Slashdot Mirror
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.
No.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
We need a .localhost
... 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.
Yes, but will .coke be for Coca Cola, or the Medellin cartel?
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
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
I think you mean 'seizing' instead of 'ceasing'.
You could not purchase a top level domain in the early days of the Internet.
By design, you want TLD's to be very rich. What's the point in owning a TLD if you can't afford reliable bandwidth, reliable, servers, etc?
More importantly, what's the tangible difference between www.pepsi.com and www.pepsi? Does Pepsi own sooooo many subdomains that it would actually help them to have their own TLD other than for marketing reasons?
This is the Internet. We need to think things out for practical reasons -- not commercial. This smells like another way to make money to me instead of actually help the Internet grow.
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.
If you do not want USA to have control over your domain get one in a freedom loving country.
What "freedom loving country" would you suggest? no, this is not an attempt to troll, I'm seriously looking for one.
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.
It is truly harmless
How many people do you think will become phishing victims through pay.pal?
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
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?
.local is reserved by zeroconf, and probably will be reserved by the IETF committee on a zeroconf-like standard. One way to solve the other problem, what "pepsi" resolves to, would be to use dots somewhere: ".pepsi" is the pepsi site, "pepsi" goes through the configured search domains before assuming its a TLD (which would work well because nobody currently goes to "com").
Plus, we get rid of the "www". Pepsi now says its website is "dot-pepsi". I could get used to that, genericised over all possible TLDs: My website is dot-preaction.
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?
Because everything that can be invented has already been invented. No need to allow later registrants.
More seriously: They probably expect the first rush to contain conflicting applications, so it is best to deal with those in a single batch.
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 ?
If you do not want USA to have control over your domain get one in a freedom loving country.
What "freedom loving country" would you suggest? no, this is not an attempt to troll, I'm seriously looking for one.
Finland
They have a really clever solution to this, you see, everyone has to give lots of money to ICANN, then we wait for about 6 months, then they give more money to ICANN, and then one of them gets to pay ICANN to give money to ICANN yearly to have .coke. Genius!
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
That hierarchy ended when people started buying multiple names in more than one com/net/org
The hierarchy was over when .com was created. There was no reason not to use .co.us, .co.uk, etc - which would have retained a hierarchy.
.com domain for personal non-commercial use.
It was *completely* over when the first person registered a
Now it is suggested that the .com is superfluous in most cases, so people simply could write:
pepsi
You already can, in any sort of modern browser. No need to create a new TLD, it works today.
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.
There is already a standard for that. The root domain is ".", so the fully-qualified "pepsi" TLD would be "pepsi.". Technically the name of this site is "slashdot.org.", not just "slashdot.org".
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
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.
What they should do is introduce the .bank domain name, which can only be registered by verified banks, to be used for online banking services to make phishing harder.
Bow before me, for I am root.
(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?