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ICANN Might Pre-Register gTLDs To Placate Critics
judgecorp writes "ICANN is to be congratulated for succeeding in expanding the Internet beyond the Latin alphabet. However, the organization is facing a harder task in extending the Internet's global top-level domains (gTLDs) — its proposal to open up the gTLD space has been plagued by controversy and delays. INCANN faces struggles with trademark owners and competing businesses — but even so it is being criticized for acting slowly (as seen in transcripts from the recent meeting in Seoul). It now seems likely the body will have a pre-registration scheme to gauge demand and placate critics by getting something moving on new gTLDs."
When will Slashdot move under .slashdot?
Unicode is hard! Let's forget all our troubles with a big bowl of ice cream!
The ./. tld? I think I like it.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
No it isn't.
If you think phishing and typosquatting are bad now, think of how bad it will be when people see a link that looks like logon.[pictogram of a cat sitting on a stool].bank and it redirects to logon.[pictogram of a cat sitting on a stool with its tail curled a little bit at the end].bank that's owned by Lavaturian gangsters.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
they used ASCII? even the smiley faces that map to ASCII 0, and 1 and escape character that map to ASCII 27? And what about Confucius, Buddha? they never used ascii/latin/english.
It isn't a .com(pany) either. It has nothing to do with .net(work related services).
Technically it should be slashdot.info but really, who cares? The gTLDs have lost their meaning and that is a good thing - it is impossible to moderate them well so it is better if people don't assume they should be given any attention.
How many translations of "goat.se" are there?
there's no smiley face in ASCII. you may be thinking of code page 437.
Plato was Greek, you insensitive clod!
There are 40 applicants who paid ICANN $50,000 each in year 2000 who ICANN has strung along all these years, neither granting nor denying. These include IOD's application for .web.
ICANN needs to deal with this leftover business from 9 years ago.
Can I write my html and javascript in farsi now?
I see it this way:
Plato: BeOS - Like, very deep, man. Thoughtful.
Shakespeare: Mac OS X - He was fashionable . . . big collars and all. And he just wanted to write, and did not want to be bothered with technical details.
Jesus: Let's see - The Emperor of Rome, Tiberius (Bill Gates) controlled the known world at that time. Some yokel from some hick province starts a movement that challenges the monopoly, by preaching an alternative. Tiberius hires a hatchet man, Pontius Pilate (Daryl McBride), to "take care of the problem, using fear, etc."
So, like the bumper sticker says "Jesus runs Linux."
Makes a good Halloween tail, eh?
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
He was Athenian. Greeks weren't invented until much later.
Any existing 2nd-level domain registrant automatically gets assigned a new TLD equivalent to the current 2nd-level name minus the TLD suffix. Collision priority scheme is .edu, then .com, then .org and .net, then .gov, and finally .mil. Ignores ccTLDs.
First, take care of the .edu sites: Automatically register a new TLD for each registered .edu name, such the that new TLD is the 2nd-level part of the existing .edu name. For example, Harvard U. currently owns 'harvard.edu.', so they would automatically receive the new 'harvard.' TLD.
Second, it seems reasonable to assume that the .com names have higher visibility than the .net/.org names, but not quite as over-riding as the grant to the existing .edu holders. Autoregister the new TLD and give it to the .com holder, but allow a weighted bidding process if the current .net or .org holder wants to try to buy the rights: During some designated 6-month period before open TLD registration starts, the .org/.net holder puts a bid of X dolllars in trust, and the .com holder has 60 days to match 20% of X (single-round bid, weighted at 0.2). That weighting is pretty arbitrary--it doesn't really matter what the actual weight is.
Third, whatever's left in the TLD space gets assigned to .gov and .mil names, on the same basis as .edu.
It's not perfect--it totally ignores ccTLDs, and the weighting is arbitrary, and who am I to say that a .com name is more of a claim on the new TLD than a .net/.org name?
