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ICANN Board Approves Wide Expansion of TLDs
penciling_in writes "The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has approved the relaxation of the rules for the introduction of new Top-Level Domains — a move that could drastically change the Internet. 'We are opening up a new world and I think this cannot be underestimated,' said Roberto Gaetano, an ICANN board member. The future outcome of this decision was discussed on Slashdot a few days ago. It also seems, based on this post on CircleID from last month, that ICANN was already in preparation mode of mass TLD introductions. The new decision will allow companies to register their brands as generic top-level domain names (TLDs). For instance, Microsoft could apply to have a TLD such as '.msn', Apple apply for '.mac', and Google for '.goog'... The decision was taken unanimously on Thursday, June 26, 2008 at the 32nd ICANN Meeting in Paris."
It wasn't that long ago that ICANN voted against allowing the much-requested .xxx domain. Now they want to open up to allow custom TLDs?
As if the internet didn't have enough arbitrary hodge-podge already.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I hope they have good oversight...
Imagine the chaos of tlds with: .exe .dll .prg .php .c0m (or other foreign symbol for o .txt .pdf .conf .doc .txt .xls .ppt .jpg .gif .tif .mp3 .mpg .htm(l) .png ...then again slashdot could have a slashdot.slashdot domain.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
I'd be happy with a TLD system based on language. Why do we need the com/net/org thing anyway. Lets just have something like
http://google.en/
http://google.it/
http://.name.language/
If you read TFA you'll see that the TLDs will cost upwards of $100,000 and are subject to ICANN approval. That cost and/or approval might be a one time thing, or it might turn out to be annual. Yes, there will be a few idiotic TLDs, but this is probably how it should've been from the beginning. I work for a university IT department and we regularly get calls from users trying to access university sites (most of which use the .edu TLD of course), except that they are trying to use .com instead. Some universities have registered .com domains to redirect to the real site to try and accommodate these people. Our department refuses to do this, and I'm glad. Many people still have the mindset that website == ends in .com and it reinforces that notion.
Arbitrary TLDs will slowly change the mindset from thinking that a URL is anything.usually-com to anything.anything. This is probably how DNS should have been from the beginning.
Take off every sig. For great justice.
A meeting of the minds between Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft resulting in an agreement to not index these idiotic domains could kill this quick before it gets out of hand.
*Will it happen - doubtful.
Can you or I do anything about it - probably not.
But I can dream.
Anonymous Cowards get no respect.
This article, which I believe I found off a comment from the previous /. article on this topic, discusses a sane way to handle a TLD free-for-all, which actually sounds like it could be better than the current system. Of course, ICANN will likely opt for the profitable way not the sane way if the general consensus on /. about ICANN's greed is at all accurate.
Yeah, domains in the other order like on usenet would make more sense, but it is quite a few years too late for that.
Centralization breaks the internet.
So for example the .cola domain, if pepsi gets it and registers .cola and pepsi.cola first then the only way we'll see coca.cola is if pepsi let them?
Typing just "google" would do. You don't need to type anything else (having www prefix was such a stupid idea to begin with).
I for one look forward to this as this is how dns is suppose to work. Anyone who doesn't like it doesn't understand how dns works.
One innocent word in a language can be an offensive word in another. For exemple, the french word for "seal" is phoque, which is pronounced exactly like you think it is.
And even in the same language, various countries will give totally different meanings to a given word. Think of "lift" -vs- "elevator", "boot" -vs- "trunk" or "crisps" -vs- "chips"...
And it can be even worse; for example, in France, gosses means "children", whereas in Québec, it means "testicles".
Comment removed based on user account deletion
That reminds me of a story a friend of mine told me about his family.
His family comes from a tiny town in Texas. After his father died, his mother decided to sell their huge ranch and move into a smaller house. A developer bought it and decided to name the development after the family in their honor. So the name of the new neighborhood contains their last name, and each street name contains the first name of someone in the family. Pretty nice tribute, actually.
I support the Center for Consumer Freedom
What about pseudo TLDs? For instance the .onion and .exit used by Tor. If any string of characters can be a valid address we won't be able to count on using special name for other purposes anymore. I can imagine how this could have significant security implications as well. This will also put a damper on the (already damp) attempts to create alternative DNS systems, since, again, there will be no names that can be counted on not to conflict anymore.
I've completely disabled history in my browser. I've never really seen a use for it. The majority of sites don't even have good titles. Not only that, but there's no really good way of finding stuff in the history. By the end of the day, it's impossible to find any one page your viewed throughout the day. Worked fine in the day of 28.8 K modems, where you only visited 20 pages a day. I think that the history should be tree based. Each time you open a new empty tab, do a new search, or type in a URL directly, it should start a new tree. The pages you visit form that point on should be under that tree. If from the same page, I open 6 different links, they should all show up as direct children of that first entry. So, you could do a search in google, and each of the six items opened from the search results will result in a child of that initial search.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Don't forget Legoland drive, Disney Way, etc, etc.
Hey I never knew that... http://com http://net http://org
(com redirects to me to cnet, net goes to net.com, and org goes to org.com)
Now, there will be so many TLD's that the "protect our brand" people couldn't possibly cover them all.
Maybe this could have the benefit, that instead of snatching up every possible combination, that companies would pick just a few common ones and hold their ground there. I would like to imagine that this would end disputes over TLDs, eg nissan.Fnord.
stupid and useless bullshit. My expectation is no one will ever use this shit. when I see google.com I KNOW it's a url. when I see search.google it looks like a typo
Yes, I know .localdomain won't be available, but what about users and systems within local networks that tend to function on alternate (internal-only) and implied (non-canonicalized) domains?
... Under an infinite number of TLDs, this isn't reliable.
.office or .foo TLD wouldn't stop this from working, I'd prefer a lookup failure to a key mis-match when trying such a command from a machine lacking the above config.
Let's say I have a partitioned office network at the company Foo Powers. My workstation is khopesh.office.foopowers.com (which is NAT'ed). From another system within the office, I'd probably just run ssh khopesh to get there (which implies khopesh.office.foopowers.com). To log into the web server (which lives in the DMZ), I'd run ssh www.dmz and to get back to my system, ssh khopesh.office would do the trick.
There are cool SSH tricks you can do to traverse NATs; I have it rigged so that from home, I can run ssh khopesh.office and get in. This triggers an entry in my ~/.ssh/config that looks like this (the first entry fits the above example. the second entry allows me to define an arbitrary extension to trigger a proxy rule and then remove the extension inside the proxy):
Host *.office
ProxyCommand ssh proxy.office.foopowers.com nc -w 1 %h %p
Host *.foo
ProxyCommand ssh proxy.office.foopowers.com nc -w 1 $(echo %h|sed s/\.foo$//) %p
While a real
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
Think about mobile devices. On the correct LAN, the local nameservers always answer these queries because they're configured to be authoritative. However, when away from that LAN, a few well-placed wildcard records would create a nice honeypot.