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ICANN To Allow .brandname Top-Level Domains
AndyAndyAndyAndy sends in this excerpt from a Reuters report:
"Brand owners will soon be able to operate their own parts of the Web — such as .apple, .coke or .marlboro — if the biggest shake-up yet in how Internet domains are awarded is approved. After years of preparation and wrangling, ICANN, the body that coordinates Internet names, is expected to approve the move at a special board meeting in Singapore on Monday. ... The move is seen as a big opportunity for brands to gain more control over their online presence and send visitors more directly to parts of their sites — and a danger for those who fail to take advantage."
"As a big brand, you ignore it at your peril," says Theo Hnarakis, chief executive of Australian domain name-registration firm Melbourne IT DBS, which advises companies and other organizations worldwide about how to do business online.
And it only costs $185,000 USD.
Funny, that.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
In fact, I think it just makes it worse.
Not only will there continue to be trademark and other fights over .com, .net and all the rest, there will now be a new level of fighting over a huge rush of TLDs.
Next up, rapid filing for trademarks in small island nations and squatting on TLDs. If I thought of it that easily, so did a thousand scum-bags out there.
F U!
Sincerely,
The Internet
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
This does nothing but muddy the waters further as to what a top level domain is for. The original purpose was to help distinguish the class of site one was dealing with. Branding was already a clear part of the domain. The second part.
This will make web browsers less useful too. As it stands now, if you type apple in your browser bar, it uses a search engine and locates the cloest match to that idea. This would make it ambiguous with a TLD and make it impossible for your browser to easily tell when to search.
My impression is that most folks don't type addresses, they get to sites through google. If I want to go to say Ford's website I open google, type ford, and click on the first link. I usually never type urls unless I have no other way to get there. I don't really need to care if their site is ford.com or cars.ford or whatevever.
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
Now Apple Computers, Apple Corp, and assorted apple grower associations can all go to legal war with each over who has the most right to the one, the only, the singular ".apple" vanity TLD.
Protip: Trademarks don't all share the same namespace, and only have to be unique within a general field of commercial endeavor.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
This is just plain stupid...but then again, how many ideas birthed from pure greed aren't. I'll believe it's not an act of greed when they only charge $5/year to register these "uber-premium" names. Fat chance of THAT happening.
And when they advertise it's "dangerous" for companies to NOT register ALL relevant TLDs related to their business? I can hear the registrar salesperson now..."What?!?, you mean you don't have yourcompany.com/.net/.org/.info/.biz/.me/.mobi/.us/.biz/(and now) .brandname!?! You MUST register ALL of these NOW or your brand will surely be ruined!"
Yeah, good luck with SEO too...All their damn TLDs won't even fit on the first page of hits.
Just one more step for Corporations to be considered Sovereign Entities. Soon they will be considered the same as a country.
Real SUV's don't have cupholders
It's 5:42 A.M., do you know where your stack pointer is?
The internet is damaged by commercial interests. I don't think I'm speaking from nostalgia about 'the good old days' but large commercial interests have only weakened the utility of the internet.
The top level domains should be neutral. The internet is no longer neutral if every company can buy out the namespace.
I envy biological scientists and ecologists with their highly organized binomial classification systems. They're neutral. They organize information how it should be organized.
I reckon we have difficulty classifying and namespacing the internet is because we don't really know what it is. I guarantee that the information architecture will have at least one massive restructuring in our lifetimes. One day it will be called something different, like 'the link' or the 'exchange'. You know the 'omniscient' like information system that you see alien races mention in Star Trek.
Slashdot needs Geekcode | Can anyone recommend any good SCIFI? My tastes: Foundation, Startide Rising, CITY, Ringworld,
Hmmmmm, until recently, only countries and groups got TLDs. Now, corporations have been elevated to the level of countries.
Yet another sign that the dystopia is upon us.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
Yes,we are aware you are one of many petitioning for .FU, but now you must convince us you are not violating the .FUBU trademark.
Sincerely,
ICANN
I8-D
ICANN has really dropped the ball on new TLDs. Folks like Tim Berners-Lee were explicitly against new top level domains. The W3 even wrote a position paper New Top Level Domains Considered Harmful. They used the examples of .xxx and .mobi, but the reasoning applied to all new TLDs.
ICANN hand-picked economists to examine the costs and benefits, and their own experts could not come up with anything close to definitive as to whether the benefits exceeded the costs. ICANN is supposed to act in the public interest, and only approve policies where the net benefit (i.e. benefits MINUS costs) are positive. ICANN doesn't even know the *sign* (i.e. positive or negative) of this policy change's impact, let alone know the magnitude. Their pathetic reports didn't even attempt to put a monetary figure on the costs vs. the benefits, i.e. are we talking about millions of dollars of benefits, billions, etc? However, many individuals and companies commented in each of the relevant comment periods pointing out how there would be grave consequences, as there would be huge costs associated with such a change. As is typical, ICANN ignored these concerns, attempting to win a war of attrition, to "tire out" opponents.