But do you think an unqualified, disorganized "land rush" would be somehow better? At least this way, you're limiting the number of trademark/squatting cases that have to be litigated.
It is very important that the TLD name space is not available to end users (neither individuals nor corporations). That would remove all administrative diversity from the domain name space. When you register a domain, not only do you choose a string of characters, you also choose a business partner: The registry. There is only one TLD registry: ICANN. That is an instant monopoly and should not become part of daily business.
To maintain choice, TLDs should be assigned to registries only and registries (as well as any affiliated company or individual) should be forbidden to use domains under the TLD(s) for anything unrelated to the registration services. Registries should have to operate name servers on every continent and have sufficient name resolution capacity.
Every time something new is created, the squatters make millions, and everyone else has headaches. Does that not sum up ICANN's contributions in the last decade?
"Microsoft killed my company, I hold a personal grudge. I don't use Microsoft products and neither should you."-JWZ
All new TLDs are immediately filled by the same old names.
If they created a new TLD of .whateveryoulike then you can be sure that all the corporate big names would fill in their names - Microsoft, Sears, Exxon or whoever. After them would come all the domain grabbers who would sit on anything of interest and offer it for "only $499".
It needs to be ensured that this does not just become another land-grab by multiple registrars, like last times...
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
I don't get the point of having a new gTLD if it just ends up being a perfect replica of existing TLDs. Why do we need harvard.cool when we already have harvard.edu?
If anything there should be an outright ban on owning the same name in more than one TLD.
It just seems like another way to get everybody with a domain name to fork over a chunk of change to get another one.
Thank you for bringing this up Karl; right now there's a certain Euphoria about IDN's and tons of people who didn't do any work on them are patting themselves on the back: it's newsworthy; people come up to me on the street and tell me the news.
And per AVC's suggestion they think maybe they can get started on new "g"tld apps, another source of institutional euphoria. I suggested long ago to him to organize a tld-apps "union".
I'm not sure anything short of a lawsuit would awaken the memory of the ICANN 2000 TLD apps, to say nothing of Postels list of tlds that IANA had noticed in 1997.
But who'd want to fund that kind of action? Seems they'd rather just pay again. Class action?
The .xxx reconsideration should be out any day. Fleming says the judges will say "hey the bylaws let them act like assholes and they acted like assholes".
Need Mercedes parts ?
Read the comments you mod. It is obviously funny, not insightful.
Domain names still can't be pictures... And being able to use non-latin won't really affect typosquatting at all. You don't accidentally hit another key and write your bank's URL in chinese alphabet instead of latin one. And if you do, it doesn't look the same so this really doesn't make phishing easier.
Either the insightful modder is a troll or (more likely) modded that as insightful as it criticizes a governmental body (Well, kind of) without actually caring to even read the comment.
I guess that this is slightly better mod than the troll mod there was earlier...
"Any existing 2nd-level domain registrant automatically gets assigned a new TLD equivalent to the current 2nd-level name minus the TLD suffix. Collision priority scheme is .edu, then .com, then .org and .net, then .gov, and finally .mil. Ignores ccTLDs."
The "move the dot to the left one" argument came up in 1997. I liked it. Course, I suggested it.
Having to pick a "winner" from com/net/org/edu etc means win-lose. Much better I think would be for them to run it in a cooperative manner. Recall that originally the Internic was run as an NSF cooperative agreement between three companies: GA, NSI and AT&T. I think consumers would feel better knowing there are multiple companies than any one outfit. Plus it's one-one.
Then you only have the problem if having 150 million tlds. ICANN will probably say there are "issues" and somebody with a DJBDNS box supporting this will no doubt shortly after echo "what issues?".
Need Mercedes parts ?
RT @Techno_Cat http://is.gd/4JAAj "There are 40 applicants who paid
#ICANN $50,000 each" Mike Roberts said there were applicants the U.S. Government denied.
Need Mercedes parts ?
i've got a lil greek in me.
Deny them all and problem solved!
