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ICANN Proposes New Way To Buy Top-Level Domains
narramissic writes "Late last week, ICANN put up for comment a new top-level domain (TLD) proposal that would open up the market for generic TLDs on the Internet, basically allowing anyone with $185,000 to buy a new TLD. ICANN has based the cost of a generic TLD on what it believes will be the cost to evaluate applications and protect the organization against risk, said Paul Levins, ICANN's executive officer and vice president for corporate affairs. Any excess money would be redistributed based on the wishes of the Internet community, he said. As of late Tuesday, there were only a couple of comments on the proposal."
Now I can finally register clownpenis.fart !
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
Slashdot takes the piss by setting its new homepage at aich-tee-tee-pee-colon-slash-slash-slash-dot-dot-dot-slashdot. All those going to aich-tee-tee-pee-colon-slash-slash-slashdot-dot-com are redirected to idle.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
www.microsoft.bob
...And will this effect DNS servers that are currently in use? Are there limits to the number of top level domains in their tables?
www.eat.me
etc...
Since it's going to be spent according to the wishes of the "Internet community", I can only assume 95% of it will be spent on porn.
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/10/24/1716233&from=rss
"wishes of the internet community"
That's just like "The American People" politicians keep talking about: the wealthy top 0.001% Internet Community.
This is probably a bad idea, but the article tags did suggest a great new TLD: .wtf.
Momentarily, the need for the construction of new light will no longer exist.
I hate to be cynical (no, that's a lie, I love to be cynical), but what's the point of commenting on this to ICANN.
ICANN has proven again and again that they listen to corporations and governments (mostly the American) but really couldn't care less what the general internet users want. Or even what the general internet users need. Sure, they'll put up some superficial show of consulting the community, but it never amounts to much.
ICANN has been bought and paid for. Really, the only way a normal internet user can comment on ICANN's actions is to take their business elsewhere (ie. alternate DNS roots).
This sounds like a pretty bad idea. The first thing that comes to mind is the wholesale registration of TLD's for typosquatting.
At least they'll be able to register a proper domain: .con
Do we have the basic TLDs? yes, stop...
Does pretty much every country have its own basic TLD? yes, stop...
whoever came up with this idea, please, stop...
especially for that low a price... maybe for $1.85 billion, but not $185,000.
ICANN needs to learn how to play solitaire, maybe then they'd get the reason they're there.
(hint, it's the first rule of both business and IT... "whatever you do, don't touch it").
Since when does the internet community pay for porn?
Is how many orders of "herbal viagra" do you need to sell to pull in $185,000 to register .v1agra (or other such clever alternate spelling) to run your spamming operation with no registrar oversight ever again?
Yes, this is a terrible idea for reasons already brought up.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Anyone want to try buying .php, or .exe, just to see what happens?
I predict a large outpouring of capital to secure any suffix TLD. Just think how companies will clamor to make words out of their URL (see: de.licio.us). I am going to buy ".ing" and ".est" and make a fortune!
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
according to the wishes of the "Internet community"
So they are going to handle this like they do domain squating/kiting? ie. Make as much money as they can and tell everyone else to screw off?
Apparently these jokers do not know how valuable a TLD is. $185,000 is all you would charge? This needs to be well north of $185k more like $18 million. I will buy the TLD .xxx for $185K tomorrow and then make somewhere north of $50 MM off everyone else.
Was the overlord welcome redundant or the question concerning the need of more TLDs redundant? Because redundant repetition is something that I try over and over again to avoid in the most repetitive manner.
Your points bring up another two.
Firstly, ICANN doesn't do all that they should now to "manage" domains and if they're going to add more, then they should do a more honest job of determining the level of service they will commit to for what is, let's face it, a discretionary option. Nobody NEEDS their own TLD. This is about things that are optional. That being the case, isn't it long past time that ICANN committed to having some sort of effective system to address, for example, claimjumping? I lost a domain a few years back because I was in the hospital for two months, in and out of conciousness for several weeks of that, and yet some fucker has been able to come in and take my domain, use it only to get traffic on the subjects I used it for, and my host provider and everybody else I talk to says that basically I'm screwed. Where the hell is ICANN at a time like this?
