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New ICANN TLDs May Cause Internet Land Rush
wiryd writes "A new ICANN proposal would allow applications for almost any TLD. From the article: 'Tourists might find information about the Liberty Bell, for example, at a site ending in .philly. A rapper might apply for a Web address ending in .hiphop. "Whatever is open to the imagination can be applied for," says Paul Levins, ICANN's vice president of corporate affairs. "It could translate into one of the largest marketing and branding opportunities in history."'"
of horrible urls. How will people still be able to understand URLs if the are horribly malformed? Soon, people will not be able to distinguish between a TLD and a domain and people will fall to cleverly constructed scams.
Also, no domain is safe. Everybody can now claim google.philly or google.hiphop and companies can do nothing about it(or start countless lawsuits). This is a bad idea and implementing this will cause the www to be more confusing than it is now.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
"It could translate into one of the largest clusterfucks in history."
FTFY
... anybody who has $185,000 for the fee, that is.
Where do we sign up to have this not happen?
You must be new here. You had a chance. ICANN took comments on this last year. Apparently not enough people spoke up about the problems, because they are going forward with it anyways.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
No the point of DNS was to replace the unmanageable /etc/hosts issue.
Awesome furniture, accessories and cabinetry in Santa Rosa, CA: http://humanity-home.com/
I would tend to agree with this, simply because so many bogus "search engines" get whole blocks of common misspellings for popular sites just to try to generate traffic/revenue on people's typos, thus the smart thing to do is use Google. Aside from the fact that everybody uses Google anyway, that is.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
The age of the domain name is over in my opinion. People find information by going through search engines, I would guess a very small population still types www.whatiwant.com when surfing. They would have learned their lesson a long time ago that that's not a smart idea.
I don't think that's true at all, lots of important sites can be easily remembered, and that's a good thing. Otherwise, we place all of our information, some of it vital, into the hands of a few big companies, like Google, who would then hold the keys to the castle. It's almost like they're a one-man DNS server converting what you want into a site name. I think we'd be better served to pare things down a tad so there weren't so many damned TLDs, rather than just give up. If we did give up, why not eliminate names altogether?
But honestly, the problem's not that dire, domain names are still usable. Let's say I want info on the Obama administration, for instance. I type in "whitehouse.com" and find a great deal of valuable information, some interesting images, and end up feeling a lot better about the direction this country is headed.
Most people will never look beyond the first two screens of search engine hits - the greater the amount of information published on the web, the more that is referenced on pages 3 and beyond.
mp3.com
buy.com
cars.com
linux.com
and of course ...
timecube.com
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Even in a distributed system there is somebody at the top. There has to be, otherwise where do you start from a blank slate?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_hash_table
Watch great movie opening scenes!
ICANN has never given a damn what anybody says anyway. I was a member of the At-Large community that elected representatives to the At-Large Advisory Committee. Anyone remember how well that went? From Wikipedia:
"In the Memorandum of Understanding that set up the relationship between ICANN and the U.S. government, ICANN was given a mandate requiring that it operate "in a bottom up, consensus driven, democratic manner." However, the attempts that ICANN have made to set up an organizational structure that would allow wide input from the global Internet community did not produce results amenable to the current Board. As a result, the At-Large constituency and direct election of board members by the global Internet community were soon abandoned."
If they don't like what others have to say, regardless of how good the advice may be, they simply ignore you and proceed in whatever way they believe will gain them more power, influence and money. That's the simple explanation for this move.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer