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Dot-Word TLDs Further Delayed

benfrog writes "The security bug that has been stalling the 'dot-word TLD land grab' might be fixed, but ICANN says it needs another week 'to sift through its mountains of TAS logs, in order to figure out which applicants' data was visible to which other applicants.' Needless to say, some are less than thrilled about the further delay."

19 of 86 comments (clear)

  1. Am I Bovvered? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Was anyone who didn't want to buy/sell them keen on the idea anyway?

  2. I am less than thrilled... by bmo · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ...at ICANT's continuing strategy to turn this TLD thing into a blackmail scheme for companies, orgs, schools, etc. "Here, buy another domain because someone might squat on it!"

    It's not my job to deal with that directly, but as a geek it rubs me the wrong way. It's deliberately injecting chaos into an already chaotic system. It's not like TLDs outside of .net, .org, .com, .edu, and cc codes matter. When is the last time you visited a company that used .biz that wasn't a fly-by-night spammer? Yeah, thought so.

    --
    BMO

    1. Re:I am less than thrilled... by Bieeanda · · Score: 5, Funny

      I am too! I've been waiting more than ten years to finally squat www.clownpenis.fart, and now they're making excuses? Who else is going to go after that domain, Lorne Michaels?

    2. Re:I am less than thrilled... by bmo · · Score: 3, Funny

      >.fart

      What's for sure is that Apple is going to buy .iFart

      --
      BMO

    3. Re:I am less than thrilled... by Fluffeh · · Score: 2

      I actually find www.cyberciti.biz to be quite handy if I need to look something up that is Ubuntu related. I do admit though, that this is I think the first .biz site that have ever found that is useful - I guess that makes it the exception that proves the rule right?

      --
      Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
    4. Re:I am less than thrilled... by billcopc · · Score: 4, Insightful

      We're talking about large corporate entities who think putting down $185k for the right to apply for a vanity domain is money well spent

      In other words, crooks!

      Call me old-school, call me a goddamned luddite, but I see nothing wrong with the current set of TLDs. What I do see wrong with the system is the continued encouragement of domain squatting by entities who add zero value to the internet. We don't need more domains, we need the current ones to be taken away from some of these parasitic organisations who thrive on "tasting", search spam, and pure flipping. There are domains that have been held ransom for 15+ years now, which have never been associated with a proper site other than "click here to buy this domain".

      My solution is quite simple: unless you own a registered trademark, or use your real name or surname, you have to use it or lose it! That takes care of a ALL existing domain squatters who hang on to tens of thousands of domains each, because it only takes one four-figure sale a month to subsidize their entire rotten portfolio. The way ICANN has handled things is an absolute travesty and a gross distortion of DNS' original purpose: to help people find stuff!

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      -Billco, Fnarg.com
    5. Re:I am less than thrilled... by jaymemaurice · · Score: 2

      But what constitutes use? Is this use? http://buywii.com/

      --
      120 characters ought to be enough for anyone
    6. Re:I am less than thrilled... by crutchy · · Score: 2

      my name is exxon microsoft... icann declined my request for http://exxon.microsoft/

      fuckers

    7. Re:I am less than thrilled... by houghi · · Score: 2

      It's not like TLDs outside of .net, .org, .com, .edu, and cc codes matter.

      That is because the system is US centric. Also it has two things mixed up.
      1) countries
      2) Company/website functions

      If they would have just used the country code, then the problems would have been solved at that level. So that would have meant to have .net.us, com.us, .org.us and so on, without the .net, .org, .com situation. At least if .us would have wanted to go that way.

      But what about debian.org as that is all over the world? Well, I see the whois points to the US, so debian.org.us would be a perfect choice. That does not exclude things like debian.be or debian.fi or any of the others.

      If you want to have presence all over the world, you would have to pay for it. It would have meant local distribution, just as is happening now already.

      This all is nice to think about, but way too late to do anything about it now.

      --
      Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
    8. Re:I am less than thrilled... by houghi · · Score: 2

      My solution is quite simple: unless you own a registered trademark, or use your real name or surname, you have to use it or lose it!

      That would mean I would loose my two domains I own.
      And please tell me who is going to tell what I must put on my site so it isn't domain squatting? That would mean telling be what content I can not put on my site. That is a slippery slope to censorship.

      I am against domain squatting just as you are, but I am even more against people telling me what I can put on my site and what not.

      And no, I do not want to use my own name online. I am very happy that I decided to not do that many years ago. See what happens with the privacy now.

      --
      Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
  3. .LOL by formfeed · · Score: 4, Funny

    I cann has TLD?

  4. Meh by rs79 · · Score: 2

    People have waited 15 years for ICANN to finish placating the intectual property wonks and actually do this. A few more days? Pfttttttt...

