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Hundreds of New TLDs Coming — Question Is When
netbuzz writes "A controversial plan to introduce hundreds of new top-level domains could be headed for the fast track to implementation or something more akin to the back burner, depending on what ICANN makes of public comments due to close at the end of this month. At most immediate issue is whether the process of granting these new TLDs will feature a pre-registration process that proponents say is necessary to accurately gauge the depth of interest and skeptics fear as moving too fast too soon. Says one critic: 'In effect, it's like ICANN saying we don't know what route this race is going to take or the shape of the track, but we're going to fire the starting gun anyway.'"
The process could be really fast or not-so-fast! We don't really know exactly yet, though, so it's somewhere around either fast or not fast. Full story at 11.
I live in constant fear of the Coming of the Red Spiders.
slash.dot
This should be kind of interesting to the /.ers. The 2009 Public Comment Fourm meeting minutes produced an interesting document called the Standards for Morality and Public Order document. A summary of key points:
Legal research was conducted in selected jurisdictions in every region of the world in order to develop standards for the implementation of a dispute process for the GNSO recommendation on morality and public order.
Sitting and former judges on international tribunals, as well as attorneys and law professors who regularly appear before them, were consulted on appropriate limitations found in the legal research that could be incorporate into workable standards.
As a result of the legal research and consultations, the four identified standards are: (i) Incitement to or promotion of violent lawless action; (ii) incitement to or promotion of discrimination based upon race, color, gender, ethnicity, religion or national origin; (iii) Incitement to or promotion of child pornography or other sexual abuse of children; or (iv) a determination that an applied-for gTLD string would be contrary to equally generally accepted identified legal norms relating to morality and public order that are recognized under general principles of international law
I. Introduction and background
"Before God we are all equally wise - and equally foolish"
Albert Einstein
That's just going to blur the lines between TLD, domains and subdomains.
http://sport.sport.sport/
Without the protocol, I'm not going to parse that as a URL at all.
Whoever registers the .con TLD will become ipso facto the king of phising...
It may be 7 digits, but at least it's a semiprime
'In effect, it's like ICANN saying we don't know what route this race is going to take or the shape of the track, but we're going to fire the starting gun anyway.'
Opposed to the [insert comment here from someone much better versed in internet history than me] moment when DARPA became open to commercial entities?
Chaos works just fine for me, anyone else?
To me, the major issue appears to be that ICANN doesn't have a clear vision on what the purpose of TLD is.
In the past, we had two types of TLDs: One for geographical/political designation (country TLDs) and one for organisation-type designation (.com/.net/.org/.mil/.edu).
The ones they added, and which I think everyone agrees were utterly stupid, are a mix of lobby-dumbness and content designation (.info, .pro, .aero)
What we need is a clear view on what the meaning of the TLD should be. But since we don't get that, because ICANN doesn't have a vision at all, we'll end up with a mess of crap, no matter which way they turn.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
What are TLDs? Answer text strings in the ROOT servers DNS.
The only problem here is the registrars, who want to be able to continue to charge $20/year for next to nothing,
these are, generally the same people that charge $100/year for snake-oil CA certificates.
This con should have been stopped 10 years ago but it is another thing caught up in the US corporation+politics mess and will require a 1000 page report to do nothing.
---
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A controversial plan to introduce hundreds of new top-level domains into the Internet has reached a crossroads: The plan will either be accelerated or delayed based on public comments due at the end of January.
I'm glad that here at Slashdot, we have submitters/editors that dumb down the original summaries for us.
Article list .food as an example of a TLD that someone might want to register.
What if they get rid of the cyber squatters that own food.net and food.org - but where's the profit in that.
Probably after Dec 21, 2012
Personally, I can't wait until .bs (Bahamas) becomes available.
I've already purchased all the .bj (Benin) I could afford and I'm already reselling those for a tidy profit.
The old baltic kingdom of Prussia requires a top level domain.
... why?