Fortunately, the US Department of Commerce / NTIA may not renew its contract with ICANN. There is a pending Notice of Inquiry regarding the renewal. I would encourage people to send comments, to voice their concerns about the bad policymaking from ICANN.
ICANN is also about to renew the .NET agreement with VeriSign despite numerous comments in opposition. VeriSign will be allowed to continue to raise prices by 10% per year, despite falling technology costs, and without facing a competitive tender process (which would certainly result in much lower prices for consumers). The US Department of Justice should investigate both ICANN and VeriSign for anti-trust violations, as consumers are being harmed by these no-bid contracts. Toll-free numbers costs less than $1.50 per year at the wholesale level, yet .com/net/org fees are above $7/yr, due to lack of regular competitive tender processes.
Why has ICANN been consistently making decisions against the public interest? The reason is obvious -- it has been captured by the registries and registrars, who only care about selling more and more domain names, even if they are not needed (i.e. "defensive registrations"). They don't care about confusing users or making it harder to navigate the internet.
Doesn't seem to me that this is about the "internet" at all. Its about economics. For the ICANN. Say there are 10,000 international corporations who will pay to immortalize their brand name as a TLD. 10,000 corporations x $185,000 application fee per corporation = $1,850,000,000, or nearly 2 billion USD. Personally, I'd royally screw the internet for $2 billion. It appears ICANN would too.
Dear ICANN,
I'd like to register my company domains, we are Local Domain, Inc. Our leading product is our LocalHost operating system. Please register to us:
localdomain
localhost.localdomain
Thank you,
Root User of Local Domain
This sig intentionally left blank.
Anyone else here old enough to remember the Great Renaming on Usenet? It was just before my time there, actually, but this sounds like the exact same thing... in reverse. They took a whole bunch of newsgroups which were turning into an unwieldy flat file (under the net.* prefix), and sorted them into a hierarchy with a small batch of broad top-level nodes: (comp.*, misc.*, news.*, rec.*, sci.*, soc.*, talk.*) which could be further subdivided, etc. In the process net.comics became rec.arts.comics, and so on. What it built was a lot like the internet domain name hierarchy (but opposite-endian). It added structure and organization, which are Very Useful Things to have when dealing with Something Very Large. (Such as the Internet.) All this move by ICANN would do is to chop the last four characters off every .com in the database, and move that whole damn thing to the root level. If I can think of a business name that hasn't already been squatted, I can still register ____.COM for a few bucks, but I have to write up a proposal and take it to ICANN if I want to also claim .____? Bad policy, bad engineering, bad idea.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
How about www.com.apple?
Grammar nazis are to this community what excrements are to gold.
Proliferating the TLDs with all the .com domain names is just plain asinine.
Someone take these morons out back and have them shot, please.
As a counter-argument, I'd say that TLDs themselves (as they currently stand) are pretty worthless these days.
Consider: If you have a site that's not on ".com", and there's another domain with the same name, except it's in ".com", there's a pretty good chance site visitors will screw up and go to the ".com" on instead. If the same name is in different TLDs and these domains are not run by the same organization, confusion is bound to result.
So one solution would be to go to a fully flat namespace. Ditch TLDs. Do that, and any given name is going to be held by just one organization.
That's pretty much what this change is. TLDs become the new domains, while domain names within traditional TLDs become somewhat devalued. There will be a new "land-grab" for the newly-available TLD space, but given the cost, not many will gobble up TLDs frivolously.
If this catches on, there will be various benefits for those who can afford the premium exposure. "dot-com" will gradually become old-fashion and forgotten. The cost of domain-squatting a TLD will be significantly higher... And the difference between a high-budget site and a low-budget site (presently a matter of hosting quality, software quality, and organizational effort) would be reflected in the site's domain name, as well.
Of course, I'm less pleased with what this change would mean for everybody else - anyone who can't drop $185k on a TLD. Small sites will become increasingly marginalized...
Bow-ties are cool.
Great. Now we can have one stop shopping for protest domains.
riaa.go.fuck.yourself
sony.go.fuck.yourself
mpaa.go.fuck.yourself
Anybody got a spare 185k kicking around?
Beauty is in the eye of the beerholder.
The only thing this will do is give Go Daddy another gimmicky TLD to upsell
Now we can have:
http://slashdot.slashdot/
How about www.com.apple?
Even better, the The American Society for Microbiology could change their URL to www.org.asm. I imagine that'd get them a few extra page hits.
Momentarily, the need for the construction of new light will no longer exist.
Yeah, I was there. This is where brian reid got pissed off at gene spafford so brian and jon gilmore created alt.*
Speaking of alt, this also applied to dns...
Ironically it was Eugene Kashpureff that came up with the .brandnam idea in 1997 and was universally reviled by the very poeple who are doing it now. Turns out it wasn't that it was a bad idea, it was just they they wern't making any money off it. Now they can.
Need Mercedes parts ?
Even better, the The American Society for Microbiology could change their URL to www.org.asm. I imagine that'd get them a few extra page hits.
*facepalm*
My first though was "You mis-spelled 'organism'".
There's no place like