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."

Comments

Am I Bovvered?

[Anonymous Coward]

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

I am less than thrilled...

[bmo]

...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

Re:I am less than thrilled...

[Bieeanda]

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?

Re:I am less than thrilled...

[billcopc]

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!

.LOL

[formfeed]

I cann has TLD?

Evolution

[lucm]

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.

Re:Evolution

[vlueboy]

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.)

All the new tld's are dizzying.

[multicoregeneral]

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.