ICANN Mistakenly Publishes Applicant Addresses

angry tapir writes "ICANN's program to expand the number of domains on the internet has suffered another embarrassing setback. The organization has been forced to temporarily take down details of domain suffix applications after it inadvertently published the addresses of applicants. In April, ICANN was forced to suspend the application process after it was found that its system could reveal details about top-level domain applicants. The organization is already facing criticism for its proposal to deal with TLD applications in batches of 500 instead of all at once."

Comments

Confidence

[Mattygfunk1]

How can anyone have confidence in ICANN's systems when they repeatedly screw up? At something like $180,000 an application, you know, maybe, they might be more careful.

This is getting stupid.

[jibjibjib]

We all know the new top-level domains (and some of the existing top-level domains) are basically a money grab and a way to force people to pay as many times as possible for their name.

And the registrar system, which supposedly enables competition, is also just a money grab. For each top-level domain we have one registry, which is a simple database run by one organisation, but then we have a whole lot of commercial infrastructure and multiple companies around it which serve no purpose except to skim profits off the top.

Now the problems with the new TLD registration process are starting to make ICANN and the domain industry look incompetent as well as greedy, for those of us who hadn't decided that was the case already.

So, what can we do? I know it's been suggested and unsuccessfully tried before, but is it time someone replaced ICANN?

Re:This is getting stupid.

[jibjibjib]

> First, the very fact the DNS is the way it is now, subdomains.domain.tlds, is their fault.

This was decided at a meeting in 1982. The minutes of this meeting are available as RFC 805. As this decision was made before ICANN and the domain name industry existed, it would be wrong to blame them.

You're right that the ordering of the DNS names is inconsistent with many other naming systems. It seems to me that the rationale (which made a lot of sense at the time) was that you can email someone at a local host the same way you always could, user@host, and you can email someone at another domain by just affixing the domain to their email address, user@host.domain. Makes more sense than sticking something in the middle and having user@domain.host.

> [ccTLD] shorts to your local country-code if it is omitted.

I think this is a horrible idea which would encourage the fragmentation of the global Internet, create many name conflicts and create a huge opportunity for phishing attacks. A URL referring to a public website should point to the same website no matter where it's accessed from.

What's the big deal?

[leroy152]

So ICANN accidently posts the addresses of those wanting a TLD. What's the big deal here? Surely if you are a company wanting a TLD you're large enough to be able to handle the general public knowing your address details.

This smells of something that was done deliberately in good faith that is now garnering bad press because of someone who doesn't want anyone to know they're after such and such TLD.

If you want a TLD then be man enough to put your hand up to the world and say you want it... oh wait, you already did that by registering your interest with ICANN.

Any other complaints against ICANN are irrelevant for this issue I think.

Who's buying which names?

[Taibhsear]

Might be interesting to see who is registering for which names. Is Coke buying up Pepsi.foo names etc? Could maybe be considered anti-competitive type practices. Is this information typically visible to the general population?