    --
    Need Mercedes parts ?
  5. How many applications are they getting? by jfengel · · Score: 3, Funny

    At $185k apiece, I wouldn't think you'd get that many applications to sort through.

  6. Evolution by lucm · · Score: 4, Insightful

    There was a time when having a good domain name was required to be found on Internet. In those days, people paid insane amount of money to buy domains.

    Then Google came, and changed everything. The domain name was not that important anymore, not as much as getting a good ranking, for which content was key. So people paid good money to generate content (aka blogs) and enlisted the help of (so-called) SEO specialist, some of which went to far (ask JcPenney).

    Then Facebook came, and changed things even more. No more websites, no more blogs - "just visit our Facebook page and Like us, we'll give you a voucher for a free bottle of shampoo".

    I may be silly but I say: fix DNS and bring back the domains. I don't like Liking and I hate blogs.

    --
    lucm, indeed.
    1. Re:Evolution by vlueboy · · Score: 4, Informative

      Annoying that to close the "convenience" loop, the *browsers* started redirecting dns misses to search engines, and that even a mistyped ping target no longer returns "unreachable" because your ISP is trying to advertise their own affiliates. This all meaning that even a *wrong* number is a *number* pointing to someone. That's like doing chat-roulette.

      I got tired of manually changing my ISP's modem IPs to non-poisoned DNS, because once in a while failing to use DHCP ones results in complete loss of DNS for some reason.

      Off on a tangent about how fake our root level and IPv4 progress is:
      If I lived alone at home, I could undo all of these "nifty" features, but static IP settings often stop working with 30 days with my large ISP that I don't care to name. I've had to give up on IPv6 because tunnels were not trustworthy and turned flaky...
      Due to flakiness I stopped looking into enigmatic alternative DNS services, though rumors of any life in OpenNic are greatly exaggerated (even .FUR is apparently extremely sparsely populated.) And the two total search engines for that thing aren't even OOG_THE_CAVEMAN approved.

      So we see only TLD infrastructure changes actually making it to a browser near us, but little else in terms of paradigm changes. New standards take huge companies and OS makers to push, when they feel like it, and then it's a whole decade for adoption to actually kick in (we got approval for ditching IE6 support only months ago, while sardonically non-IE browsers all decided to stop graceful degradation as users switch to them.)

    2. Re:Evolution by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      but it was the first to make it possible for non-geeks to find what they were looking for on the Internet.

      Uh, yeah - no.

      Google's results were exactly as shitty as everyone else's, for many years. What made Google a force was the simple fact that they didn't plaster ten metric megaasstons of bullshit all over their search page.

      Bitter nerdrage led to geeks immediately switching to Google instead of shitty portal sites, and they told their families and friends, who for once listened to them - because fuck, people were on dialup, man - dialup! And Google, with nary an ad or news story to be seen, loaded quicker'n shit.

    3. Re:Evolution by Whiney+Mac+Fanboy · · Score: 2

      Google's results were exactly as shitty as everyone else's,

      Bullshit. When google appeared on the scene, they were a revelation. Google's algorithm for looking at relationships between pages & links rather than just counting the number of times a search term appeared on a page was orders or magnitude better than lycos, exite, altavista, etc.

      It took 10 years for Google's results to become (nearly) as shitty as everyone else's.

      Frankly if you think that, you probably discovered google in 2004 when the competition was catching up.

      --
      There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
  7. All the new tld's are dizzying. by multicoregeneral · · Score: 4, Insightful

    So I decided not to pay attention to it for a few years after .info. Next thing I know there's .name, .asia, .cat, .jobs, .tel, .museum (can anyone even spell that?), .travel, and .xxx. And while all of this is going on, the only tld that anyone even knows exists is the .com. There hasn't been a land grab for any of them. But I can't help getting the feeling that our friends at Icann keep expecting us to get Pokemon fever with these things. Maybe if a new tld was something special again? Maybe if the public was a little better educated on what a tld is, and why we need them? Why do we still need tld's anyway? Ah well. That's my two cents.

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    This signature intentionally left blank.
    1. Re:All the new tld's are dizzying. by Sancho · · Score: 2

      I still run into people who can't send to my .mobi domain because their ISP does some dumb preverification of the e-mail address (I think it's checking for more than 3 characters in the TLD) and automatically rejects.

      I also get sites that don't let me buy from them because of my .mobi e-mail address. Stupidly, their support address works just fine, but try to create an account with a .mobi and it gets rejected.

      I can't wait to see what happens when these idiots run into dot-word TLDs. I hope .gmail takes off like hotcakes and these people lose sales while they're scrambling and paying some outsourced contractor to figure out why they generate so many rejections.