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ICANN's Brand-Named Internet Suffix Application Deadline Looms
AIFEX writes with a snippet from the BBC: "'Organisations wishing to buy web addresses ending in their brand names have until the end of Thursday to submit applications. For example, drinks giant Pepsi can apply for .pepsi, .gatorade or .tropicana as an alternative to existing suffixes such as .org or .com.'"
Asks AIFEX: "Does anyone else think this is absolutely ridiculous and defeats the logical hierarchy of current URLs?"
As long as they keep talking bullshit and people keep eating it up, it won't matter what the logical reason is behind it. They'll sell whatever they can to further their profits.
Annoying that is. Your average person will likely welcome it.
No.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
We need a .localhost
At least, USA wont be able to control it, like the .com TLD, which also prevents them from ceasing. The only issue here is price, which makes it impossible to buy if you're not either very rich, or a big company. Aaaah... how good it was at the beginning, when getting a new domain name up didn't cost a dime...
.goatse
Track IP - Remotely track the IP address of a machine via email or MySQL.
... but remember that the TLD was supposed to be just that, the top-level domain. Why not allow massive organizations to have their own namespace? Granted, I do think they should be expected to provide all infrastructure services (root servers, etc.) necessary for such operations, but I don't see this as anything except a return to the original design.
The URL hierarchy is not destroyed as much as it is decentralized. If I am not missing anything, there is really not much difference except earlier it used to be pepsi.com and now it will be .pepsi.
It won't be better this time that when they were AOL Keywords. Guess now every ad will have an "Internet Keyword" on it?
I say we go the opposite direction. Stop new registrations in .com, .net, .org, etc. and drive peopke to the country specific doimains. That gives a big "now STFU!" to the anti-US agitators. who expend endless energy hating 'US domination of the Internet".
Step two, on the .us domain, only allow a entity to register a single domain, requiring them to use subdomains for additional needs.
Democrat delenda est
Corporations are the dominant institution of modern times; so it makes sense that they are given equal footing with national TLDs.
If you do not want USA to have control over your domain get one in a freedom loving country.
Note: USA gets the non nation domains because they were first. The UK stamps were first so they do not have to label their nation on them.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
For those who know what they're doing, current domain names work fine.
For everyone else, they're just going to know these sites as terms they type into Google (or Bing, I guess) anyway. There's no point giving them TLDs to make it easier; you can't dumb it down enough to benefit them, and in the meantime, dumbing it down conflicts an already confusing set of standards.
ICANN has taken the application system offline after a fault, and will extend the deadline till Friday 20 April. Details here
http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/internetimageoverload-287x331.jpg
Vell, in a vord, yes. It isn't exactly new, though. Witness even registrars pushing for more "extensions" to be sold, and a wilful misunderstanding of how the DNS actually works. Starting with the shining example of the "global" TLDs com, org, edu, mil, gov, most of which should've been put under .us years ago. With that in place, we could've had a few truly global ones and keep the rest more-or-less local. It didn't happen. The great unwashed, and for that matter the press, and damningly the IT press, did not and still does not understand it. Plenty of decision makers in IT don't either, and lo and behold, ICANN is made up out of that. Plus the need to "innovate" to justify its own dysfunctional existence. So yes, it's stupid, and a clear artefact and exponent of politics and industry.
Shoulda fixed it when we had the chance. Now, ICANN will go right ahead, and turn the DNS into a glorified NETBIOS type polished turd. You are expected to like this.
Carl didn't do too well with TWA, what will he do with Internet Brands?
The only issue here is price, which makes it impossible to buy if you're not either very rich, or a big company.
As I understand it, brand TLDs are intended for trademarks that qualify as famous under dilution law. If you're not a multinational company, you probably don't represent such brands.
Aaaah... how good it was at the beginning, when getting a new domain name up didn't cost a dime...
And then NetSol took it over and it cost $70 until the separation of registrar and registry allowed GANDI to jump in and establish the price expectations of the past decade.
What constitutes an entity?
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
Frankly, get over it. The current .com/net/org/Turkmenistan/whatever thing doesn't mean anything. Yeah, ICANN is doing a money grab and that's its own issue, but as a matter of just resolving a damned hostname into an ip address, I really don't care what rules are established.
The only issue I can think of is if a TLD is assigned a host record. Like if com resolved to an IP. If http://pepsi/ resolved, who would win between my local machine named pepsi and the pepsicola pepsi domain? I guess that sort of sucks, since that isn't a race that should get to happen. But that's an issue different styles of names, some ad hoc thing over mdns, or even a local SOA properly DNSing. I've definitely created my own TLDs for in-house use, like .lan; RFCs probably say not to do this but I can do as I like, realizing it's my fault when the Internet sheds into a new skin.
