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The Beginnings of a TLD Free-For-All?
Mordok-DestroyerOfWo writes "According to the BBC, ICANN is considering opening up the wholesale creation of TLDs by private industry. While I'm sure this is done for the convenience of the companies and has nothing to do with the several thousand dollars they will be charging for each registration, I was curious what the tech community at large thought about this idea. It seems to me that this will simply open the doors for a never-ending stream of TLD squatters."
Creation of new domains is like extortion. For example, Disney will have to pay for disney.fun, disney.kids, disney.parks, disney.film, etc. just to make sure that those don't turn into porn sites or worse.
http://yetanotherpoliticalrant.blogspot.com
It's OK if the TLDs are brands (not generic like com, net or org) and there is some factor which limits them to resale use (otherwise we just punt the .com problem up a level.)
The big mistake was having generics in the first place. Trademark law figured out hundreds of years ago you don't grant people monopoly ownership rights in generic terms. To get ownership rights in a term it must be non-generic, not have meaning other than the meaning you created in it. Thus nobody owns the word "Apple" with regards to fruits, but you can own it with regard to computers, or records. Even better are made-up terms like Xerox and Kodak.
Anyway, we goofed by selling things like drugstore.com. We should fix that where we can, and not make it worse. If names are for resale only (you can't have your own sites in a TLD you own except for nic.TLD) and the names can't have any meaning for you to get a monopoly, then it can work.
Things like .xxx and .mobi and there rest are bad because they have a meaning, and grant a monopoly in internet naming to that meaning.
Full details are at http://www.templetons.com/brad/dns/
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
I fail to see the point of allowing new TLDs... How many do we have now, yet unless you have a .com, .net, .org, or .edu (and even then, most people
stop at the first one or two of those), you may as well have a random
unpronounceable string of characters, because no one will find you
except via links.
.biz and .info email) without giving them a second thought.
This will have one and only one useful effect - It will add more TLDs we can safely block as spam sources (yeah, suuuure we see a lot of legit
Raising prices will just force out the casual user. Right now I can get hosting and domain registration for $35-50 a year. I like having my own domain for personal use, but charging $250 a year for the registration it would make it a really expensive luxury.
For any vaguely competent squatter, ads and possible sale of the domain would still make up for most of even that cost, so they wouldn't suffer at all.
$_ = "wftedskaebjgdpjgidbsmnjgcdwatb"; tr/a-z/oh, turtleneck Phrase Jar!/; print
Just 'rm /etc/resolv.conf' and you're done.
Votez ecolo : Chiez dans l'urne !
For every new TLD that gets created it just adds that many more TLDs that company has to buy to cover their trademark, company name whatever.
This is just ridiculous.
www.compaq.xyz has zero value. I never even understood why .net was created either. I can understand .ORG, and maybe even .INFO, but not .NET.
This only creates whole new markets for domain squatters. Who gives a crap about .MOBI? I certainly don't. I don't see any major wireless carriers using it on a regular basis. The mobile blackberry website I go to is still a .COM
This is made all the more ridiculous by the fact the most people have a hard time differentiating between TLDs as it is. Even I have problems sometimes and put a .COM when it should be a .NET. The fact that those 2 websites are wholly different entities is just crazy.
This is all about money going into the pockets of some people, and nothing about adding value to the Internet.
There are only two, and will forever be only two, TLDs which have any value associated with them whatsoever.... .COM and .ORG. That's it. Everything else is reserved anyways, and you can substitute a country TLD for .COM and .ORG when appropriate.
For those that would argue that point, ask yourselves honestly.... when you think of a domain name which TLD do you think of putting after it first?
This sort of thing would be a godsend for spammers & phishers. It'd make it so much easier for them to forge websites to try to scam people. Just imagine creating a TLD that's something like "comm" instead of "com" or "C0M" (zero instead of oh), etc. It'll create a security nightmare out of what is already a major pain in the @ss.
address within 30 days. Your second point assumes that domain names are registered exclusively for putting up Web sites. There are plenty of legitimate uses for domain names that don't require putting up a public page for the entire Internet to see. Heck, there may even be some value in someone creating, say, a parody site that looks like a page of ads, or doing so to hide a real site.
