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System For Applications For New gTLDs Still Down
itwbennett writes "After almost a week the ICANN system for applications for new generic top-level domains (gTLDs) is still down, and it is unclear when it will reopen, although ICANN said it would provide an update by Friday, according to an IDG News Service report. The system was taken offline after a software glitch was found that 'resulted in some users being able to see some other users' file names and user names.'"
Can't sell something nobody wants.
The #1 priority for ICANN is "stability of the global internet"
Need Mercedes parts ?
ICANN kept introducing new gTLDs that it alleged the world needed, when all those new gTLDs did was create confusion for the general population and liability for corporations and organizations that felt pressured to race to "buy" their name again with the latest gTLD ending to "protect" their image. It was a money grab on their part. Simply shameful. Now the system through which this nonsense was created is down?
I wouldn't call that broken. I'd call it "fixed." Glad they finally got around to it.
Someone could go on Kickstarter and raise some money for an open source project to do it for them. They could hand out tee-shirts saying "I helped fix the Internet".
Why is Snark Required?
The new system they're proposing of handing out arbitrary branded TLDs is a joke. It's a slap in the face of internet architecture. One of the DNS's most defining and useful properties is that it's a hierarchical system with meaning. The ccTLDs we have today make sense. The historical com/net/org/mil TLDs work. I'm even somewhat ok with the addition of some of the newer gTLDs that have a fixed, broad, categorical meaning that will contain lots of independent subdomains (e.g. ".xxx").
But the very idea of ".pepsi" and ".mcdonalds" is just sad and stupid, and it's a clear fear-based money-grab on the part of those intimately involved in selling TLD/DNS services, all of whom are in bed with each other and the ICANN. ICANN, get your heads out of your asses!
I'd swear it was Rod Beckstrom's idiot cousin!
After paying $5000 just for access to the system you were given a citrix login which then gave access to a badly written .net web interface.
The day before it was taken off line the system was so slow you would hit post, then go make coffee then come back and carry on waiting for a bit. Probably a good 10 minutes on some of the longer questions. The idiot programmer also didn't know how to escape html for the preview so he just stripped out angle brackets which was really great for the detailed EPP (all xml) questions.
The entire system felt like it was written by a student.
ICANN is pretty much a legalised RICO racket.
And the fact you collective millions haven't joined me in the lawsuit is proof that you're not smart enough to be part of this community.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Lots of sites would keep running with such security problems. And more effort would be put into keeping those people who knew about it quiet than into fixing the problem. Shutting the system down immediately and letting people know about the issue gives me an impression of an organization that takes security more serious. That it is still down after a week is not great, but they will still be able to have a fix ready quicker than average across other sites. OTOH accepting a downtime of a week for the site does give the impression that perhaps it wasn't an important site to them after all.
Selling gTLDs is an epically bad idea. The enormous leeway that ICANN gives to owners of gTLDs is sickening and could open up a great number of new problems (new spamming mechanisms being just one of them) that we did not face before.
ICANN needs to go, if they are willing to commit such grave offenses against the internet community in the name of profit.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
If they can't even get the registration system working, how the hell do they expect the general population of DNS servers to deal with a flood of spurious TLDs?
The whole concept is bass-ackwards compared to the design of TLDs and should never have been approved in the first place.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Wow, that's a fascinating narrative you've constructed. I have agitated for unlimited TLDs for over 20 years now. ICANN was the biggest obstacle (well, unless you count Paul Vixie personally). They used to claim it was technically impossible to free the top level domain space, and that was why alternative DNS roots started popping up right and left - because ICANN was lying about a pure technical issue and techies often respond to that by routing around the liars.
Logically, if pepsico wants to dominate the namespace by monopolizing all names containing "pepsi", you can deal with that by making so many possible names contain pepsi that they can't profitably bear the expense. And then the problem of a corrupt name plutocracy either goes away, or at least we get lots of funding for nameservers.
Despite our disagreements about motives and actions, we may have a common conclusion. The most likely reason for this system not to be working is because ICANN has never wanted it to work, and would prefer it stay broken. Or "fixed" if you prefer.
ICANN's first jobs when it seized control of the domain business were to require True Names for domain name registration and to stop the IETF Ad-Hoc Committee (IAHC)'s plan for expanding the gTLD space. The IAHC plan initially proposed seven fairly lame new gTLDs (which was fine, because you want to test out the expansion process on names that nobody really cares about, like .firm, using them as a scratch monkey before you sell the valuable gTLDs, like .inc, .llc, .ltd. .gmbh, and .sex, because you only get to do that once. The Trademark Gods really didn't like the idea that they might have to buy up names in more namespaces, and wanted to make sure that if there was ever a trademark dispute involving a domain name that they'd be able to identify who to sue. And they certainly didn't want to allow any sort of experimental alternative name structures, though .museum sort of sneaked in, nor did they want to have actual public-interest representation on their board no matter what their initial charter said about electing members.
I don't think having a near-infinite number of gTLDs is a good idea; it's basically equivalent to losing the top level of hierarchy and having everybody under .com.
But having a few dozen or a hundred gTLDs can work just fine - for instance, the US trademark registration system has something like 34 categories of businesses, so you can have a "Coke" company selling soda and another "Coke" company selling coal products without them infringing on each other. ICANN being the kind of organization that they are, they'll of course try to monetize the **** out of the gTLD registration process, which isn't going to be an optimally rational division of the name space, but will at least keep it from getting totally out of hand.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks