ICANN Considers Single Letter Domains

* * Beatles-Beatles writes "...as the Internet's key oversight agency considers lifting restrictions on the simplest of names. In response to requests by companies seeking to extend their brands, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers will chart a course for single-letter Web addresses as early as this weekend, when the ICANN board meets in Vancouver, British Columbia. Those names could start to appear next year."

Comments

Only 26

[mysqlrocks]

With only 26 available they should fetch a hefty price and be accessible to only the wealthy. Great.

Re:Only 26

[keithmoore]

So let's see...ICANN is devoting valuable energy to deciding whether it should free up a tiny number of new domains. The domains will inevitably cost a lot of money. The only question is who gets it. If they released the domains under the normal first-come first-first serve policy they would be snapped up in microseconds by speculators and auctioned off, and the speculators would get the money. OTOH if ICANN tries to make the money itself, or split it with registries, then they subject themselves to charges of inappropriately lining their pockets and favoring wealthy commercial interests.

This will not do a thing for the net as a whole and will only make more trouble for ICANN.

I just don't see why single letter domain names ar

[putko]

I don't get why single letter domain names are so wonderful.

Nor do I see why they had to get held back (mostly -- just check the list) until now.

Does anybody really want the letter 'j'? What does that mean? Is it really worth big bucks?

I would guess that at some point you won't have domains, but some sort of searching facility -- e.g. a bunch of tags. At that point, the name won't really matter, and you probably won't want to remember most of them.

E.g. your microwave will have the IP: 123.223.3.123.43....
But you'll look it up on your keychain device, or do a search for "Me" "microwave" to get the magic number.

And your living rooms light switches address will be ...
and so on -- everything will have an IP, but you won't be able to name all that stuff anyway.

from the people that brought you ".museum"

[rebug]

Does anyone actually respect ICANN anymore?

Re:from the people that brought you ".museum"

[m50d]

And you wonder why people think the US shouldn't be in control of DNS.

Finally, we can get a .m TLD

[spyrral]

When they started pushing .mobi as the mobile TLD, I thought they were joking. Type MORE letters on my phone? A .m TLD (and really, any of the other single letter TLDs) is a much better choice.

Re:A new record?

[Dachannien]

(Assuming he isn't already on the payroll, that is)

I think you mean, assuming Slashdot isn't already on his payroll.

Re:Heh... **Beatles!!!

[Lord_Dweomer]

You know, before you go ahead and attack the guy, is whats happening with his link scam really more important than the admittedly interesting stories he has on occasion posted?

I mean, this isn't like Roland who linked to the story on his ad supported blog rather than directly to the article. At least this guy has the common curtesy link directly.

And people have said that he changes his homepage a lot, I've just seen the George Harrison one, can someone please post some evidence to the contrary?

I mean, I love a good old-fashioned pitchfork and torch rally on Slashdot as good as the next guy, but I'm wondering if this guy is the right target for it.

Is He Serious?

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

OK, I'm not really sure whether you're being sarcastic or just doing a Dvorak on the whole current DNS debate.

You're suggesting we all dump DNS and just use search engines for everything. Let me ask you this. When everyone has done this, How the hell will search engines work?!

Consider Google pagerank. It searches you page, finds links to other pages.... but wait! These links are now not direct links. They are search engine terms which may or may not return the desired site, and by clicking on the link, you change its value on the search engines rank.

You'd turn the whole internet in some kind of quantum mechanical system where you're never quite sure where a link points to until you click on it, and once you've done so you've changed the state of the link. I'm sure we'll all get around just fine.

Not to mention the increased bandwidth and overhead. The net would quickly become primarily a system of passing around search engine queries rather than actual end user data.

Your idea sucks. Turn back on your DNS and svae the world some extra bandwidth.

Re:BURN ALL TLD's

[gfreeman]

Why not go to http://cocacola/ and be done with it?

Because it would be confusing if you wanted to tell someone to go to that site, e.g.

You: "Go to aitch tee tee pee colon slash slash cocacola"
Them: "Sorry, I fell asleep halfway through that. Hmm?"

as opposed to current usage,

You: "Go to cocacola dot com"

It's the "dot com" bit that tells everyone that you are talking about a website, because no-one I know uses the redundant "aitch tee tee pee colon slash slash" bit in normal chat. Of course you could say "visit our website, it's cocacola" but you'd have to do that everytime you refer to the cocacola website rather than the soft drink. Imagine business meetings in the soft drink industry.

Q: "Have you seen cocacola recently?"
A: "What, the website or the company?"

Something needs to distinguish the brand from the domain, because until now, the context has been quite clear whether you are referring to a name, a brand, a site, or the product. Drop the "dot com" and it starts to get confusing.