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: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.

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.

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.