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.
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?
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...
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
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.
The fact [is] that a DNS server requires next to no bandwidth, cpu power or other facilities
.com name servers spend more than $10/year of bandwidth and CPU time answering requests for google.com.
This depends upon the amount of traffic you're handling. I suspect that the
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
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.
What happens when someone registers http://localhost/ ?
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.
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.
R oot/dmr.pdf
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/DNSMeas
"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
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Could you please stop posting horrible ideas on a website that Microsoft-executives could read?!?
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