There is a group in the German captial that want's a TLD .berlin. I always wondered, what they would do with it. If i want to find Berlin's website now, i'd try berlin.de or www.berlin.de. What would the future web address be? www.berlin? How can i be sure i end up in my capital and not in Berlin, TX (i'm pretty sure there is one :-)
This just deepens our dependence on search engines.
The only reason that .com was so popular was due to marketing; practically no one in meatspace knows what .com even means. It's just a freaking address for Christ's sake. We need a metric shit ton of new TLDs so that we can get away from "premium" TLDs. It's a lot like when they rolled out 888 and 877 toll-free numbers; 800 numbers commanded a premium, due to marketing. it's a just a phone number, if your customers can find you who cares? Besides, do you really want a customer that is ignorant enough not to call you or visit your site because you don't have an 800 number or a .com domain? I do have a number of .com domains, but I really wish the importance of the TLDs would diminish.
Oh, and fuck domain squaters.
I still cannot find the droids I am looking for...
Dilute DNS even more.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Several things imo.
As websites increase in number, the typical need for more unique domains increase. If a significant number of unique names are all tried to pull from a small number of TLD's, this makes it more difficult to find an available name that fits what you are trying to do. A substantial number of domains are tied up because of the squatters.
If the REAL cost was ten bucks a year or so to keep a domain, the squatting would go down. Remember when .com was $50.00 a year? The really juicy names would still be squatted on. With business.com selling for how many millions?
If a lot of new .TLD's are opened up, then it will be easy for you to get a domain you want. Say, bobspizza.newtld. If there is a real baseline of cost that makes it unlikely that people will squat on these new domains, then they will be available for business/people/organizations to use. However, .com is STILL the king of domains, and is what people want. But increase the supply say with 100 new TLD's (or more), and the impact of .com will be lessened, and the cost of squatting will become just too much.
I've noticed that organizations and businesses are using facebook/wordpress for websites a lot nowadays. With no TLD at all.
Will be interesting to see how this all plays out.
From TFA:
This is the same cash-grab proposal from a number of months ago where ICANN was considering offering custom TLDs to those with big enough pockets (ie.: .coke, .ford, .msoft, etc.). This is really not how the domain name system as a whole should work. We can't have creative new domain possibilities opened up only for a select few rich and famous. I'm not saying that they should be selling custom TLDs to anyone who wants one (although that shouldn't be a problem *), but simply continue to introduce generic TLDs that make sense (as quoted from the TFA).
.coke, how is that any different from someone registering cokewebsite.com? Either is a trademark issue with Coke and neither is for ICANN to deal with.
* if someone registers
Gov, com, edu etc are essential and geo/ country domains are also required due to the recent localization of search. Who uses .travel or any of the other major tld currently in operation? Nobody because they are not marketed properly and confuse people.
Some new tld will be solid for large niches in the internet (.porn, .xxx, .city, etc) and could be profitable, but the costs associated with having your own tld will be expensive and the risks high. Solid business plans and capital will be essential for the next wave of tld (not the same as regular domaining).
New View Media - Custom Website Design
I have a much better idea. Get rid of the gTLDs altogether. They are an arbitrary crutch to begin with. Without them we could have freeform domain names and end the silly quabbles over myname.everytldthereis.
What they are up to now looks more like damn money making scheme.
:T:R:A:N:S:
We need a .DOT domain -- that'll confuse somebody....
I think TLD's should be used to organize fraud to make it easier to manage. We just ask all tricksters use the .con TLD.
similarly, people with intent to bomb should be steered towards a .terror TLD. or perhaps a more generic .violence.
Also, TLD's should be translated, so that in French the TLD is http://alqaeda.terreur/ if your language setting is FR.
regardless of wether the URL is .con, .fraude, .terreur, .terror, .violence, .violencia, etc... We would then have a simple means of implementing http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc3514.html RFC 3514, just set the evil bit on all traffic coming from these domains.
All this so they can try and sell us .abc, .bcd, .cde, .def and other versions of the domains. Big money for domain registrars.
