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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.
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.
I disagree. Google has assloads of money, so they register the TLD "google". Then they can provide "groups.google," "search.google," "gmail.google," "maps.google," et cetera. Same for companies like McDonald's, Microsoft, Chase Bank, et cetera. Every big company that can afford it will use the TLD as their domain name, and ICANN will get solid gold Ferraris from the money they rake in.
Meanwhile, do you think Ubuntu will be able to pony up the money for "get.ubuntu"? How will it look when "www.fedora.org" has to compete with "get.windows"?
The .com, .net, and .org TLDs will become the "subsidized housing" of the Net, where all those who can't pony up the cash have to stick their domains.
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.
Then IBM, Microsoft, and Jenna Jameson file complaints with ICANN, who use their Uniform Domain-Name Dispute Resolution Policy to automatically award the names to the trademark holders. And, of course, ICANN get even more money out of this, since it costs money to file the complaint.
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
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
Punycode is the preferred IDN system at this time, as does not require making major changes to virtually every running DNS server. The vast majority of the Unicode character set is encode-able using it, so adding a larger character set does not seem to be necessary.
Stylish sheet to fix many problems in Slashdot's D3: https://gist.github.com/801524
Probably. Mark Shuttleworth made nearly $600mil prior to setting up Canonical. :)
You study hard, work hard, get promoted to a high ranking position in a large company, obviously.
Definitely not by doing anything sexually explicit.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it" -Voltaire
Meanwhile, do you think Ubuntu will be able to pony up the money for "get.ubuntu"? How will it look when "www.fedora.org" has to compete with "get.windows"?
It will look exactly the same, most of the people today don't type domain names, they just use a search engine and click on the first link. They won't even know what a domain name is or where to find it.
La vida no es una pastafrola.
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?
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.
Its worse than that.
I pulled this from http://www.icann.org/en/topics/new-gtld-draft-agreement-24oct08-en.pdf. Apparently they also charge a crazy QUARTERLY fee to keep it in existence. So much for my genius idea of creating a donation site and taking votes on the most inadvertently funny/abusive TLD to register.
"Section 6.1 Registry-Level Fees. Registry Operator shall pay ICANN a Registry-Level Fee equal to the greater of (i) the Registry Fixed Fee of US$18,750 per calendar quarter or (ii) the Registry- Level Transaction Fee calculated per calendar quarter as follows. For any quarter in which the Registry-Level Transaction Fee as calculated in this Section 6.1 exceeds the Fixed Fee, then the Registry-Level Transaction Fee shall be paid. The Registry-Level Transaction Fee will be equal to the number of annual increments of an initial or renewal domain name registration (at one or more levels, and including renewals associated with transfers from one ICANN-accredited registrar to another) during the applicable calendar quarter multiplied by US$0.25 (the âoeTransaction Feeâ) for calendar quarters during which the average annual price of registrations (including all bundled products or services that may be offered by Registry Operator and include or are offered in conjunction with a domain name registration) is equal to US$5.00. For calendar quarters during which the average annual price of registrations is less than US$5.00, the Transaction Fee will be decreased by US $0.01 for each US$0.20 decrease in the average annual price of registrations below $5.00, down to a minimum of US$0.01 per transaction. For calendar quarters during which the average annual price of registrations is greater than US$5.00, the Transaction Fee will be increased by US $0.01 for each US$0.20 increment in the average annual price of registrations above $5.00."
Support the EFF and Creative Commons. The war is coming, and they're supporting you...
.gov, .mil, and .edu are anomalies and should really be a subset of .us.
Country TLDs would work fine if the smaller countries kept better control over them but since they don't even there there tends to be issues.
Marc Hurst set this up in 96. It still works. You just can't see it. But that's your choice how you configure what servers you believe to tell you what tlds exist.
Need Mercedes parts ?
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/
$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.