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.'"

Comments

Re:Why now?

[rs79]

"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?"

It's documented. Look at the "msggroup" archives from the era, it's the first mailing list at a time when there was only one mailing list. They say this is how it went down. The network was young, maybe 1000 nodes or so, and totally arbitrary hostnames were about to be phased out in favour of hierarchical DNS names. This would eliminate the problem of the host table getting huge, and the bigger it got the more often it needed updating.

DNS names were decentralized. Nameservers point to other nameservers which point to nameservers, thus the whole name database management problem went away as the data was decentralized.

But about the only thing poeple agreed on was "." or dot. Remember at the time the network was being used by military and aerospace contractors and universites. That's pretty much it.

So there was .mil, .nato, .arpa and then .com and .net for "commercial networks" (not that any existed then) and .net for "network infrastructure" - it was supposed to be for routers and stuff. >org was for "anything else" and wasn't "for non profits" as the icann bozos now claim. Check the rfc.

Nobdoy really like the names, they argued about it for about a month, then Jon Postel just decided, and that was that.

Steve Wolff is the guy that took the network out of the hands of the US government and freed it so anybody could do anything. But in moving administration of the network he *forgot* about the domain system so it stays in the hands of the US government. Where of course it was immediatly taken over by special interest groups where it's been ever since.

Don't expect any ratinal name schemes out of thesde clowns. If you look at the 2000 Marina Del Rey ICANN conference video where they picked the .museum and .coop winners you'll hear Darth Cerf say "I don't like the way that plays on the ear" and that was that, for $50K application for a tld that's how much thought you got, made only more ironic by the fact Cerf is deaf.

For $50K a deaf guy says it doesn't sound right to him.

I'm dying to see what the $185K test is although I suspect it involved telepathy, midgets and a sausage.