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VeriSign Could Add 220 New Top Level Domains
darthcamaro writes "At the end of this month, the first round of applications for ICANN's expansion of the generic Top Level Domains will close. While we still don't how many applications in total there will be, we now know that VeriSign — the company that runs .com and .net is backing at least 220 of them."
Won't these extra gTLDs just increase load on the root servers?
How many of these TLDs can be shut down extra judicially at the behest of political or business interests without due process?
Immigration and Customs Enforcement....for the Internet!?
No US controlled TLDs for me thank you very much. I boycott US domains, US hosting, and travel to the country itself.
Making them worth much less than you might expect, given that the Americans have recently shown they're quite willing to apply their laws to foreigners if they can reach them. .COM's fine because companies are already invested in it... but who would bother using a new TLD with that risk?
I'm going back to Usenet.
It has better structure than this mess.
I'll come back when the web has been completely killed off. Wait... damn it you get what I mean.
Down with the web.
"According to Bidzos, 12 of the 14 gTLD applications are transliterations of .com and .net. "
Please tell me that this doesn't mean Verisign is poised to scoop up: .nte .ten .ent .tne .cmo .moc .mco .ocm...
to resell them to domain typo-squatters?
its already a complete cluster now anyway.
It made a lot of sense in the early days: org, net, gov, com but those days are long gone.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Did Verisign get a deal on these? How do you justify that sort of an investment?? How do they figure out what 220 TLDs they're going to register? The top domains that are mistyped by users?
So if I see an e-mail that says, come to scifi.jockfarts, it just might be a real domain, because .jockfarts is now a TLD? It's hard enough to distinguish TLDs now with all the silly countries-gone-commercial such as .co and .ly. Adding 200+ more is going to be highly annoying.
Then there's all the spelling out. "That's J-O-C-K-F..." How annoying will that be? Like when people used to say, "Ayche tee tee pee colon backslash backslash doubleyou doubleyou doubleyou" before they got to saying the actual domain name. (Yes, I know it's a slash, not a backslash, but try telling them.)
Let's hope none of those top-level domains is named 'intranet'.
for spammers
Seriously, can anyone come up with a point for this other than a money making scheme for ICANN? Verisign "protecting" its ".com" and ".net" brands, presumably by registering the likes of ".con", ".c0n", and ".cum" (bet the people who opposed ".xxx" will love the last one), kind of proves the point, does it not? The only thing I can come up with is that because ".info" and most of the rest of the last batch of gTLDs are widely regarded as a cesspit this is the attempt at a do-over in the hope that the scammers won't be able to pony up the cash but trademark obsessed companies can and (apparently at least a couple of hundred of them) will.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
..after all, with all these new TLD's it will solve the problem of...uh...I mean, it will help greatly with...uh...um.
shit.
expandfairuse.org
....you may also consider: slashdot.og slashdot.rg slashdot.or slashdo.torg ...
The spoofing possibilities will be endless. Just what the web needed!
The quicker the number of top level domains balloon to ridiculous size, the quicker the concept becomes worthless. Except for commercials and business cards, no one really types in domains by hand any ways. I think this is the beginning of the end for the hierarchical domain name system.
Does that mean I can soon buy clownpenis.fart?
It's to sell them to those law-abiding companies that already have their domains in .com/.net/.org, and who want to protect their trademark investment
This is why new TLDs are of little value to anyone. Instead of treating it as a namespace that makes more domain names accessible, companies treat their second level domain as a TLD, making the TLD just about as significant as the "www" in front. Purveyors of domain names don't help, they actively promote the practice. Porn sites were up in arms when .XXX was in the news, claiming "it will only cost us more to register the new domain name and protect our trademark." These folks are missing the point of creating new TLDs. They are namespaces which serve to increase the number of second-level domains that are available to the community. All this "protecting my trademark" whining has to stop before internet DNS turns into the US patent system.
Well, there goes the accuracy of my domain name regexes.
We've already dropped http:/// and www. ".com" is just the last geeky vestige. From a human, rather than a UNIX, perspective, users should be able to type mcdonalds and get to its website.
I guess most people don't know this, but: type "mcdonalds" into Safari for Mac, press Return, and... you end up at the side of the McDonalds restaurant. It's not like that was particularly hard to program: if someone types a word, just add a www. to the beginning and a .com to the end and see what happens.
The amazing part is that most systems/browsers are too stupid to support this...?
OTOH, Firefox will do a search for "mcdonalds" and of course the restaurant comes up first. I suppose that's not too bad either.
There tends to be anglo-centrism on the web, but it's never too late to start turning the tide. I'm sure many over in Quebec would love the TLD .tabernac
"Live as if you'll die tomorrow." Ridiculous. You could die later today.
Now all those big companies will have to buy 220 more variations of each of their domains. Big bucks coming in for the registrars!