Afaict, from the first ten pages or so of TFA, the only costs they assess are those of reviewing and processing the application, which is not how any rational organization would approximate them, Even after the application, there will be costs of some sort to maintain the damned thing and afaic, for something this discretionary they should set the bar higher and commit to providing better service, service that costs money, services like domain ownership arbitration, and then estimate the total costs to incorporate that level of service.
In another point, from spagetti suppers at smalltown churches to sale of air rights by private schools, there is nothing unusual about a non-profit treating sale of non-essential goods as a profit opportunity. The term "non-profit" is an oversimplification, as anybody who has gone around selling candy for their sports team knows. We know that some people would pay tens of millions for their own TLD and we know that nobody NEEDS their own TLD so why shouldn't they charge at least a few million each?
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
So what I want is to buy .extort1 as a TLD for 180K and then basically open up shop
so anyone who wants to get foo.com but can't afford it can get foo.extort1 instead.
This means the owner of the name foo will have to pay me to keep their brand pure,
since they'll want to own foo.extort1. Then when I need more cash, I can make a .extort2 and
start selling foo again as foo.extort2 unless foo again pays me to hold their brand.
Well, ok, so probably .extort1 won't sound so good and no one will want to visit it so the
foo owner may not care. But if foo is a brand of shoes and I buy a .shoes or a .clothes or a .footwear or a .america or a .united-states or a .united-states-of-america or a .english-speaking
or even nuisance names like .go or .yes or .buy or .super or .comm then there are going to be lots
of opportunities to extort the owner of foo.com over and over and over.
And to whose benefit? Are there really so many businesses in the world that need domain names? An awful lot of decent domain names don't command much of a price these days now that there are auction sites that show them side-by-side so you can see that the space is really rich with options, and now that domain sales agencies already suggest dozens of reasonable name combinations not yet taken.
This is just a scam pushed by people who want to make money, and it just causes the little guy who is trying to build and protect a brand to scramble. Coke or Disney may not have much trouble covering, since it's a tiny fraction of their operation, but someone trying to build a reasonable brand from nothing may have a great deal of difficulty. And yet, big companies can already afford to just buy out whatever names it wants (or push people out by applying appropriate legal means around an established trademark). And smaller operations can better afford to use a longer name than they can to get a good short name and then never be able to protect it because of a proliferation of more-or-less-duplicates under different top level domains.
And none of this considers the way that heuristics work in text editors, recognizing foo.org as a URL without anyone having to say. When .anything can be a domain name, how will text editors know whether you just forgot to insert a
space or you intentionally wanted to auto-highlight something as a domain name.
There are plenty enough domain names. The one thing there might not be is a fair distribution of them across non-English languages or non-US countries. But that isn't what it sounds like their mechanism will fix. If anything it will take the existing problem and compound it.
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
Since when are your eyeballs the "community".
The Internet, like television, has become a farm, where website developers raise eyeball-bearing click-monkeys like you and sell them wholesale to advertising resellers.
Once again, as with TV, you are not the customer of the Internet, you are its product.
Sounds like it could easily be abused by domain squatters.
How do these sound:
www.micro.soft
www.goog.le
...
www.face.book
Any site, make it plural
slashdot.org.s
facebook.s
hot.girl.s
naked.chick.s
etc
Judging by the amount of money raised for the atheistbus the Humanist Society should by .god to stop the godsquad getting it.
Not to mention
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
I strongly encourage people to write to that address and voice your opinion on the issue. That is, after all, why it is called a public forum.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Many of us have named many of their local machines with a short name having no dots. Maybe as many use have a search setup for their local domain. So what happens if I happen to have a local machine named "tube", and someone decides to register the "tube" TLD and puts an A record on it, which he most likely will -- after all, if you owned a TLD, wouldn't you put your website there?
You got it right, a big mess. And that's just the first thing that comes to mind that open TLD registration might disturb.
I don't have any problem with TLDs being a mess. There is no way to put such a big system as the world DNS in good order and keep it tidy, and after you are used to it, it doesn't make much difference. It might even be better, or at least no worse, than it would have been if there were strict rules about who and what.
However, opening the main namespace for open registration sounds to me like a bad idea. That's a big no-no for me. Especially when it is everyone's main domain namespace, and we are already using it excessivly for a lot of stuff.
The good thing is that the impact wouldn't be that big as, while many companies could afford a TLD of that price, I hope there won't be a huge rush for registrations, and honestly, I don't have any boxes named 'ms' and 'ibm', and even if I have, renaming one or two wouldn't be much a trouble.
But even then, this shouldn't be allowed. At all.
I would then block any e-mail coming form @*.v1agra.
Email domains are easily - and frequently - spoofed. What I was trying to get to is that the actual spamvertised domain would be something in a new gTLD (such as .v1agra). Blocking traffic from .v1agra would be useless in this situation, as you'll still see email from some other .com domain which is spamvertising the pretend pharmacy in the new .v1agra domain.
Sorry if I was not clear on that one. While many people place the blame for spam on the domain from which the spam was sent, I for one prefer to blame those responsible for the registration and hosting of the domain that is being advertised by said spam.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Worse than that. They expect the application fees to "protect against risks". Now, just what 'risks' could that possibly be? It's not like they could hit somebody with a truck, or a building might fall on somebody. Just what sort of risk is involved in maintaining a database that links tediously formatted names with a 32-bit number?
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Fuck. The word is fuck, not frak. This isn't broadcast television. Remember to stress that fricative for best effect!
May the Maths Be with you!
Who are versed in this sort of thing and don't agree with it can simply write the libraries and server software to refuse to acknowledge them.
The average windows user won't know what's up, but those of us who run the DNS servers will.
Since it's going to be spent according to the wishes of the "Internet community
No, no, no. The article specifically said "redistributed" according to the wishes of the Internet community.
This should be getting tons of support from the new Obama administration.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
I like the auction idea. Not all TLD's are of equal value. Perhaps instead of a fixed price there should be a fixed minimum bid to cover costs and an auction of, say, 90 days to see who is willing to pay the most for the rights to control the new TLD. That should bring in enough revenue that the minimum bid could be brought down to a range that some smaller organizations could afford, like $1000.
Perhaps there should be an annual maintenance fee. How about 1% of the purchase price? If the fee is not paid the domain is re-auctioned to a new owner. I foresee problems with the new owner raising rates on sub-domain owners, either to milk them or to drive them away so the sub-domains can be re-sold... Not sure if/how I would propose controlling that.
so that we can have slashdot.dot
The problem is that $185k isn't really a "good lump" of money to many companies. It's more like "pocket change."
Xfce: Lighter than some, heavier than others. Just right.
Think of the possibilities!
I think we need to be prepared for a new generation of phishing. There can be unlimited number of these going around. How about a registration for patch and someone gets a mail linking to http://www.ms08-067.microsoft.patch/ promoting it as the patch for the latest RPC exploit.
Damn. Why am I paying to be a product?
Perhaps because it's a blatantly obvious cash-grab by an organization whose ostensible purpose is to serve the Internet community, but instead lives off of it parasitically?
Perhaps because it would require many people to register multiple domain names (possibly thousands) in order to protect their brands, or else leave them open to be registered by squatters and phishers.
Perhaps because there's just no legitimate technical reason for it?
Perhaps because it would be a giant pain in the ass and probably break various pieces of software, requiring people who have no interest in the issue either way to expend energy on it?
Those are just the things that come immediately to mind.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Um, why do we need to separate sites' domain names by "commercial," "network," "organization," "foreign country" and so on?
Let's grant for the sake of argument that there are good reasons to do so (and I wouldn't be terribly surprised if there are). Then, we still have to ask: sure, but why do we need to make that distinction with DNS?
DNS is a distributed database that maps hierarchical names to IP addresses. The only thing that's essential to the hierarchy is that the authority for establishing and updating the mappings under a certain subhierarchy falls to a specified person or organization.
Let's just stop pretending DNS is a good solution for "rational organization" of internet sites, and leave that function to other network services (e.g., directories, search engines).
Are you adequate?
Um, why do we need to make TLD vs. non-TLD such an important distinction? What does it really matter how many TLDs there are? The only domain level that really is "special" is the root domain. Why shouldn't TLDs be as freely purchasable as second-level domains?
