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....
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.