Really, no one will care once we have to start resolving v6 addresses regularly just to make it usable. There will be some butthurt because people want vanity TLDs but cant pony up the cash, and like I said - that's its own issue that I am not touching.
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
What would these companies even do with these domain suffixes? Register for pepsi.pepsi? Do they ironically reverse it and use com.pepsi? Do they use it for cross purpose marketing/advertising by leasing out things like celebrityname.drinks.pepsi? If a company owns their own suffix can they become their own pseudo-domain providers for anyone wanting to use their suffix?
Worse, if you open the floodgates for any word at all to be a TLD, what happens when generic words used by multiple companies clash? I thought it was bad enough for the genericwords.com side of things but now we'll also have to put up with whatever.genericwords as well?
At this point, the only thing ridiculous about it is the deadline.
There is already lack of "logical hierarchy" in full hostnames and their URLs. That hierarchy ended when people started buying multiple names in more than one com/net/org and ICANN didn't bat an eye, and it was further eroded when domains started using the "cute" country codes like "tv" without being even slightly related to those countries.
Since the TLDs are already meaningless, the gates might as well open all the way. It is truly harmless.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
Numerous email address validations start with RFC compliance of the string. Some go a step further and make sure the TLD is valid and the domain exists. Some of those validators (rightly or wrongly) use arrays of TLDs (.org, .com, .name, .ca, .uk, ..) or REGEX for the TLD validation component. Now there are arbitrary TLDs? Doom!
Webmail:
To: complaint@mail.pepsi
ERROR! Invalid email address.
> What constitutes an entity?
A person or Corporation. Just that would slow things down since filing papers to encorporate is a lot more expensive than registering a domain. I'd like to make wholly owned entitites of another have to use a subdomain of the parent but that would be a paperwork nightmare and in a world where M&A activity is as furious as today it just wouldn't work.
Democrat delenda est
'nuff said.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
It won't. DNS and ccTLDs is just one part of the bigger picture. The way the Internet backbones are currently interconnected and its operators being mostly under direct or indirect US jurisdiction, there are multiple ways for the US Government to censor sites them deem undesirable... on a global scale. For example, if the US wanted really hard to kill The Pirate Bay, all it needs to do is to instruct its major Tier-1 backbone providers (one would be enough already) to drop the BGP route announcement to TPB's upstream provider, and TPB is dead, worldwide, without appeal. There are not many major upstream providers that are willing to risk the (BGP-)death penalty w.r.t. Tier-1 backbones. So the US Government's influence on the global Internet will stay, no matter how we reorganize the DNS.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
I imagine that the better claim for a famous trademark would go to the maker of a product deemed legitimate throughout the industrialized world than to the maker of contraband. Coca-Cola, Stepan, and Mallinckrodt hold a U.S. government-granted monopoly on coke dealing in the United States.
The hierarchy is already dead. .com, .net and .org were supposed to have distinct uses. But they don't everyone goes for .com first and then grabs a .net or a .org if what they want is unavailable. The country codes were supposed to organize sites that were specific to certain countryies. instead they're used to make stupid domains like tw.it
ICANN's only criterion here on whether this is a good idea is whether it will generate lots more money in newly registered domains. Better grab your top level domain before someone squats on it and makes you look bad
Well, any RFC-822 validator that is based on keeping an explicit whitelist current, is doomed anyway, has always been and will always be. They'll have to be RFC-822 (or its successors) compliant without referring to whitelists, or they'll need to actively query the DNS for a valid MX record before validating. That's tough, but it's inevitable in the long run.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
Isn't "complaint@mail.pepsi" RFC compliant though?
It does.
Since nobody wants to receive numerous complaints I suspect this will sit well with the companies involved.
to be honest, why do we need .com at the end of things or .org. you can usually tell if it's an organization, or business. it's kind of redundant, and on the flip side of things you can always have multiple redirects so pepsi can have both promotion.pepsi and pepsi.com/promotion they'll go to the same spot, just two different routes, is it such a big deal? really it seems like it's a little more logical.
Nothing new. My primary address is a .us domain, and I've had validators complain that its not valid. They were just going to spam it anyway, so I gave them an address I no longer have access to.
Exactly. Some validators are already weak. Now we'll have a whole new generation of broken ones. Even more people can experience your frustration.