The implied answers I hear to these questions tend to presuppose that the purpose of hierarchical DNS spaces is to "organize" the Internet, so that commercial sites get put in one TLD, educational institutions in another, UK sites in yet another, and so on. This really strikes me as a very unconvincing idea. Can't we organize the Internet better using a varied collection of directories and search engines, all of these more powerful than DNS?
There are other objections that have to do with things like typosquatting and phishing. I think these really point to UI problems; we've built the Internet so far so that users are exposed too much to domain names. Or, in other terms, we need more powerful and secure ways of pointing end users at Internet resources. Again, non-DNS directories and search engines would do the trick.
Basically, DNS is a pretty good distributed database that maps hierarchical, symbolic host names to IP addresses. The hierarchy of domain names corresponds to a hierarchy of authority to decide which mappings exist within a particular subtree. If you want a domain name at a given level, you should just be able to pay for it. The cost of a domain at any given level should be determined by the cost of running the DNS servers for that domain level. I.e., TLDs might perhaps be more expensive than lower level domain names because running the root DNS servers would be more expensive than running the servers for a second-level domain.
The only domain that really is special is the root domain. All of the recursive sublevels of that are basically equivalent.
Are you adequate?
For the same reason that Merriam-Webster has removed gullible from the dictionary.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
With the tremendous proliferation of TLDs, the DNS could need a massive infrastructure change.
The root zone will very likely grow from thousand fold to million fold, thus ramping the query load up on world root servers (13 clusters somehow spread all orund the world).
Simply put, the current DNS infrastructure was not design for this!
Maybe it could also be the time to implement EDNS
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
Time for a free p2p powered internet naming system with plug ins for common browsers? I envision several competing naming networks, each with its own naming architecture. So you could have for example darknames:whatever.I.want to identify a an IP. where darknames is a "naming domain" within the naming system. That way if they wanted to take down, say gambling sites, they.. well, couldn't.
Just what sort of risk is involved in maintaining a database that links tediously formatted names with a 32-bit number?
Proliferation of phishing and social engineering, primarily - and let's not forget the various technical risks that DNS system as a whole has had over time.
I believe the money as a risk avoidance is to be understood as "your average small-time conman or a parents'-basement script kiddie can't afford the registration costs, and it would be prohibitively expensive even for big-time criminals to spend and immediately lose an investment that big".
Well at least the names apt as it's clearly a site for twits who witter a lot.
Sky subscribers are morons. They pay to be advertised at !
Just a thought experiment. Suppose you set up a TLD - .bob for instance. Users can set up domains for web sites, e-mail, FTP etc. within .bob just like any other domain, but the rules of using it are different from the rest of the web. Such as -
.bob account holders can access .bob sites. No one else can get in, not even google. .bob sites cannot be accessed anonymously, but .bob sites must guarantee privacy - your usage can't be shared with anyone else.
.bob e-mail addresses or chat names must be linked to an actual person. .bob users can only send/receive e-mails or IM to other .bob addresses. Nothing outside .bob is allowed in. .bob access
.bob account comes with a license with nearly all known media companies. (www.timewarner.bob, for instance.) For a monthly fee you can access any media they have digitized - books, news, film, music, games, software, etc. It's DRMed out the wazoo, of course. All usage is tracked. Violate the terms of use and you lose your .bob access.
.ftw might only allow services that are fully encrypted and anonymous, for example.
Web -
- Only other
-
E-mail and IM -
- No anonymous addresses or accounts.
-
- Spam is not allowed. At all. You spam, you lose your
Content -
- Your
In other words, a fully privatized portion of the internet. A nightmare to some, but to others - "Access to all media? No spam? $39.95 a month? Where do I sign?"
Other TLDs could set up other ecologies.
Is there anything that would prevent TLD owners from doing this?
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
They do? Shit, when did this happen?
Obligatory Soundbite Catchphrase
Wasn't he that guy who went around a lot? Travelling?
And hey, I followed your link and the definition is so still there!
Wait a minute...
-DwS
How about .big?
Then you could have clownpenis.big
In meatspace I like to toss people the dictionary and tell them to look it up because it was removed. Yes, I have no life.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."