I'd rather not have a registrar deciding whether or not to revoke my domain name registration just because they didn't think the content was non-trivial.
Let each country manage its own servers.
Does anyone in the USofA really care if Britain allows sitename.xxx.uk ?
Does anyone in Germany care that there is a sitename.mobile.us ?
All the .com and .org and .net and ... were okay when the Internet was tiny and mostly USofA only. But it showed a complete lack of forward planning. Decentralize the names. Let each country work it out. Particularly for the countries using alphabets that don't match 100% with USofA English.
So you won't be able to register a domain for use in email, ftp server, etc, etc?
domain names != web
Hey, I don't know about you but I'm find just memorizing IP addresses.
IPv4 or IPv6?#DeleteChrome
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
Anybody thought about using a co-opted naming system such as used for Newsgroups ?
Think about it....
Nah, people will want certain numbers and not want others. East Asians won't want numbers with "4" in them as they're unlucky. Christian nutjobs won't want 666, the number of the Beast. Script kiddies will want 1337.
you CAN buy a phone number... Ive seen it done by some local pizza places.
Are generic names like that really worth that much? I doubt "search.com" is making CNet as much money as "google.com" is making Google.
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
So whitehouse.com gets .whitehouse? What about other collisions between .com/.org/.net/.edu/.gov/.co.uk/.co.au/.dot.dash-dash.dot.?
Correct. Good 800 and 888 numbers are valuable, same with SMS numbers (google = 466453).
What if two different people own, for example, pizza.com and pizza.net? Who gets the TLD then?
Lately, I wonder that same thing. This used to be "news for nerds" and if you've never met someone who works in nuclear power, then you've no idea how just how nerdy someone can get.
Modding Trolls +1 inciteful since 1999
.html, .htm, .php, .asp ...
That idea falls apart when you start dealing with 'internet properties'. For example, my company owns .com and is going to build out a portal on it. Down the road, we may want to sell that to another company that already has an interest in the market.
With your idea, we would be unable to actually transfer that domain name to the company, essentially tying ourselves to them in perpetuity, and requiring them to rely on us not going out of business. Bad idea.
So expect the registrars to get behind this quickly and completely. It'll make their cash registers ring, as typosquatters try to register variants of well-known domains and sell them to phishers, and legitimate domain owners race to beat them to it. In the end, a large amount of money will flow to registrars, every TLD except a few gTLDs and the ccTLDs will be blacklisted by default, and lots of people will own worthless domains that nobody really wants.
And ICANN will congratulate itself on a job well done.
It's worse. What they are proposing is nothing less than the total elimination of the current DNS and replacing it with AOL keywords. And raising the price a hundredfold while they are at it. And making sure it stays centralized under ICANN's control by cutting out the national registrars.
Within six months of going live .com will be but a memory as every entity with enough budget to buy bandwidth to actually run a server on buys their own TLD, or keyword. Ford.com becomes ford. google.com becomes google, mail.google.com probably becomes googlemail or mail.google, assuming they don't just outbid every other webmail company and just have 'email' or 'mail.' Just send to userid@email.
And domains will all be to the highest bidder with ICANN getting the money instead of domain squatters. Old legacy domains will be taken as a sign of a cheap bastard who can't afford a 'real' name.
Democrat delenda est
"What ICANN really messed up with was the TLD concept reading backwards. It should be ... com.google.etc. It confuses a lot of people to have the order the other way. "
Yeah, look at all the confused people typing in "com.google."
Seriously, the ordering is just a convention. It can go either way as long as it does so consistently.
DAILY ROTATION
Actually they followed a convention, which I believe most countries follow.
The postal convention. Think of how you address a letter.
Most Specific
Next most specific
next most
least
get it?