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."

Comments

Worst idea ever

[kramer2718]

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.

Re:Worst idea ever

[Floritard]

.com was originally supposed to mean strictly commercial sites was it not? Moving away from that original intent, it's become ingrained in most casual user's minds that this is the obligatory suffix of a typical web address. .net and .org are only sightly as recognizable as additional suffixes. I think it would be difficult to get people comfortable with the idea that the TLD can be any word you want. If anything .com will just be seen as the most legitimate address and anything else will be automatically suspect.

Disney already has registered TLDs for the localized versions of it's site for other regions and any further categorical distinctions for content can be accomplished with subdomains. There's not really any need for Disney or any other large corps to make use of unique TLDs. While this doesn't stop spammers from setting up their own dubious TLDs and trying to lure people there, after a few publicized incidents of scams I think it would become fairly common knowledge that people should stick to trusting .com or the localized regional version thereof.

Re:Worst idea ever

[lazlo]

Unfortunately, this isn't the worst idea ever, at least for ICANN. Extortion it is, but extortion isn't really a bad idea if you're the one doing it, else it wouldn't be so popular.

However, opening the TLD floodgates doesn't help anyone other than ICANN and the registrars. Additional TLD's which are functionally equivalent to the existing TLD's are not useful. Additional TLD's are useful with respect to any exclusivity they enforce. .com, .net, .org, are all functionally equivalent these days. .edu, .gov, and .mil are actually, in fact, useful. They are useful specifically because I can't get one. The proposed .bank had some hope of being useful, although it suffers from the endemic problem of appointing someone or some organization to decide for the whole world, what constitutes a bank. .xxx or .porn has some hope of being useful, because it is self-exclusive in that there's somewhat of a disincentive to having a .porn domain if you are not, in fact, in the business of providing porn.

Of course, nothing useful will come to pass. It's too tempting to sell domains to everyone, and the useful things that could be done with TLD's could be done with SLD's as well, but aren't. It would be useful, for example, to have a company that already does work in the field of corporate information such as Dunn & Bradstreet, to start offering "vetted" corporate listings, such as "yourcompanyhere".dnb.com. But they don't do it, because a) it wouldn't really be all that useful, and b) because very few people would use it and thus c) very few companies would buy it.

Generic TLDs caused the problems

[btempleton]

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/

Re:Generic TLDs caused the problems

[TheRaven64]

.mobi is bad for a different reason - it ties a specific service (web for mobile devices) to a domain name. Having a .xxx domain name isn't a terribly bad idea, but it needs to be done 20 years ago before all of the porn sites got .com domains. If domain names worked more like trademarks, with each TLD representing an area, then this would work well - you could have apple.computer and apple.music being different companies (well, until Apple Inc. licensed the trademark from Apple Records).

The other part of the reason why this is potentially a bad idea is technical. The DNS scales very well because it's a tree. Hardly anyone queries the root servers (a couple of years ago 95% of queries were answered with NXDOMAIN) because their ISPs caching name servers store the locations of the most common TLDs (.com, .org, .cctld, etc.). The load is then spread around the TLD servers (and, again, most common queries are cached). Adding new TLDs increases the number of hits on the root servers, which makes those 14 machines a lot more critical, which is probably what ICANN is trying to do.

Re:ICANN should make domains more expensive

[ShadowRangerRIT]

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.

Worthless

[EdIII]

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?

Spammers, etc. will LOVE this

[Iphtashu Fitz]

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.

Re:ICANN should make domains more expensive

[GleeBot]

2) Require an actual site (not just a page of ads) go live at any give
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.

Re:DNS has failed anyway

[93 Escort Wagon]

Hey, I don't know about you but I'm find just memorizing IP addresses.

IPv4 or IPv6?

Re:ICANN should make domains more expensive

[Sentry21]

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.

Worse

[jmorris42]

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.