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."

Comments

ICANN Backflips

[fustakrakich]

What do they want, a medal?

Re:ICANN Backflips

[c0lo]

What do they want, a medal?

Nah, it's just... being for the benefit of Mr. Kite.

Dumb idea

[girlintraining]

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.

.assclown

[techoi]

I only hope that ICANN was able to register .assclown for themselves. Anyone else getting it would be unfair.

Re:.assclown

[gmhowell]

I only hope that ICANN was able to register .assclown for themselves. Anyone else getting it would be unfair.

Not so fast. Several politicians and corporate C?O's have a vested interest in that TLD.

Re:Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.

[Ash-Fox]

DNS is not the Internet.

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?

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.

Re:This is getting stupid.

[jibjibjib]

This idea has many problems:

You can't change your ISP, or renumber your network, or move your website to a different server on your network, or switch to IPv6, without making all existing links to your site invalid.

A link can only point to a specific IP, not to a website that has multiple redundant servers with different public IPs, or a website with both IPv4 and IPv6 support.

Anyone can create a site like (for example) http://203.0.113.135//westpac.com , and no user can distinguish it from the 'real' westpac.com without consulting some authority. This makes phishing easy.

Also, I think you underestimate the importance of being able to remember a site's address and tell people what it is. Even ICANN is better than having to look up a directory of IP addresses manually.

Re:Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.

[BradleyUffner]

DNS is not the Internet.

Unless you use this.
http://analogbit.com/tcp-over-dns_howto

Backflips?

[Dagger2]

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.)

Why we need new TLDs again?

[devent]

What was the official reason from ICANN for new TLDs again?
The current scheme don't make sense anymore anyhow, a company have to register .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.

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).

Re:The real reason

[Qzukk]

Somebody reigsters the gTLD "apple", and sets up his website at http://apple/ [apple] and his email somebody@apple

There is no A or MX record for "com", "net","org","us","uk","info","museum","biz","mobi"... I'm going to say that none of them work that way. If anyone thought they would work that way, that's their own damn fault.