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."
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!
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
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.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
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!
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...