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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."
Now I can finally realize my dream and create the ".isgay" TLD.
Feed the need: Digitaladdiction.net
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
I still get to call dibs on XXX?
what is wrong with you people?!
If domains were expensive enough we wouldn't have squatters. Say you would have to pay 250$ to purchase a domain name. How many would a squatter be willing to buy?
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
As if their total lack of real control over domain registration wasn't bad enough already, now they want to sell TLDs? Come on, we're close enough to arbitrary mish-mash as it is.
.viagra and .pirate, so it would be easier to screen them.
The only good that could potentially come from this would be if the spammers found it worthwhile to start placing all their spamvertised domains under TLDs like
But we all know how likely that is..
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
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
http://first.post
I've had it with this hugely confusing system of names and TLDs, so here's my proposal:
We drop DNS completely and establish a completely numerical system of finding things on the internet. Each machine will just get a simple number. No more wondering what everything is called - just type in the number and presto - you're there! No fighting, no trademarks, no registrations, just "Here's your number pal, have fun."
Should work fine - right?
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?
All I'm saying is I would not want to be a DNS admin if this goes through. DNS zones (and DNS queries I might add) would increase exponentially and DNS standard practice would fragment even more.
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.
That said - if this is implemented as written I also foresee a rush towards all short words of the English language and a subsequent loss of all mnemonic devices I use to remember websites:
Now: "Hey, I want to go to Amazon. That's amazon.com, right?"
Then: "I want to go to Newbookstore. That's newbookstore.books - no, wait, newbookstore.cheapbooks - or newbookstore.bestbookstore? Newbookstore.isgreat? Newbookstore.all? Newbookstore.shopping? Newbookstore.AAA?"
Granted, the current TLD system kinda sucks, but opening up all kinds of words as possible TLDs will certainly bring no improvement (one thing I like to do when I browse for a product's availability here in Germany is enter the search term into google with the added restriction "site:.de". When German online presences will end in dozens if not hundreds of different words this easy way to identify them will be lost...).
-- Language is a virus from outer space.
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.
Hey, I don't know about you but I'm find just memorizing IP addresses.
Saying "I'll probably get modded down for this" in a post is the best way to get it modded up.
I read the summary 5 times wondering why the hell a ICANN was messing with TLDs. Ya, oh... the "other" tld... right. um.. moving along now...
Modding Trolls +1 inciteful since 1999
Hey, I don't know about you but I'm find just memorizing IP addresses.
IPv4 or IPv6?#DeleteChrome
Eight equals D?
I thought D equaled 13...
Ignore this signature. By order.
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....
I wouldn't be surprised if ICANN made the rule that your 2nd level name aliases the TLD. So Disney.com would also own *.disney.
TLDs would no longer be categories, they'd just be the site name. http://ilovecats http://cnn http://teslamotors
Makes sense to me.
Never mind the levels of confusion it would be creating.
Especially when I start registering common file extensions, like .exe, .bat, .jpg, .txt...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
They should simply make it a reflection of .com. If you own abcde.com you, and only you, are entitled to abcde TLD. There are couple hiccups with other tlds... but that could be resovlved:
So if you have dotcom, and leaving .com off won't conflict with an existing TLD, you can pay another X$ fee and get it as a TLD. If you don't pay the fee, you don't get it, but nobody else can get it either.
No massive influx of squatter problems, trademark problems, spammer problems etc. PennyArcade.com and only pennyarcade.com can get the PennyArcade TLD, CocaCola.com can get cocacola, microsoft.com can get microsoft... intel.com can get intel, ibm.com can get ibm.
And ca.com, us.com, com.com can't get ca, us, and com respectively. They'll live.
The idea of organizational TLDs was a mistake from the get-go. If we could just get rid of them entirely I'd advocate that. But due to conflicts between legitimate .net / .org / .com sites that's not really practical.
So lets just do second best, and give the vast majority of .com's the option of leaving off the .com.
Firstly, the interviewer started under the misapprehension that domain names were running out, which Dr. Twomey corrected, and said the problem was with IPv4 addresses. The following comments then followed, which concern the introduction of IPv6:
Dr Paul Twomey, chief executive of Icann, told BBC News that the proposals would result in the biggest change to the way the internet worked in decades. "The impact of this will be different in different parts of the world. But it will allow groups, communities and business to express their identities online. "Like the United States in the 19th Century, we are in the process of opening up new real estate, new land, and people will go out and claim parts of that land and use it for various reasons they have. "It's a massive increase in the geography of the real estate of the internet." This is included in TFA, where it is implied that he was referring to domain names.The comments he actually made about DNS and TLDs were much tamer, mainly relating to internationalization and the use of unicode URLs.
I listened to this while driving, so I may have misunderstood slightly, but there was definitely no sense of "OMG TLD free-for-all" in the interview as broadcast.
[ ]Half Empty [ ]Half Full [x]Twice as big as it needs to be
Seems to me that the current holders of legacy names in the flat namespace of UUCP Mailnet, who have retained their legacyname.tld counterparts in .com, .edu, .net, or .gov, should be able to get them as TLDs, and free of charge, as a continuation of the legacy.
Failing that they should have first refusal.
These names in this flat namespace predate the ICANN. They were also transferred intact into the electronic mail routing during the conversion to domain-style addressing. (Indeed, at some sites you can still get mail to them by addressing it to user@legacyname, and at many more by addressing it to legacyname!user.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
wtf.FTW!
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
.html, .htm, .php, .asp ...
ICAAN released a final draft for public comment today, June 22, 2008.
Public comment closes June 23, 2008.
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.
Under US law, parody isn't copyright infringement. So how about copying just about everything in *.com, doing a regex to replace certain words with obscenities, and reposting it as *.parody?
Then when you search, why shouldn't Google assume you're as likely looking for the parody as The Real Thing?
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
I expect Commander Taco to register http://slashdot.dot/ immediately upon its availability.
The Humblest Mollusk on the Net
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
I don't know! WAAAAAAARGGHHH!
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