Yeah, Georgia is not going to be happy when they lose their entire country domain space to General Electric. GE has a market cap of something like 10X Georgia's GDP, so I assume it would be a slam dunk that the TLD be turned over to the rightful owner.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
if the tld's are to be sold only to entities holding global, dilution protected(nobody can use them, even for unrelated products, for example can't sell pepsi socks..) why is there a deadline on it? because they wanted to hurry up the registrations?
btw how much does it cost to buy one of these?did they make any limit on how many they're going to make of these? because there could be hundreds of thousands of trademarks which would qualify..
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Just in case someone implements an email validation based on your comment: Make sure you read the spec, you don't need an MX record to be a valid email domain, an A record only is perfectly valid.
The internet was initially designed for about 40,000 nodes, and it got scaled up. It still worked. It continued to grow. The design engineers did a good job, the administrators did not. This is a continuing logical extension. Nothing surprising here.
(The surprising thing is that the internet still works, after so much overscaling...)
"go a step further" (than the RFC)
Then get the fuck off of our Internet, eurotrash.
At first, when you wanted to check out Pepsi, you had to guess & write:
http://www.pepsi.com/
And then browsers realized that non-http protocol became rare (gopher:// anyone?), so people could write:
www.pepsi.com
And then people realized that "www" was superfluous, and so people could write:
pepsi.com
Now it is suggested that the .com is superfluous in most cases, so people simply could write:
pepsi
How is this not just the natural evolution of technology and human interaction? My apologies to all those who love to rant about pet conspiracy theories...
[Of course the downside, as you can see, is that /. currently only auto-recognizes links of the first kind!]
URL are simply an instantiation of a URI, which is simply an X.500 object.
X.500 could be useful if you wished to, say, build a semantically linked mesh of information resources.
Thanks, Tim.
davel
So I have a question: Google Chrome (and some other browsers) treats the address bar as a search bar. How will that work with new TLD's like "pepsi", does every search (for a single word) first get a DNS lookup, and then if fails, searched for at Google (which means all your personal searches leak to your ISP and any DNS server along the way), or do we include a whitelist of every new tld in the browser?
Keep in mind the person that started all this was Eugene Kashpureff who ran around in the mid 1990s trying to sell brand name top level domains to big business. The powers that be thought this was a horrific idea and over the next 15 years captured the whole thing so a bunch of old white guys ran it then did the exact same thing, but it just costs 15X more an they get the money now.
If nothing else it serves as a great example of what happens when government takes over technology and all future technology need to keep this in mind so it can never happen again.
And keep in mind it was ISOC (the Internet Society) that handed this to the government while all along saying it was "for the good of the net" and never mind they made hundreds of millions by doing this.
Need Mercedes parts ?
Back when the euro was weaker and Go Daddy wasn't popular, Gandi was cheap (10 USD).
I spent enough time telling my less technical friends to always look for (bankname).com/ in the URLs of their banks, because virtually all banks in my area have .com addresses. At least initially, it's going to be that much more confusing for a user if they have to decide if, as a hypothetical example, bankofamerica.lowrates.cn/ is significantly less trustworthy than lowrates.bankofamerica/ without a solid rule to go by.
AND Then we all have to start using http://slashdot.slashdot./ I guess this gives these orgs the ability to have (using their examples) http://www.pepsi/ (I had to fight SO hard not to add .com to the end of that) But what difference would that be than saying http://pepsi.com/ rather than www.pepsi.com... Like how slashdot currently does it... I admit it would be fun to tell someone to go to http://slashdot.slashdot/ Or the ellipsis edition, http://slashdotdot.slashdot/
Spread the word.
Presumably this is a workaround for the fact that .com is redundant. Everyone wants a .com URL for their main site. They might also want ccTLDs for regional sites but the .com is what everyone will try first.
Which makes it useless. If everyone has it. Why not get rid of it entirely.
The Department of Commerce is putting ICANN's contract out for re-bid partially because they think this is a bad idea.
Personally, I think that not only is adding new TLDs bad, some of the old ones should be wound down. ".biz" is a bad neighborhood. Nobody can figure out what ".info" is for. ".aero" never took off. And the entire domain list for ".museum" is about five pages long.
No, it's the logical conclusion of the Internet becoming commercial. When things are run for-profit than logic takes second place behind profit. Basically, if there's a buck to make, someone will do it, whatever "it" is. And in this case "it" is mutilating the DNS.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
"Find us on facebook!" "Find us on twitter @" is the new "AOL Keyword".
