises all over the place as a special gift. They have their own registry, and take puny little numbered stars, and assign them names for $49. The name is local to their registry, which they dutifully mail to the Library of Congress, as if that mattered (okay, so it might give them a useless copyright). But the astronomy community doesn't give a rat's kiester about their names.

There's one born every minute.

I'll stick with my .com's and .net's....

[Guru84]

I don't like it, and I think they are just trying to figure out how to make some cash.

The way it will be

[KIDputer]

.me or .mytrademark is the way it will be in the future. The only question is how long will it take us to get there. There is a fantasy out there that root servers cannot handle it, bull****! Sure the root servers in their current configuration would have issues, because they were designed that way. These issues are making millions for morons that have connections. Ultimatly if it does not go this way (.anything), then the Internet DNS will split up into many multiple DNSs based solely on the purpose of language. After all, I wonder in how many languages .com is actually a swear word, or if .org is like an orgie. This is about tongue movements and sounds, americans think the English language and .com is it , but Americans like me say quit making people sound like they are choking and drop the dot com crapola. Lets have some fun and change .com to .cum, if you are going to sound like you are gasping for air while choking down sperm you may as well have the proper spelling.

Copy'n'Paste and email is too manual!

[shapr]

Years before the web, FTP sites often included text files with the address of other FTP sites. It was a pain to download the file, open the file, find the address, copy the address, open an ftp application, and then paste the address.
Gopher was easier, but the internet didn't explode into popularity until names included the address and the client was able to follow them directly.

In short, emailing bookmarks and copy'n'pasting bookmarks is a lot like the old FTP approach.
An automatic peer to peer DNS is more like the web.

Actually, before the DNS system you hand edited your /etc/hosts file so you'd have nicknames for the ip addresses you used most often. That wasn't much fun either.

In any case, automatic migration of relevant information during a conversation is a Good Thing, a peer to peer DNS is just the first step.

This is a really old idea.

[John Sokol]

Just before Network Solutions was going to take over the DNS system in 1995, many groups wanted to do this. Even my company at the time were talking with a very large group of ISP to break off our own private root servers, we did a small version of this.
Several serious groups did this. Yes, Technicaly they worked just fine, but almost all failed in terms of catching on and being usable.

We could create our own .com domains or override some, and block some, which some ISP's even do today. But web links wouldn't work for outsiders.

Also NSI / Internic would cut us off.

One thing done deliberatly by NSI was to stop publishing the Root DNS records, so there would be no way for alternate root servers to support the "real .com .net .org domains" They would also block our IP's so we couldn't even act as a proper DNS server, Caching the roots.

Search google groups for "aryeh friedman dns" Aryeh was my partner in these things from back them.

Quote of new post:
  ISPA (Internet Service Providers Association) announced today in
order to show our displeasure with the recent semi-offical announcement by
Network Solutions Inc. [NSI] (the Registratin Services arm of Internic) that it
will start charging for domain registration as of Sept. 18, 1995 4 PM (EST)
that ISPA has created a alternate Domain Name Service (DNS) that does not
depend on NSI's services.

                In order to do this ISPA has announced the creation of the following
top level domains, avaible only to ISPA members at no cost and at NSI fees for
non-members: .biz (replaces .com) .isp (replaces .net) .nfp (replaces .org) .ind (a top level domain catagory to indicate a domain belonging to an indivual)

Realnames and Microsoft

[robogun]

Back in the day, there was the concept of Internet keywords which is basically the same as this. RealNames tried it and repeatedly tried to sell me RealNames registration for $100 per year. Eventually they gave it to me for free. I don't remember it driving much business.

Meanwhile AOL was getting $300,000 per year for certain Keywords(sm). Then as now it was a horrible idea. Realnames
folded after losing Microsoft which had hooked Realnames into IE.

Re: bs

[gibson_81]

It's not like there's a difference between text and numbers to computers anyway.

Except that comparisons are faster for numbers than for strings ... Maybe I missed your point, but it sounds like you want the FQDN as "target" in each packet, rather than a "fixed-length address". If that's what you want, then the internet will slow down, as each router must now do a string compare instead of a simple bitmask compare before passing the packet along.

They're not selling those TLDs

[billstewart]

Fortunately, these bozos have at _least_ decided not to sell TLDs that conflict with ICANN TLDs (and while the article didn't say they won't conflict with 2-letter Country-Code TLDs or not, they may have enough clue not to do that.) But if you did try to sell those names, the trademark police would probably be all over your case, at least if you were selling them to anybody other than the current whatever.com holders or selling any names with trademark conflicts. As the other reply to the parent posting said, you'd be better off just running ad banners and offering to redirect to the real whatever.com.

Real DNS names work - example.DNS-bozos.com

[billstewart]

The DNS hierarchy has the annoying problem that There Can Be Only One root and only one of any given name, but once you've gotten beyond that annoyance, most other problems can easily be solved by hanging subdomains onto the existing net. So if Yet Another Competing Root company, like DNS-bozos.com, comes along and wants to sell their own TLDs or their own TLD-less names, they can set things up so that you can reference their customers as "example.tld1.dns-bozos.com" instead of example.TLD1, and "www.example.dns-bozos.com" instead of just www.example. And as long as their customers set up their DNS resolvers properly, it'll work for them also, and they'll just have to remember to print business cards and web pages that look for www.example.dns-bozos.com so other people can find them.

The big difference with these DNS bozos' business model is that they're getting $1000 up front per sucker instead of $6 or $25, so they might make some money before their customers start hunting them down like a mob of villagers with pitchforks when they find out that it's not really useful.

Control-Enter

[DavidD_CA]

You know, I just hit Control-Enter after typing in the first part of a domain name.

If I type microsoft into the URL field of a browser, and hit Control-Enter (instead of just Enter) the browser assumes I mean .COM and then goes there.

Of course, if you don't have a .COM domain then that does you no good. But then again, under their system this would be a problem too if the TLD/domain were already taken.

Obsolete

[x_terminat_or_3]

Typing slashdot instead of slashdot.org already takes you to the site.

Thanks to google, people only need to know a brandname or part of a name to be taken directly to the right site.

For instance, type dieselsweeties in your address bar and poof, you're there.

Security concerns w/ browsers

[Anonymous Coward]

Doing this would essentially either break the internet or cause most of the internet to have to start over. For example, Internet Explorer looks at the layout of the address to determine how trustworthy the site is. If it sees a non-numeric, non-hex, dotless host, it assumes that it's in the local intranet zone, giving that site higher priviledges than, say, www.somesite.com or 123.45.67.89.

Extensionless addresses don't only sound like a bad idea at first glance, they also prove to be very dangerous...

In Firefox,

[krunk4ever]

all you have to do is type the word followed by hitting ctrl+enter and it'll tack on the .com for you. If you hit enter without hoding down ctrl, then it returns I'm feeling luck from google.

Not really, not now

[hummassa]

(I'm out of the ISP trade for a couple of years now)
But I'll give you this: on both ISP's I worked, and in 3 others I consulted for, any packet going from a costumer to port-53 would not go anywere but our caching DNS server. There was simply no good reason not to, and we pinched some pence in bandwidth. Now, I know other ISPs do not do this -- out of ignorance (that they could save some $ doing it) but the point I was responding to in the GPP was "And everybody uses the DNS servers of their upstream ISP", to which my response would be "everybody should be, whether they want it or not -- unless they are ready to pay for it."

Re:Not really, not now

[cperciva]

any packet going from a costumer to port-53 would not go anywere but our caching DNS server. There was simply no good reason not to

Unless, say, your customers want to check that their DNS servers are working properly before delegating to them.

If I send a request to a server, I want it answered by that server -- not by a "transparent" proxy which will give a completely different response.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

The history and Fraud behind UnifiedRoot

[baptista]

The UnifiedRoot is an attempt to revive the Public-Root i.e. see www.public-root.com and www.inaic.com. I am the founder of the Public-Root and by default the business principles subscribed too by the UnifedRoot. I declare the people behind the UnifiedRoot as fraudulent and associated with criminals. A good history of the UnifiedRoot and it's association with the Public-Root is unfortunately only available in Turkish. urkey was a country which subscribed to the Public-Root system, until my investigation closed the show down. The UnifiedRoot is an attempt by the commercial end to go it alone - good details on this unfortunately are only available in Turkish. There has not been an english language publication which has exposed this. But for those of you who read Turkish the story can be found at: http://www.cihansalim.net/blog/index.htm Search for UNIDT, Public-Root, P-R, and UnifiedRoot for more details. Documents supporting my claims the companies and people behind this have committed fraud can be found at: http://www.cynikal.net/~baptista/P-R/ The Public-Root/UnifiedRoot was a great idea until a few people destryed it due to the usual human frailties - greed being the primary one. Also the UnifiedRoot claims to be open, transparent, representative and bottom up. Those are just marketing words without much substance. Joe Baptista

The thing is.....

[Anonymous Coward]

this is already happening with keywords in Firefox. I type in "slashdot" and this site comes up. "gmail" brings up my inbox, and so on.

If you want the priviledge of ...

[hummassa]

wasting valuable bandwidth sending out DNS requests for which our DNS server have perfectly good responses cached, then you'll have to pay for it. Got it?

Re:If you want the priviledge of ...

[cperciva]

DNS requests for which our DNS server have perfectly good responses cached

You're missing the point: If I'm trying to debug DNS problems, it's because your server doesn't have a perfectly good response cached.

umm

[dwightk]

when I type slashdot into my address bar, it already goes to slashdot.org

Topless Dot-Level Domain?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's what I first thought it was!
Sheesh!

What's coming over the Net next???

To confirm you're not a script,
please type the word in this image:madden

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion