Slashdot Mirror
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."
Would the single letter domains allow for international characters? This would be a cool way of reducing the contention for the English/Roman single letters. The article didn't mention this, but it seems to me like it may be possible already given the IDN standards.
Helping with organizational effectiveness is our job.
The point of domain name hierarchy, as ICANN has forgotten, was to organize information into identifyable categories to make it easier for people to find what they want.
Now, I will grant that with the advent of search engines, this is far less of an issue than it was 20 years ago.
Still, the domain name conventions are NOT about corporations "extending their branding." It's about organizing the ip space into human-readable and human-understandable segments. Single letter domain names do nothing to further that purpose.
It's a bad idea not because of any technical limitations but merely because it is bowing to corporate pressures in the governance of the last arena in the world where people have more power than the companies.
Two **Beatles-Beatles stories on the front page at once? You guys might wnat to consider hiring him, he's clearly a journalistic power house. (Assuming he isn't already on the payroll, that is)
It's official. Most of you are morons.
How have they beaten you to the punch? For example, Yahoo has already trademarked "Y.COM". Even if you get www.y.com, they simply take it away for you for free as the "trademark owner," and brand you as a criminal cyber-squatter in the process.
Oh, and btw, have a nice day!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I'm recycling a comment from another AC in another Scuttlemonkey/**Beatles-Beatles post. This guy's getting worse than Roland Picklepail: Am I the only person who has noticed the numerous stories that get posted by *--Beatles-Beatles? Am I also the only person who has noticed that the link used in is name is a constantly changing URL (depending on the story) with pointers to various scammy sites? Is it not obvious what he's doing? He's using the awesome PageRank of slashdot do promote his sites based on searches that have the word Beatles in them. It's a small price to pay for free advertising. Find a story, summarize it in 5 minutes, post to slashdot, and get a pagerank boost that advertisers would pay hundreds (or maybe thousands) for. (Text links on high-ranking sites is big business - just ask oreilly). Slashdot should at least put a ref=nofollow in the links to submitters (or better yet, only link the submitter's name to his/her user page). In closing, a quick bit of WHOIS shows that all the sites linked by **B-B are registered to Carl Fogle. Carl, cut this crap out.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_DNS_root
About says it all....
Two actually. Two heretic ideas:
(1) Reverse the DNS order (e.g. http://aol.www/)
(2) Get rid of TLDs, make everything up for grabs, and force at least two domain combinations
this makes stuff like
http://microsoft.msdn/
http://gnu.linux/
http://debian.sarge/
http://gentoo.linux/
possible. Imagine the possibilities!
"All you have to do is be fragile and grateful. So stay the underdog." Chuck Palahniuk, Choke
Blech!
.org-ness of an institution (especially in places or countries where the divisions of non-profits, government, and corporate are either non-existent or irrelevant) is to me unnecessary. The internet isn't about "defending the people" or picking winners and losers, it's about an open, largely unregulated system for connecting networks. The moment you go down the road of choosing policies and standards based on protecting or fostering one group over another, you'll never stop.
.com / .org / .net equivalents anyway. Is slashdot a .org or a .com? Just for example. Why not go to http://cocacola/ and be done with it?
Personally, I think we don't need TLD's anymore. The idea that an independent system should be vetting the
Ultimately, I think that if I could alter the domain name system, I'd burn all TLD's. Most groups register the
However, I can see the logic of reserving 2 letter codes for countries. After all, they have the guns and decide the laws. I don't know what 1 letter domains could be used for, but I'd prefer that they not be allocated yet either (for future use, perhaps). Selling 26*n (where n == number of TLDs at any moment) domain names isn't really worth the headache of changing the rules, and they could come in handy later.
Of course, then the job of the registrar becomes much more administrative. So odds of ICANN actually doing this are slim --> none.
They are concerned... because as one of the previous poster above said, there are probably about 126 domains to be available.
.com only, minus the few already registered. The ones left can easily make over $100K each... consider that usually one domain name is if I recall right $3 to the registrar. Those are the equivalent of AT LEAST 33.000 domains. EACH. Not bad! Especially if ICANN introduce a mandate that says they receive all or a part of the fee...
Now if you read the article and that most domains will go in the 6figures, and most like with the crazyness around these days, over a million $$. It is a LOT of money for Icann.
Even in the case of the
so, I would believe it is about money... Yup.
Back in the early nineties I managed domain registrations at a relatively small ISP. This was back when people filled out registration forms using a text editor and emailed them in. I'd do about 10 a day, and since they were free, I thought I'd slip another one in to see if it'd work - "z.com". I thought, "Well, they've registered x.org already, so why not?" To my surprise, I got it. I also took a stab at registering a one-letter UUCP name - "z". I got that too. So you could email me at eric@z.com or even z!z (shortest email address). Joy!
Someone had this idea that serving the com/net/org domains was going to be too large for any single nameserver to handle and that we should perhaps start hashing domains. If a resolver was going to lookup domain.com, it would look it up first at domain.d.com, and they'd distribute the letters out to multiple servers. Moore's law and load balancers proved that you could create some beefy root-server clusters, and the idea never materialized. Besides x.com, q.com, z.com, x.org were already in use (and I think one other), and I'm sure no one wanted to give them back.
When domain prospecting came along, I had many offers for real money to buy my domain. I turned down many of them, but one day someone made me a good enough offer. My elite-ness was gone, but I used the proceeds as a down-payment on my first house.
Portals were all the rage, and my buyers tried to turn z.com into one. The best part about this one-letter domain at the time was that if you simply entered the letter "z" in Mozilla or Explorer, you'd go straight to the z.com page. The project didn't seem to go anywhere, though. Those people sold it to some people from IdeaLab (founders of Goto.com). I don't think they ever thought of anything to do with it, so the domain stayed in limbo for a while. One day at the movies, I saw an ad/trailer for the new Nissan 350Z sports sedan. For more information, you had to go to "z.com". Surely, I suspect those guys at Idealab got alot more money than me, but at least the domain was being used for something useful now.
A single-letter domain without good branding and advertising isn't worth much, and perhaps the people at ICANN are seeing that they're now on the falling side of the value curve. Can anyone thing of a reason why new domains would be released, aside from money? I could only hope that ICANN, a non-profit organization, would use the proceeds to help fund IETF (ietf.org) and DNS infrastructure research, but they'll probably go to fund more "meetings" in far-off places.
-ez
But .Museum wasn't just another lame domain name - they're about the only one that actively experimented with naming structure beyond saying "We're only selling .foo domain names to genuine Foo customers." Go read about.museum/naming. They'll sell 2LDs for very specific names, like sanfrancisco-modern-art.museum, but they mainly have generic 2LDs maintained by the gTLD, and want to sell 3LDs like sfmoma.art.museum or moma.sanfrancisco.museum, so it's easy to find given types of museums.
There are technical innovations as well - if you look for a nonexistent name, like nonexistent.museum, you'll get an A record for the gTLD's web server. (It doesn't seem to be implemented consistently - there's an A record for nonexistent 2LDs, but nonexistent.art.museum doesn't get one, which is a bit strange.) This wildcarding does break a few assumptions about domain names - a common anti-spam technique is to make sure a domain name exists before accepting mail from it, to cut down on stuff like spammer@dffsdfdsafdsfdsafdsaf.com, but you forge send mail from spammer@spammer12345.museum and the spam-filter's DNS query will get a valid record for the domain. This isn't a big problem when it's only .museum and a few minor ccTLDs, but Verisign's Sitefinder scam did this for .com in ways that broke a lot of things (e.g. "telnet missspelled-example.com" is supposed to get a DNS failure, not get stuck trying to connect to the telnet port at sitefinder.verisign.com.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks