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?"
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?
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
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 happens when someone registers http://localhost/ ?
That bastard posted a goatse link. Whatever you do, don't click on it.
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