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Can World Governments Veto Your Domain Name?
AugstWest writes "There's been talk recently of the Obama administration wanting the right to shoot down possible TLDs, but it looks like things may be going even a step further — According to this article by Laura Stotler, 'the NTIA is asking for the power to object to any proposed Internet address for any reason.' What happens if, say, the government of Germany decides they don't like your domain name? ICANN's had its share of bureaucratic nightmares, what happens when world governments also have a say?"
All your domain are belong to US!
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
This is a really wonderful idea. I certainly wouldn't want to register a domain that might not be acceptable to every bureaucrat in every government on the planet. This way, if there's something that a particular government doens't like, they can just remove it for me. Simple! This will be awesome!
Of course they quote this line:
Then in order to push their pov they ignore the very next line:
No single country can veto something, it takes a majority to agree to the veto.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
There is no law that says there can be only one DNS root. If the Governments start censoring domain names, a competing DNS structure will arise, e.g. based from OpenDNS or some other entity.
Does anyone else thing it's rather silly that ICANN is seriously considering new, highly-specific TLDs?
For example, a .nyc TLD is rather silly, as one can already get example.ny.us domains. If one has a New York office for their company, why not simply set up a subdomain of nyc.example.com? That way the organizational hierarchy is preserved without needing additional TLDs.
The article also mentions that the dotGAY Initiative and the .GAY Alliance are looking to get a .gay TLD. Why? Why not get gayalliance.org, assuming they don't already have it?
I'm curious as to the utilization of the less-common TLDs like .info, .jobs, .museum, and so on. I can't imagine they're terribly useful; why would a company buy example.jobs rather than simply use jobs.example.com?
Sure, ICANN wants to make money and trademark holders would need to re-purchase their names in different TLDs, so I see the financial motivation to create new TLDs, but it still seems like a bad idea for the internet as a whole.
New TLDs serve no useful purpose, and make things worse for everyone but the registrars. Legitimate organizations will now have to buy even more TLDs to prevent impersonation or typos. Users who are accustomed to everything residing under .com, .org (or .co.XX) will now have to remember the TLD in addition to the domain name. While the total number of available domains will theoretically increase, when you consider that organizations will be buy their name under all of them, this isn't true in practice. The only people who win are the registrars who now get paid more since people have to register more domains.
As far as removing old domains, there are two reason. Removing .biz and all the other crap domains is for the same reason above, to undo damage that has already been done by creating worthless TLDs. Transitioning the .mil, .gov, and .edu domains is mostly just an aesthetic / fairness thing; they are US specific domains, and really ought to reside in the .us TLD, but I could tolerate them remaining for legacy reasons.
Welcome to Communism! Where the government can take away your hard earned property just because they want to! Ask how wonderfully this general mechanism works for China...