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
If they are going to add TLDs like confetti, it makes more sense for IANA to allow them to be associated only w/ IPv6 addresses, but not IPv4, since there is no shortage of the former, but an acute shortage of the latter, depending on where one lives.
185k * 220 = PROFIT!!!!!!!!
All those blog and forum systems that recognize links will be unable to recognize single-world domain names. Or they're mis-recognize as a link every word that's also a TLD.
You have to put a dot at the end of a domain name for a rooted search, or it's looked up locally first. If you're on a stanford.edu machine, and look up "music" or "art", you'll get the site for that department. If you want the "music" TLD (I wonder who gets that. The RIAA? iTunes? Myspace?), you have to type "music.". Unless you're really into DNS semantics, you probably don't know that.
Remember AOL keywords?
it is a safe assumption that every applicant of one of these vanity TLDs already has at least one other existing domain...
so... WHY THE FUCK ARE THESE STUPID THINGS NEEDED? this is nothing more than a money grab by icann and the sponsoring registrars.
fuck 'em. fuck 'em all.
once the list of vanity domains comes out.. i'm just going to add them all to the malware domain blocks already in my hosts file. i won't use 'em or any site that redirects an established .COM (or whatever) to the fucked-up vanity name.. even if a major online site starts 301-redirecting existing tools, pages or sites i use, to go through their new vanity domains (which i'm gonna call SLD for Stupid Level Domain). i'll find something else to replace 'em -- that's the beauty of the internet, competitors are only a click away.
Ok, is there anything that we as the Internet community can do? Blacklisting these crap new domains on our own DNS servers sounds like a good step forward, but it won't have any kind of wider impact. Any way to make them not work for a good part of the world? Without impacting the legitimate TLDs?
First thing I can come up with is finding a meme - they are obviously not gTLDs and vTLDs (for vanity-TLDs) doesn't quite capture it. How about sTLD, for stupid-TLD and with an intentional close similarity to STD?
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I suppose that versign will be grabbing .idiots and .greedybastards for their own use -- they seem accurate descriptions of why they are doing this.
This has happened because ICANN has become a perfect example of regulatory capture: that is, the people running it are (for all practical purposes) the people that it's supposed to be regulating. Insider deals and quid pro quos are now the rule. That's what we got the .xxx TLD: nobody needed it, nobody wanted it, but there was money to be made -- primarily by extortion of non-porn sites, driven to purchase .xxx domains before someone else did by a fear-mongering campaign.
.co as a .com alternative, as utterly ridiculous as that is?)
And that's why we'll get 200 or 400 or whatever more TLDs: because the registrars, not content with selling domains to spammers by the tens of millions (yes, really -- and that's probably an underestimate by an order of magnitude), want MORE money. (Why do you think GoDaddy is pushing
The solution to this is to make these new TLDs completely worthless and unusable. And we can. As soon as the list is announced, do the following:
1. If you run a DNS server: mark these TLDs as invalid/unresolvable. (You could use DNS RPZ to do this if you use a DNS that supports it, like BIND.)
2. If you run any HTTP proxies or filtes, blacklist these TLDs.
3. If you run a mail server, then block all email from or to these TLDs.
4. If you maintain a blacklist of spammer/phisher/abuser domains, add these TLDs to it.
And so on. The idea is to make them disappear from your operation's view of the Internet, just as we've collectively done in other cases -- with spammer-operated networks and similar. Except in this case, we should be able to do all this before they even go live, driving the value of a domain in any of these TLDs to zero.
Yes, I'm quite serious. The only people who want these are ICANN and their cronies. There is absolutely no obligation or need on our part to go along with this scam.
See subject-line above & thanks if anyone can produce it from "the horses mouth" (a reputable site)...
* Thanks In Advance...
APK
P.S.=> More changes to handle is all, pain in the you-know-what ones, but probably going to happen whether we like it or not & MOST LIKELY FOR THE WRONG REASONS ONLY (profits for those controlling the game)... apk
You have to put a dot at the end of a domain name for a rooted search, or it's looked up locally first. If you're on a stanford.edu machine, and look up "music" or "art", you'll get the site for that department. If you want the "music" TLD (I wonder who gets that. The RIAA? iTunes? Myspace?), you have to type "music.". Unless you're really into DNS semantics, you probably don't know that.
That's an interesting point, but according to the man page for resolv.conf, the default for the ndots option is 1, meaning "if there are any dots in a name, the name will be tried first as an absolute name before any search list elements are appended to it." While you're correct that "music" won't work properly without the trailing dot, my guess is that most actual sites would be something like "www.music" (or something a bit more whimsical, such as "my.music"). In these cases, the name contains the requisite minimum one dot, thus hinting to the resolver that this is indeed an absolute name (specifically "www.music." or "my.music.").
So when ICANN is slow about allowing new gTLDs (on the grounds that it creates confusion and is bad for people) they suck and are crippling the market (typical software engineers) but when ICANN approves new gTLDs it is because they are money whores (Republicans).