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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."
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.
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'.
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!
No-no-no, you misunderstand completely. It's not to resell them to domain typo-squatters. 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 from possibly being abused by domain typo-squatters. ~
Actually, its more that the quality of journalism has fallen so low, that I don't automatically trust a journalist to know the difference between transcription, transposition, and transliteration.
I'm somewhat pleased that its not outright capitalising on typosquatting, but I'm not exactly sure what positive benefit transliterations of .net and .com would be to users of the internet.
You mean the lut (look up table) ?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
You are confusing the meaning of transliteration to mean transposition. Transliteration is the conversion of characters from one alphabet into another based on closest approximation, usually of by sound.
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I was thinking more that the article had them confused. But yes, transposition would be the situation I alluded to.
I'm not really sure that transliterated versions of .net etc have much point either though, except maybe to typosquatters in other countries?
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.
No; that's not even the good news. It's all bad news--all these domains will make people move all their actual web sites from the collapsing DNS black hole to "web sites" on apps, Twitter and Facebook (with a side of YouTube and trendy_html5_website).
The only lining this cloud has is a blustery shitstorm--nothing silver about it.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
Domain squatting and name exhaustion has gotten so bad, it is nearly impossible to create a website brand that doesn't use either some crazy portmanteau or a whole sentence strung together. I welcome the idea of adding hundreds of gTLDs, because over time it will make any one of them less important.
No more will I contemplate shelling out $7,000 because the domain I really want is being squatted. Instead, I will just add one of the hundreds of gTLDs, and make that my brand name.
Also, dibs on http://slashdot.dot/
Do you have $200k up front and then $60k a year to blow? Then sure.
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.
I want http://dot.dot.dot/ myself.
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.
Y'know, if ICANN were truly looking out for the best interests of the net, they would reserve all those TLDs as well as foreign transliterations (.xom -> .com), and automatically remap them to .com, .net, etc. So if you accidentally typed randomdomain.cmo, you'd automatically be sent to randomdomain.com.
So I guess we'll see if ICANN wants what's best for the Internet, or they just want more money.
Great scam isn't it. Verisign get little to no money from the after market for domain names, so the only way they can ramp up profits every year, a requirement under the God of US capitalism, is to increase the number of TLD,s forcing existing companies to not only buy them up but to have to rent them year in and year out for the foreseeable future.
Catch with this, the blatant greed game is likely to piss off a bunch of other countries who are likely to turn around and cripple Verisign's get rich quick scheme and value by creating local only high level TLD's and requiring independent payment for all of them.
The new war, where will ISP's get their customers to point their DNS Address to point to. Make no mistake in the Domain Name gold mine, it is the ISP's and of course inevitably the governments that regulate them that have the upper hand, the high ground. With that DNS address entry so go the customers, the end users, the wallets to be milked.
The bigger the ISP the greater the temptation to create your own DNS database and offer up entries for sale so they can access your clients (mirror default, buy to change entry).
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
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
Probably, but not in the way you'd expect. Last I saw, 95% of all traffic to the root servers was caused by people making typos in domains. This makes sense, because most DNS caches will cache things like .com, .org, .relevant.ccTLD, and a few others. They'll also cache any new TLDs that people actually use. However, an increase in the number of TLDs means that there is now a much greater chance of making a typo. This is particularly true on mobile devices: most on-screen keyboards have a .com button, but require you to actually type other TLDs, and will autocorrect things randomly if you're not careful...
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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.
In the long run, what's best for the Internet might just be what nets them more money. No true geek would prefer a much larger percentage of the Internet economy now over a fixed percentage where the total size of the Internet grows exponentially at a slightly faster rate.
Expected time to finish is 1 hour and 60 minutes.
At least it is not a case of transubstantiation...
Christ that could get ugly.
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
No, they use a single paper sheet and are already writing on the margins. Or that's IPv4, sometimes I get confused.
Or some big company (like google) will realize they can roll their own DNS scheming without needing ICANN. And you can bet that everyone will follow.
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.").
Funny you should mention that. I looked for the domain of my last name, and it was being squatted. The sale price is $4,000 so I registered http://dotcadot.ca/ instead. It's annoying to have to explain to people, but sounds cool to say.