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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
http://first.post
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
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.
You missed
3) Prohibit exchange of domain names. Don't want one? Let it expire and it goes back into the pool. No, you can't sell it, any more than you can sell your telephone number.
But again, this wouldn't benefit the registrars, so it won't happen.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Never mind the levels of confusion it would be creating.
Especially when I start registering common file extensions, like .exe, .bat, .jpg, .txt...
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
Having your post modded "Funny" has no effect on your Karma, while "Insightful" does. So, there are a number of moderators who give out the insightful moderation to posts that they think are exceptionally funny or witty.
;)
Of course, maybe I'm giving the moderators too much credit. After all, why was your post modded troll? On second thought, maybe the moderators are smoking something today.
wtf.FTW!
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Your logic that .com was so large to make .net pointless to create makes no sense considering they were created at the same time. (January 1985)
.com to take off, there are fewer than 100 currently registered .com domains that date back to the first two years of .com's existance. Both .com and .net were rare to see in the late 80s to early 90s anyhow- .edu was much more common on USENET, or IRC, or on internet games such as netrek. Hell, .mil seemed about as common as .com in the early days.
It took years for
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