Slashdot Mirror
ICANN Backflips Again
angry tapir writes "The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has backflipped again on the process for evaluating applications for new generic top-level domains such as .bank and .lol. The proposal to evaluate applications in batches of 500 had been subject to criticism from registrars, particularly the 'digital archery' component, which would be used to determine which batch an application would be part of. Last month, ICANN scrapped digital archery altogether, and now ICANN has announced that it will seek simultaneous processing of all applications. The reason people were annoyed at the batching process was it meant that even if an application for a new domain was complete and correct, and even if a domain application was not contested by anyone else, it could end up going live years after other new TLDs did. Given it will cost over a couple of hundred grand to run a new TLD, people were upset. The whole gTLD process has been fraught with delays and security breaches."
Goodbye internet!
It was fun while it lasted. I will happily await the arrival of your replacement, just as BBS/Gopher/eWorld/AOL had its time apparently you've had yours as well. It's truly sad to see your demise brought about by a bunch of fucking monkeys who couldn't care less about your well being, so long as they're making more money off stupid shit nobody wants or needs.
Who's up for a nice cryptographically secure distributed DNS system that runs over IPv6?
-AC
This shit is going to break the internet.
Why does ICANN backflip all the time?
Because ICANN.
What do they want, a medal?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
:)
ICANN'T make a decision and hold to it.
ICANN apparently can't solve one of the most basic object oriented programming problems: Namespace organization and integrity.
There's only a couple of organizational schemes that make sense; Geographical, topical, and organizational. Of those, the third was the first used: Separating domains on the basis of their function; educational, commercial, non-commercial, and governmental. Then we tried to launch geographical, which meant that agents within the system would need to register on both basis; You'd have, for example, usairforce.gov, and airforce.us. But then ICANN botched big-time; they tried to organize based on... er, nothing. Rather than a couple hundred nodes on the root, you now have effectively an infinite number of roots.
The results were predictable: Complete and total chaos as everyone tried to register every possible permutation of trademarks, organization names, governments -- and although the cost of running a gTLD was in the tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars (which, itself, seems rather retarded; Why does adding a name to a file containing a list cost a hundred grand?) -- there are literally hundreds of thousands of organizations and individuals with the desire and cash to do so.
And they all threw their money at the problem at the same time. Now they're stuck because there's hundreds of millions sunk into the program, and they can't go back on the process. It's a bureaucratic cluster-fuck beyond even what our most inept governmental organizations can do.
At this point, the entire DNS system should be scrapped and start over from scratch. But that won't happen for years and years. Eventually though, it'll have to happen... when it does, I hope they pick one organizational scheme and stick to it.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
don't the people at icann get paid to deal with shit like this?
I only hope that ICANN was able to register .assclown for themselves. Anyone else getting it would be unfair.
The whole thing is clearly a joke. ICANN should just disband; they're unfit to do their job, or any job in fact.
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?
People keep suggesting decentralised DNS, but I'm not convinced it's a workable solution. If there's no central authority controlling the DNS, there's nobody who can give your domain back when someone breaks into your system and steals it, or when you accidentally lose your crypto keys.
I read about how "digital archery" was supposed to work. If I had read it out of context, I'd have assumed it was some sort of parody or April Fool's joke.
The use of "backflips" suggests they've done something wrong. Yet the summary seems to say that there were complaints about the application process, and that ICANN has responded to those complaints by improving the process -- or at least altering it so as to remove the parts that were being complained about. In fact it doesn't even have anything negative to say about the news itself, other than the headline.
They actually listened to criticism and removed the cause of it. What more do people want of them?
(Other than coming to their senses and aborting the whole thing, of course.)
I think they need to change their name from ICANN to ICANNOT, ASAP!
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
The rotten and corrupt Domain Name System.
What was the official reason from ICANN for new TLDs again? .net, .com, .de, .org anyway to secure it's trademark. For example Disney: all TLDs redirect to the domain go.com with is registered with Disney Enterprises Inc., except .gov. So the only clasification that survived is .gov, all the others are basically the same.
The current scheme don't make sense anymore anyhow, a company have to register
After the introduction of cTLDs, there was no purpose for the ICANN anymore, other then to ensure that each country gets one cTLD. With a cTLD each country can make their own DNS sub-tree, like .co.uk. So there would be no issue what-so-ever with the long discussed berlin domain: just make .berlin.de, .munich.de, etc. and if a US company wishes they can get also their own domain: pepse.us.
Mark my prediction: there will be a time in the near future where the meaning of a TLD is gone and you can choose your TLD freely. That will be the final money grab of ICANN.
Firefox already got rid of the protocol part of the URL (the http://./ So why we not just get rid of the TLD part? (It's already in firefox, for http://slashdot.com/ I can just enter "slashdot" in the URL bar).
http://www.mueller-public.de - My site http://www.anr-institute.com/ - Advanced Natural Research Institute
I don't think that means what you think it means. Seriously, words mean things.
The real reason ICANN is doing all applications simultaneously, is so that the folks in the later batches won't have an opportunity to ask for their money back when they realize that a gTLD is completely worthless.
Here's what's going to happen: Somebody reigsters the gTLD "apple", and sets up his website at http://apple/ and his email somebody@apple. Then he finds out he gets no web traffic, because people don't type "http://" into their browsers. They just type "apple" and get the top search engine hit (apple.com) instead. Also, much of his incoming email never gets through, because most email software doesn't recognize "somebody@apple" as a valid email addresss.
Will browser makers update their browsers to go to gTLD's instead of top search results? I don't think so. Their users would hate them for it, so they'd need a financial incentive to do so. Maybe they could charge gTLD owner's another $100k to be on a whitelist. That would generate a lot of money for browser development.
Why does it cost hundreds of thousands to run a tld? Is most of that just labor/marketing costs? I would assume it would just be a matter of setting up a few replicating bind servers and a basic api for buying/adding domains that could be distributed to domain brokers (GoDaddy, Moniker, etc).
Maybe there is more involved that I think there should be?
I'm just curious where hundreds of thousands go to launch and run a tld.
Things you think are in the Constitution, but are not.
I shop for and purchase ammo online legally. What does your post have to do with anything?