The artificial scarcity created by limiting .TLD's to a select few makes it feasible for domain squatters to squat on typos. The TLD's were completely open (any possible), then the economics of typo-squatting start to suck because they have to pay for far more domains to hit a lucrative one.
If, say, IBM consolidated to a single TLD (.ibm), they would keep some other domains for legacy purposes, but more than likely, it's harder to typo-squat a TLD than a sub-domain because there are
fewer letters to mess with. Spelling IBM imperceptibly wrong is harder than messing with ibm.com.
legitimate large organizations can better protect their name with access to TLD's than when they are stuck in the .com soup to nuts category.
Concentrating on protecting a smaller number of more unique domains is a net win for legitimate people.
Another thing that might help is some sort of reputation mechanism for DNS. Today we have binary blacklists, it would be helpful to have grey lists indicating domain squatters etc... to give people the option to filter them out. Obviously, these lists would have to be maintained by third parties, such as today's blacklist operators, to be reliable. Augmenting DNS would be cleaner than the current mechanism, and would allow to differentiate amoung DNS providers.
Are we getting .blog yet? Actually that fad's kind of gone and Facebook is the new blog, so maybe .social . How long can these TLDs be?
You must be about the last one standing who *still* after all these years hasn't realised that the Internet != USA. Sure, I realise you think that the EU government *ought* to be properly considered as something belonging to the US, but you can't seriously expect they *are* going to give up their domains.
Your idea is half-right, though. The top-level US domains .gov, .com and .mil should be moved under the ccTLD .us, just like everyone else. Because you're not as special as you like to think.
Go ahead and allow the new domains.
However, make a rule that all sites and DNS servers in the new TLDs must exist in IPv6 form only, and make it an instant ban if anyone using the new TLD is caught with any A record in their zone file for that TLD.
Maybe it will push things to IPv6, especially if the .XXX TLD exists in IPv6 form only. Pron is the only way that we can get a large amount of people to move to IPv6 before the run-out in 600 days or so.....
This way, although I think we have too many TLD's now, if this could be used to push people to IPv6, Id go along......
Finally clownpenis.fart can be real.
I hope so.
This could have a fascinating result:
1) Organisations sign up to host their own "so cool" root domain, expecting that lots of companies will be "forced" to register their key words in the new root domain
2) Companies finally wake up and say "WTF? We don't need this shit" and don't buy in
3) Lots of organisations who did #1 realise they're not going to be able to make enough to pay ICANN let alone cover their costs
4) Scumbuckets come in and start domain-squatting, setting up crap sites, etc
The above may well lead to:
5) People stop trusting domains and use search engines more (it's happening more & more now anyhow - most people can't remember even simple domains and use search engines to find them)
6) More legal cases for domain-squatting and illegal use of registered trademarks/keywords/etc
7) No more "gold rush" mentality for the opening up of new TLDs
8) Bad press for ICANN and fewer groups willing to take part in the next "all new territory" TLD funding drive (leads to less $$$ for ICANN)
Yeah, I'm just dreaming. ICANN is rapidly joining the RIAA & MPAA as a prime example of a bloated, self-serving organisation that's doing all it can to hang onto a way of existance that's no longer viable :(
I left my body to science, but I'm afraid they've turned it down...
I don't know where to start first:
To my opinion, they are going way out of line by breaking open a new set of problems without solving the number one domain problem: Thefth/copycats.
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
In the end .com will still be #1 in consumers minds. Big companies have already invested too much into their .com marketing strategies that it wouldn't make much sense financially to switch to an unproven tld scheme.
Investing in domains is a viable business (excluding spammers, typos) and building up a large network of websites from those domains is no different from investing in speculative real estate or fine art.
New View Media - Custom Website Design
It's just an economic argument. Whether you view investment in domains as boon or bane, opening up TLD's will make far more 'land' available... given supply and demand, this should make the price go down... and also make it necessary to own more "land" to make the business profitable. You say that your business model is viable. The point is just that opening up TLD's reduces that business's viability.