Slashdot Mirror
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?"
The TLD is an important piece of the identifier, IMHO.
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
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
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.
Be a real patriot: Question authority. Think for yourself. Formulate your own conclusions.
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"?
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
I'm a small fry with a non-commercialized, free site and service that can't afford $1,000 + $240/yr.
.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?
Big company comes in and wants to roll right over me. It's bad enough when someone takes your domain name (but under
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?
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.
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.
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...
"And would anybody really want to place control of entire TLDs in the hands of one private company?"
.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?
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
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.
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.
do.what.promptcmds
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
do.what.promptcmds
This has already been tried http://searchenginewatch.com/sereport/article.php/ 2164841 by Realnames
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.
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.
.local, yet at the same time .local is reserved for use by mDNS.
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
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
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.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Who wants to be the first to register "com", and have the entire internet be reduced to a subnet of your domain?
That green slime had it coming.
TLDs are an appendix that needs to cut out!!
.IBM, .Mircosoft, ...
.IBM.US is already mapped to .IBM. So no trademark issues again.
I believe each company should own their own TLDs...
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
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.
What happens when someone registers http://localhost/ ?
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.
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...
That bastard posted a goatse link. Whatever you do, don't click on it.
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.
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.
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?
"and give a clear defintion of who is responsible for which subset of the tree."
.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?
.travel....
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
"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
Comment removed based on user account deletion
...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;
Could you please stop posting horrible ideas on a website that Microsoft-executives could read?!?
Free beer is never free as in speech. Free speech is always free as in beer.
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!
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.
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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.
It's not like there's a difference between text and numbers to computers anyway.
... 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.
Except that comparisons are faster for numbers than for strings