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ICANN Releases Draft For New TLDs
NdJ writes "Looks like a whole new domain name battle ground is about to open up. ICANN have just made available their How to Apply for a New Generic Top-Level Domain Draft Applicant Guidebook. It won't be cheap for the individual, but certainly achievable for many domain-name-pimps. 'The Evaluation Fee is designed to make the new gTLD program self-funding only. This was a recommendation of the Generic names Supporting Organization. A detailed costing methodology — including historical program development costs, and predictable and uncertain costs associated with processing new gTLD applications through to delegation in the root zone — estimates a per applicant fee of $US185,000. This is the estimated cost per evaluation in the first application round.'"
obvious get rich quick scheme is obvious.
Where is the "Ignorant" mod tag?
I always assumed the reason behind .org, .net, .com and country TLDs was to keep things organized and consistent. Why have they decided to do what appears to me as simply going back on themselves?
The .com, .net, and .org domains have meant absolutely jack-squat for years now. May as well open up the field.
Of course, this means a company like McDonalds will now be forced to register "mcdonalds.[every possible alphanumeric string]" -- this ought to be interesting.
...".spam"?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
As if things weren't dificult enough to your average Joe Internet User. Most people have a hard enough time understanding that not all websites end in .com as it is.
They're not putting a $185K price tag on domain names, they're putting it on the application for a new generic top level domain. That is, in www.google.com, the $185K isn't to apply for the "google" pieces, it's to apply for the "com" piece.
As an individual, why would you care? And what would a "domain-name-pimp" get out of the deal? Nothing as far as I can see. This looks more like it's being marketed to governments.
ICANN has all the moneys?
Use the Firehose to mod down Second Life stories!
One thing about the DNS system is that it is very hierarchical (if you want everyone using the same root servers at least). And when the organisation that controls it all is a corrupt organisation answerable to the US government (not the most pristine government in the world), that's a problem.
So, my question is, why can't these functions be handed off to an international organisation dedicated to standards, that isn't a part of the US government and has got a history of not being corrupt? Perhaps the ITU (official ITU website)? (WIPO, who administer domain name disputes, is part of the UNO, and no one complains that they are run by China and Iran.)
As for expanding how many TLD's there are, I don't see why there should not be more. It would be nice if the prices were less of course.
And finally, imagine how many poorly written filters are going to break because they think that all TLD's are two or three chars.
I wank in the shower.
Domain naming is going to need to grow to be more versatile and expressive. Right now a URL becomes foobarhelloworld.com and there are problems when sites with similar names squat on each other. With IPv6 this only stands to become more confusing. Domain naming is going to have to get better. I think we might see more details and a larger character set added to DNS.
www.slash.dot?
INDIVIDUAL: I'd liked to register a TLD please.
ICANN: Ok, what is it?
INDIVIDUAL: foo
ICANN: Ok... we'll have to do some extensive research on this.
ICANN: [Turns around, ruffles some papers, turns back around]
ICANN: Ok our extensive army of legal analysts deem "foo" to be acceptable. That will be $180,000 please!
What could possibly require a fee that high (I don't buy the "staff time" and "investment" line)? I mean... if you already resigned to polluting the name space with gimmicky TLDs, why should ".foo" cost more to register than "acme.com"? Is it just a barrier for entry?
Actually... $180,000 is for the luxury of filling out the application form... you aren't guaranteed to get the TLD. So lucky you, you get to pay up front before they say yea or nay.
As it is, ICANN has been falling flat on what they could be doing to curb the spam epidemic. But now if they start selling TLDs to any schmuck with enough money, they've just thrown what little clout they had, right out the window.
Previously, domain registrars were obligated to abide by the registrars terms set forth by ICANN/Internic as part of their terms for being a registrar in the ICANN-controlled TLDs. But if ICANN is going to sell new TLDs outright, they are handing over the keys entirely. Just wait until people start buying TLDs that are misspelled variants of viagra. Then we'll see spam floods from those and nobody will be accountable for the bogus pharmacies under those domains that are selling poison across the internet.
