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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 ----
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.)
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
or .local
"Evil will always triumph because good is dumb." -- Dark Helmet
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.
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.
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.