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."

Comments

Interesting reversal

[damn_registrars]

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.

Abuse of TLDs

[JoeCommodore]

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.

Why not just languages?

[fintler]

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/

in many ways, this is good

[eobanb]

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.

This is stupid - here is the solution:*

[I Want to be Anonymo]

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.

Problems

[Pig Hogger]

Ther will be some problems... If you look in the release,

4. How will offensive names be prevented?

Offensive names will be subject to an objection-based process based on public morality and order. This process will be conducted by an international arbitration body utilizing criteria drawing on provisions in a number of international treaties. ICANN will not be the decision maker on these objections.

This will obviously not work.

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".

Re:The end of ctrl+enter days?

[CastrTroy]

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.