Who will rid me of this troublesome gTLD madness?
> "ICANN is to be congratulated for succeeding in expanding the Internet beyond the Latin alphabet.
The problem isn't that ICANN expanded "the Internet" beyond the Latin Alphabet (or at least the subset enshrined in ASCII's alphanumeric characters plus hyphen)... the problem is the collateral damage it caused, and continues to cause, because they did the equivalent of dumping a freeway interchange in the middle of an already-thriving residential neighborhood.
ICANN (possibly with IETF) needs to do three things:
1) Work with IETF to extend DNS so that TLD registrars can define a specific subset of UTF-8 that's valid for its subdomains. By definition, .com/.net/.org should be forever restricted to the historical [A-Za-z0-9\-] subset to put an end to homograph phishing. In other words, no TLD could indiscriminately include everything from legacy-ASCII to Klingon, Runes, and ancient Egyptian. They'd have to pick the characters used to write a single real language and stick with it.
2) Require that TLD character-validity rules be fully normalized against characters between 0x30 and 0x7f. In other words, if there's a letter in the language's unicode codepage that looks just like ASCII 'i', they can allow ASCII 'i', or the language's own version of 'i' with its own UTF-8 value, but NOT both. The choice of which 'a-zA-Z' to use would largely depend upon which value gets generated from a keypress by a keyboard in the target country.
3) Create new TLDs for writing systems used in more than one country, by at least 50 million people... preferably, short and understandable to anyone in a country that uses that writing system. So, Chinese might get .{zhong} or .{zhongwen} (but the PRC itself's country TLD might be .{zhongguo}), Cyrillic might sensibly get the characters that resemble .NHT (backwards 'N') which apparently is the abbreviation for "Int" in Russian, Ukranian, Serbian, and probably most other languages using Cyrillic, etc, and conveniently looks vaguely like ".NET" to everyone else (but the backwards-N would ensure only a complete idiot could think it really WAS .net). Ditto for Arabic. Languages almost synonymous with a single country (Hebrew, Greek, Japanese, Korean, etc) or spoken by fewer than 50 million real people in daily business wouldn't get their own TLDs... but their countries would get a new country TLD in the writing system (along with their old 2-letter TLD).
The point is, the way internationalization has been rolled out so far has created a worldwide party for fraud and phishing via homograph attacks. An end needs to be put to it NOW. If someone has an existing IDNS name that would be invalidated by the new rules (say, {nurren}.com), they'd get first chance at it in the new .{zhong} TLD (nurren}.{zhong}). If there were two or more existing .com|.net|.org domains that clashed (say, {nurren}.com and {nurren}.net), they'd have to share the TLD and settle for distinct subdomains of it, like {something}.{nurren}.{zhong} and {somethingdifferent}.{nurren}.{zhong}.
And what if Harvard is a legally registered trademark in a foreign country, not owned by Harvard University? Shouldn't the TLD in that foreign language go to the trademark owner of the country that natively speaks the foreign language?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
I can't wait for the next profitable action from ICANN that will improve spamming opportunities to take effect. Really, the current gTLDs are far too well regulated - we need something wide open so that domains are not traceable or accountable to anyone at all.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Then why bother having different TLD's? If Harvard has the .edu and other FQDNs, why do we even bother having multiple? It's not like slashdot.edu matters because that school of thought is at the dot org already. How many white houses are there (ok, stop with teh porn site references right now...)? Or cia? or microsofts?
Why don't we get rid of the TLD all together and just type in http://microsoft/ and be done with it?
Most Chinese registrars totally ignore the rules for registrars. When will there be some enforcement there?
Until then, I wish the Internet would blacklist Chinese IPs. I know the Net helps a little to spread freedom there, but they are out of control. Ask a sys admin about how often their systems are attacked by Chinese IPs? Or ask the person who works the abuse@ how much spam comes out of or links to Chinese addresses.
I thought .org was for non-profit organizations...