I agree, ICANN's time has come and gone. It should be replaced by an international organization with international allies for international goals and solving international problems. Anyone who thinks that the US can solve the spam problem just by passing new laws is a fool.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Not, we are talking about a body that is subordinated to "the people" here. ISO is an independent not for profit organization, quite like ICANN.
Rethinking email
I know this might sound weird, but since the "extention" doesn't make much sense anymore, why use it? Just have it named by your compagnie's name. Web site would be reached by their name and that's it. Say you want to see Sony's site, you type in sony... Most compagnies buy the whole .everything anyway.
I hope they have a bidding war for it... they could use the money.
One could make a mint off a ".sucks" TLD, no?
What's really funny is all the Fortune 500 companies that would have to buy their names and their product names as defensive registrations.
exxon.sucks
aig.sucks
Can you imagine how much money there is to be made off of .sex?
Now I need to figure out how to raise the money and get it. Though I am sure there will be many fights over that one.
Should have suggested this during the google idea hunt.
OpenNIC has been around since 2000, offering free TLDs. We're still doing it, 8 years later, and it's still free. The only way altroots will flourish in the oppressive environment forced upon us by ICANN is if more people vote with their feet and migrate away from ICANN to alternate roots.
The alternative to ICANN is out there. When will people stop bitching about ICANN and actually do something about it through action rather than words?
Har har. I LMFAO'd at that.
My kingdom for some mod points!
I actually suggested ISO a decade ago as it seemed safe then - at least safer than anything else. The ITU was the worst possible choice it's been concerned with prolonging monopolies for decades and was desparatly seeking relevance in a post telophony internet era; the WTO was a more logical choice for the kind of "just do it" internet anarchy, as they'd been promoting breaking down trade barries for ages but they were undergong bad press at the time from anti-globalization demonstrations. Tony Rutkowski was ITU general council at the time and very narrowly got an ITU draft resolution very quietly passed that mad e the internet *legal* as it was not, at the time, under international telecommunications treaty.
The best coverage of this is the freely downloadable book "Exploring the Internet" by Carl Malamud. Go find and ready it for important understanding of the ITU process and how it differs from the IETF process that built the internet. Pay particular attention to one Robert Shaw in the book, you'll see him come up behind the scenes in icann and to this day involved in the areas where there is the least transparency. There are icann meetings thatr are held in secret, to this day. That's Bob's contribution to all this.
Need Mercedes parts ?
Imagine telling your friends about something you saw at http colon slash slash slash dot slash dot.
Yet another way to screw the little guy and help businesses while profiting.
Spammers and criminals will be able to afford it so they can come up with a load of TLDs to try to confuse people, businesses will be able to have their own TLD and guess what the only person screwed is the small guy who may want to start his own business and attempt to have his own TLD but chances are any good TLD will have already been bought up by a spammer or business.
Perhaps its more affordible if you wait for somone to infringe on your trademark then go through dispute resolution?
Trying to install linux on my microwave, but keep getting a kernel panic...
I am going to start selling .con domains!
I love the double meaning.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
...from clownpenis.fart?!?
I can't remember the last time I forgot anything.
Many years ago I proposed .here as something like the DNS equivalent of RFC1918 IP addresses[1].
e.g. anyone can then use *.here for their own network (stuff like .local or .localnet would probably be for machine use - but AFAIK they are not formally reserved either).
So if you roam to a WiFi network within range, http://jukebox.here/ could control a jukebox for that location.
And http://about.here/ might actually tell you something useful. On most wifi networks this could say something like:
"Welcome to the default LinkSys WiFi homepage. The owner of this network has not set a usage policy yet. You should probably assume you're not supposed to use this network unless otherwise authorized. Please be nice :)".
But some might provide permission (maybe with some T&C).
Of course it would be safer if https was used, or the http redirected to a FQDN + https e.g. https://about.mydomain.com/.
But you'd get lots of grumbles about certs and all that...
Unfortunately I don't have millions of dollars spare to buy a TLD and then give it to the world to use.
[1] http://www.watersprings.org/pub/id/draft-yeoh-tldhere-01.txt
http://www.circleid.com/posts/top_level_domains_for_addressing_by_physical_context/
Have you guys read the freaking article ?
I think not !
Nowhere does it say it will be possible for corporations to register a TLD. ICANN only posted a document that explains how to submit one and there is an evaluation fee associated with submitting an application. What is so hard to understand ? ./ers... a great bunch of scaremongering IT nuts.
or http colon slash slash slash dot dot dot slash
$185k per TLD application
$ wc -l /usr/share/dict/words /usr/share/dict/words
479625
that makes
$ dc
185000
479625*p
88730625000
Eighty-eight billion, seven hundred thirty million, six hundred twenty-five thousand dollars.
And no sense.
Um, how is it that if some people use a language that you don't speak, they are "isolating themselves"? Are one billion Mandaring speakers "isolating themselves"?
Your computer is almost certainly capable of accessing websites in dozens of scripts, using fonts to display their content correctly, and of accepting text input in those scripts; this stuff is all standardized (Unicode). There is no technical barrier at all, and the social ones aren't because of prohibitions or censorship: nobody's stopping you from learning some Mandarin or Russian if you really want to see what those sites say.
You don't even have to go all the way: I don't speak a word of Chinese, but I often successfully search Google, in Chinese, for images of Chinese cooking ingredients. If my cookbook has both the Chinese character and the romanization, I can, about 75% of the time, figure out how to enter the Chinese text into Google Images, and off I go. It's not exactly easy, but it's not rocket surgery, you know.
The real technical isolation problems are things like the Great Firewall of China, and guess what, that has nothing to do with Unicode domain name support. Chinese Internet censorship would be as much of a problem if all of the net was English-only.
Yes, and we have a standard for encoding text in dozens of scripts, and standards for how to encode Unicode into domain names. But apparently, standards that you don't want to exist are not standards, but rather "concessions for non-standard this and that"; and they segment and segregate the internet, even if your computer supports them. WTF?
What are you going to argue next, that everybody should stop speaking those pesky foreign languages, because they're foreign? Because after all, why stop the fight against "segregation" and "segmentation" at just the Internet?
Are you adequate?
Yup. DNS serves an important function: a distributed database of symbolic hostnames to IP addresses, where each domain represents an independent authority entitled to decide the mapping for a given subset of FQDNs. DNS allows you to change hosts' IP addresses without breaking references to those hosts. This function is essential, but it's also akin to plumbing, really.
The problem that DNS has been misapplied to is how to get users to access specific content on the internet, for example, by making address bars such a prominent part of browser UIs, and expecting users to access content by typing DNS names into that bar. The end user content-addressing problem (i.e., "how does an end user get to a specific site") can be solved better, and in a more flexible, decentralized manner by tools like search engines and other kinds of directory services.
Consider that users don't really have a choice but to use the DNS system. Yeah, I know about alternative roots, but most people just won't understand how to make that work, and anyway, it involves transferring power from one set of people to another. With search engines, OTOH, there is a variety of choice, and you can switch easily from one to another. You can use more than one at the same time if you wish, and specialized search engines for different purposes can coexist.
So really, we need something like DNS as part of the plumbing of the net, but it's the wrong place to address the end user content-addressing problem. The folks who control DNS have all the power they do because we're using DNS as a stopgap solution for that problem. This is precisely why we should stop doing so: if we used DNS only as part of the low-level plumbing, restructuring the TLDs would just not be a big issue.
Actually, I really hope vanity TLDs become commonplace to the point where they just increases the supply of domain names so much that they lose their non-plumbing value. I'm not holding my breath, however, because I assume the DNS authorities will try to create some kind of artificial scarcity.
Are you adequate?
As far as I am concerned centralisation of DNS control to a single organisation is a bad thing. It distorts the free market and can lead to political manipulation. People with brains use OpenNIC or run their own DNS servers. Nothing can beat the speed of a DNS server in your LAN, and if you know how to do it right it's also more secure.
An alternative free software project called SocialDNS.net enables registration of Web TLDs (wTLD) for free. You can register your wTLDs like go://myblog or go://slashdot and manage for free your subdomains: go://wiki.slashdot. In SocialDNS domains have no cost, the information is public and free, and it is free software. Furthermore, domain conflicts are managed by users. Look at: http://www.socialdns.net/
so i can register .c0m and make tons of fake sites?