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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?
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.
This has been thought about more than you give them credit for. See this post of mine here. There is a quarterly fee they charge.
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.
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.
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
so that we can have slashdot.dot
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."
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".