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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."
This posting brought to you by the domains "F" and "U".
John
So MX on these domains won't be very useful?
He's going to post all Beatles Beatles stories to spite us.
With only 26 available they should fetch a hefty price and be accessible to only the wealthy. Great.
Bradley Holt
how.r.u ?
.b confusing, .a?
This could
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
does this put tinyurl out of business?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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.
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
Six single-letter names already claimed at the time _ "q.com," "x.com, "z.com," "i.net," "q.net," and "x.org" _ were allowed to keep their names for the time being.
Bradley Holt
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.
I actually take the time to read a side-dispute over a submitter's reasons for submitting, then blow it off as something that doesn't really interest me.
Then suddenly it seems like he's popping up left and right. It's like something out of a low-grade horror movie. To make matters worse, someone nearby keeps blasting Beatles tunes from their cubicle - not even the good ones. I half expect an undead George Harrison to start clawing at my bedroom window tonight.
Do not confuse "Freedom of Choice" with "Free Will".
Does anyone actually respect ICANN anymore?
there's more than one way to do me.
We'll know it's really Taco in disguise once he starts posting duplicates.
The next Cmdr Taco duplicate will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
FTA:
Six single-letter names already claimed at the time _ "q.com," "x.com, "z.com," "i.net," "q.net," and "x.org" _ were allowed to keep their names for the time being.
liqbase
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.
...this does not open up top level domains, like .a or .b This is a proposal to open up something like a.com or b.com.
Yes, I realize there are a few out there, www.X.org comes to mind. Most of the single letter domains are registered to:
[whois.iana.org]
IANA Whois Service
Domain: c.com
Name: IANA_RESERVED
The article also states that IANA started reserving these in 1993, but the whois record for x.org shows it was created in 1997.
SecureThe.Net - Practical Resources for Securing Systems
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.
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."
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.
My followup:
If you have a GSM phone, dial #31# before the number and it'll show up as "private" or "protected" on the recipient's caller ID. Everyone else, use *67
"Hello, please leave a message after the tone"
BEEP
Googling for his phone number brings up a lot of information. Apparently he's in the search engine optimization business and has been spamming for a long time.
His website: hxxp://search-engines-web.com
Another website: hxxp://5url.com/
More website: hxxp://google-yahoo.com/
Old e-mail address: aa1a@yahoo.com
His Guestbook: http://server.scripthost.com/guestbook?harrison
Google Phonebook: C Aab
stwnewspress.com: Contact Name = A. Seo*
5url.subportal.com: Contact Name = A. Aab
Feel free to send him e-mail url55@hotmail.com
*A. Seo = A Search Engine Optimizer
very fucking clever
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
First dupe post fromt he future -
Of course, 1 is going to go for big bucks - "We're #1".7 also - "Lucky us".
Avis will buy #2 - "We're #2 - we try harder"
3 will be bought out as a business portal - "3's company"
4 will be some scam - "trust us - we work 4 u" - or some golf site - "fore!"
9 will be sold to some kraut anti-drug campaign - "just say 9/nein"
8 will go to weight-watchers or slimfast - "8 too much?"
5 will go to whoever looses the bid for 1 - they''ll then say "5 - we're the quintiscential site" or some other loser shit
6 will go to an online redneck pharmacy - "when you'se feeling six as a dawg, order your meds from 6.com"
0, of course, will be the big one. The BIGGEST sex portal - "come to 0.com - because you can't get any lower than us"
Remember - watch for it next year
tt
Your points all have merit, but people and companies still want something to put in their email, on business cards, and in commercials, which uniquely identifies them and is hopefully memorable and comprehensible. Saying "just type Sony into Google" doesn't really cut it for that purpose.
I believe it's still the case that domain names can't start with numbers. Single character number domain names would and likely won't be avialable for that reason.
Well, I guess the real question is: How much did 3.com pay them?
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
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.
By the time I get to the 'o' in c-o-m, my fingers are about plumbt-tuckered out!
It's true no man is an island, but if you take a bunch of dead guys and tie 'em together, they make a good raft.
Your idea is absolutely terrible from the perspective of people who run websites. What if I want to link to a particular document at a particular site? Do I like to a google search query and just hope that it's the first result?
Search engines are better than nothing, but by and large they are not great.
This defeats the entire point of hypertext, and you are taking the power away from the people and placing it squarely in the hands of the corporations (like Yahoo and Google).
I admit DNS is not that great, but it's so much better than what you're suggesting.
C17H21NO4
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
I hate to be pedantic, but 'cd' is not a command. Its a shell builtin.
It was hilarious when a coworker tried to do 'sudo cd some_directory_with_strong_permissions', and was asking me why it wasn't working. What's scarier, is that she had sudo access. What's even more scary, is that she eventually took my job after I left.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_DNS_root
About says it all....
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.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
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.
May the Maths Be with you!
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
Come, everyone wants 127.0.0.1.org
So before being pedantic, better first check you are right.
/bin/sh. Anyway, my shell, zsh, has a manpage called zshbuiltins, and cd is listed there. Its under the builtins section of the csh shell's manpage.
I'm always right and I never lie!
Note that even if sudo successfully executed the cd command (say, by executing it in a root subshell), the intended effect will not happen (because the directory change would only happen in the subshell - which immediatly terminates afterwards -, and the original shell's current directory will not be affected).
Yup. That is why I thought it was funny. 'cd' has to either be a builtin for a shell or something you do inside of another program, chdir() is the usual case. Plus bash is not the sanest of shells for interactive use (ouch, I feel the downwards moderation already). Read the INVOCATION section if you don't believe me. Its not entirely bash's fault because it has tons of legacy junk left over from
For me, a command is something which I can type in a shell. It may execute a shell builtin, a shell function, an alias, or an executable found in the path, but in any case it's a command.
Fine. TZ=zulu is a command? Type 'which TZ' if your shell has a builtin for which.
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.
Imagine having just a single character as the whole domain name though - no TLD, just a single letter!
That would open up *thousands* of new possiblilies for domain names...
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
there are many alternative dns systems but none of them get much support and any that did take a stand against icann rather than just adding thier own tlds would almost certainly lose most of thier existing users.
managing the top level of a unique nameing system is a natural monopoly.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
jleq.com, bitchezzzzzzzzzz
perhaps my counting is wrong, but I'm pretty sure it would only open up 26...
//FIXME: Bad
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