Why aren't you faggots spreading the word? 3 Sgt. Sysop
Explain to me why I the consumer should care about or want these new suffixes. What value do they add to my browsing experience? Some folks have suggested it is just a money grab.
I'm a little surprised how little I've seen so far on how difficult this makes security for browsers. Because most of the TLDs now are country codes such as .uk, and those countries in turn have their own sub-TLDs suck as example.co.uk, browsers keep a list of which TLDS and sub-TLDs are real suffixes. This lets them know that mail.google.com can read/set cookies for google.com, but evil.co.uk can't read/set cookies for all of "co.uk", much less safe.co.uk.
As you may have guessed, this doesn't always work out properly. It's kind of a crap shoot with sites that use the country TLD directly, such as nhs.uk. With unlimited and variable TLDs, this implementation becomes even more questionable.
Does anybody know if browsers have gotten smarter about this in the past few years, or are we racing towards one of those security nightmares that forces content companies and standards bodies to actually get their acts together?
The ICANN solution seems to use seemingly sound logic to conclude the exact opposite of what makes legal and practical sense. They require the new TLDs owners to be trademark holders. Instead, they should forbid them from being trademark holders. The word "apple" is trademarked by a consumer electronics company, a cruise company, a famous musician, various fruit growers, a bank, etc. So it does not make sense to give .apple to Fiona Apple, Apple Vacations, Apple Computers, the Washington Apple grower's association, the New York Apple Country, Apple Federal Credit Union, or any other apple-related entity.
Intead, a 3rd-party should be able to hold .apple, and license it for computers.apple, fiona.apple, vacations.apple, wa.growers.apple, ny.growers.apple, etc. That's how DNS was designed to work, how trademarks work, and it is completely fair. By giving .apple to Apple Computers it makes the DNS system a mix of hierarchy and non-hierarchy, while assigning one trademark holder special rights over another trademark holder. I foresee *lots* of new jobs for lawyers thanks to ICANN.
"Find us on twitter @" is the new "AOL Keyword".
Only until they can have their own 'keyword'. It has to annoy their PR depts to be giving all that unpaid advertising to Facebook and Twitter by displaying their logos in all of their advertising. Notice how neither facebook or twitter has ever had to spend dollar one on advertising because they can free ride? Ad buyers have noticed, they can't help but notice.
But then I have yet to have anybody explain what CNN or any other large outfit gets out of a facebook or twitter account that an RSS feed wouldn't be a better fit for. Yes, if you are some regular slob it makes sense to use a free account somewhere, but CNN already has an extensive Internet presence, why are they throwing that under the bus and handing out millions in free advertising for Facebook? Never have understood that.
Democrat delenda est
It hurts my head thinking about it too. The thing that really annoys me was seeing the logos on every webpage I went until I found some adblock subscription for all of that crap. It's still annoying to drive and see billboards with facebook and twitter logos every which way. Off-topic, but speaking of CNN what is up with scam sites using AS SEEN ON CNN, MSNBC, etc. for stuff?
> Off-topic, but speaking of CNN what is up with scam sites using AS SEEN ON CNN, MSNBC, etc. for stuff?
Trying to make the mark think it is a legit product. They want em to think CNN or MSNBC has done a story about their miracle product. Kinda funny that, scammers are usually at the forefront of trends so they can screw people and they still think anybody still respects either of those brands. MSNBC never had it and the last employee at CNN will be turning the uplink off on the way out any day now.
Democrat delenda est
Of course it "defeats the logical hierarchy of current URLs"!
That hierarchy is a quaint anachronism of an earlier design.
See, it turns out the need for independent namespaces for .org and .com and .gov is essentially non-existant.
And the current design wasn't granular enough to proteect regional things which might share the same name with organizations in a dozen different areas.
There's just Pepsi and GM and the US government.
If your computer brain is confused by this just imagine an imaginary superdomain these all belong to called, oh, I don't know, dot newglobalnamespacecom.
How's that?
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
(1) ICANN needs replacement. a private california company MUST NOT control the entire internet and charge what it likes. folks, do people in europe really want to be subject to the laws of california and the US? DNS is a glorified PHONE BOOK. the solution: have multiple independent DNS servers which synchronize with each other and provide the service FREE. if a government shuts down or otherwise influences a DNS server, the others should reconfigure by go by best consensus on what IP the name resolves to. (2) TLDs ARE NOT NEEDED. Just a string-->number mapping is. TLDs are a vestige of the past, just like the middle digit of the US phone area code were limited to "1" or "0" in the past. examples of these are 212 (NY), 312 (chicago), 415 (san francisco), 405 (san jose), the tld and dot notation are the same way -- time to go. why does pepsi need to be pepsi.com, pepsi.co.uk and pepsi.se? "pepsi? should be enough, and this is what many people type into their chrome address bar or into their google search term to go to the website. you can use the IP address to geotag a computer if you want to. also, many .com companies are not located in the US, just like many .tv companies are not tuvalu.
does this work? this is what tinyurl does. it doesn't care what your TLD is. it maps a string --> your DNS name. it simply does not matter what hierarchy you belong to. after all, isn't the internet supposed to flatten our world and make it all accessible to everyone?
