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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)
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/10/24/1716233&from=rss
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?
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.