"Does anyone else think this is absolutely ridiculous and defeats the logical hierarchy of current URLs?"
A logical hierachry would be com.example.www/somepage.html
Why they opted to make it a little endian scheme, I'll never understand.
If they keep this shit up we can just re-root their entire namespace there and give the new root to some organization that's chartered with organizing things sensibly instead of maximizing profit.
Implementation details aside, all this is really adding is a blank TLD that's really expensive to buy into. I don't see what it really accomplishes, except now web addresses will be harder to visually identify.
The only upside I can see is that the stupid browser trend of combining your search bar with your address bar is going to hit a roadblock. Chrome won't be able to easily tell when I type Pepsi into the web bar whether I wanted to go to the URL Pepsi or search for Pepsi.
Companies can have their TLDs but it's been quite awhile since you could register new .us locality domains. Go figure. Like anyone who could administer a TLD could't handle a sub-domain registry.
this is a patheic.effort to raise more.money from companies that do business on the.internet. How will I be able to know if IBM's official site is IBM.com, IBM.IBM, or International.Business.Machines? Or is it IBM.biz? Or is it IBM.info? Or is it IBM.US? What about the fact that I'm sure there are a dozen or more companies with the word "apple" in their names? Is attire.apple an Apple logo-branded arm or apple.com? Or is it the home of Apple Bottom Jeans? What about .time? Is it time magazine? A clock company? A purveyor of spices who can't spell? Then what if you have a company with a very short name? Take the IBM example again. Sure it's an acronym, but it almost always is called by the initials. What would be their homepage? http://www.home.ibm? www.website.ibm? www.www.ibm? www.doyoumissdotcom.ibm?
I mean, WTF.com? Quit jacking around with the top level domains, you ass.holes!
I don't understand the problem you're trying to solve with that definition. Reducing the number of domains? Even with it limited to a single domain per person or corporation (which skews things even more heavily toward corporations, as they spawn new shell corporations like people buy socks), the rate will be so high that it would be indistinguishable from the current unfettered method, which as far as I can tell, is working just fine.
Also, you want to shut the anti-US agitators up by arbitrarily mandating a new domain policy that more than capitulates to everything they're asking? Sounds like a way to piss them off even more and burden us with more, completely pointless, restrictions, and then increasing namespace depth, leading to even less-convenient URLs. And further, unless you're proposing taking away registrations, it enshrines all the current domains as special, so that nobody will ever be able to have a .com in the future, raising the barrier to competition for the perceived credibility that comes from such a domain like the 212 area code and/or creating a new market in legacy domains. How is that not a classic lose-lose-lose-lose-lose situation?
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
Actually me@ (me@209.202.254.14) is perfectly valid as well. So are some other really odd and little seen combinations. There's also me@my-ipv6.
As several commentators have already pointed out, the structure of the domain system is already broken beyond repair. What I will see happening is the abolition of the the structure and the possibility to choose the domain as one wishes.
Now they started with .coke, .pepsi, etc. which it in self a joke. If they finish milking that cow, they will just open up the system so you can choose your own TLD. That is the next logical step anyway to milk further the DNS system.
The next step is of course to allow unicode characters, or I think they already planning it.
http://www.mueller-public.de - My site http://www.anr-institute.com/ - Advanced Natural Research Institute
Whatever you may think of the expansions of the name space so far (.mobi, .info, etc) rest assured that it won't be happening again. By turning the root into another free-for-all (really pay-for-all), ICANN has guaranteed that there will be no space in the root to implement any new ideas that they or anybody else should come up with.
why do we even have suffixes? how important is it really in browsing the web to type in what sort of organization owns the domain name every single time you type the domain in the address bar? instead of typing 'slashdot.org' or 'slashdot.com', why cant i just type 'slashdot'? or 'google' or 'cnn'? is it really a big enough problem where different types of organisations with the exact same name exist such that i have to type at least 4 extra characters every damn time? why cant they just put that info in website metadata or something?
ICANN's bizarre and self-serving behavior.