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World Governments Object To New gTLDs
hypnosec writes "ICANN is receiving more and more requests for new generic top level domains, and governments around the world are busy registering their complaints and objections with the proposed names. To date, more than 200 objections have been raised against proposed gTLDs, with Australia leading the pack with over 120 objections. Some of the other countries which are at the forefront of registering their objections include France, Germany and India. US and UK are near the bottom of the list. ICANN's "early warnings" about national objections to gTLDs serves as formal objections but it doesn't mean that these domains will never be signed off. There is always room for discussions and mediation that would allow prospective registrants to keep on pursuing their claims. Australia has objected to names such as '.baby,' '.app,' and '.beauty' among other. It has also objected to names such as '.sucks' and '.wtf,' stating that these names have 'an overtly negative or critical connotation.'"
Give control of everything to the UN
First dibs!
I guess Australians don't have internet access yet...
Never say never. Ah!! I did it again!
I don't see why there are even objections. Why do governments even have a right to determine what gTLD's are offensive? We're talking about privately owned names and the government should have no hand in that. It should be something between the applicant and their user base alone. For any government that thinks they have the right to control the names that people choose on internet: censorship.sucks
I fail to see how that is supposed to be a reason for not allowing a TLD. Critique and satire are important cornerstones of individual and free expression, of - yes - critical discourse and public debate. Yes, not everything on the internet smells like roses and tastes like sugar. But meaningful exchange has never been without thornes and sometimes words have to be nasty to get through.
It is shamefull for a democratic government to be acting in such a way. A democracy hears its citizens, accepts critique and initiate change whereever reasonable. Censoring speech because you're afraid of people not praising you all the way - that's the way of tyrannies.
whats the big deal really? they are just words, and not even "bad" ones at that.
Govs are more and more becoming like kindergardens full of little pesky shits not wanting to share the toys with anyone else.
Brazil is objecting to .amazon being taken by amazon.com.
Let's hope Microsoft can't claim windows.com. 1. It was arrogant for them to name their custom windowing system that, and 2. The product is now more accurately described as .primaryColorTiles.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
My first reaction was 'why would they complain about baby?' But I went and read the complaint. I guess I totally misunderstood the purpose of these gTLDs. I naively assumed they were just new extensions that everyone could use if they wanted. However the complaint about .baby was that Johnson and Johnson was reserving it for themselves. Well DUH!! of course you can't do that.
I worry about the lack of common sense in the business world.
No one respects the conventions at this point anyway and I don't see much point in using them any more. Big companies just register everything available anyway, and small ones has to deal with trolling an scamming. It's just an extra vector for profit to some people, the way I see it. I'd say just drop the requirement for TLDs and let the people use current ones if they want to.
Just stick to country codes ONLY for top level names and let each country do what they want. .com, .net and .org, but doing anything else just creates a mess.
Of course that would mean the end to
But I don't see that happening, too much money to be made.
'An overtly negative or critical connotation.'
Yeah imagine people being critical.
Even worse: People being critical with a frown on their face!
Along with .scam, .lame, .sawthisbefore, and .nsfw. Those would make our sysadmins lives a lot easier.
How many "World Governments" are there? I only know of one (Yhe UN) and not all of the National Governments take any heed to what they say.
If there was more than one World Government wouldn't they be arguing/fighting with each other?
(like during the cold war, the First World (Capitalist western Democracies) were nearly at war with the Second World (Communist Countries), and some of the fighting was in third world countries...
The police in the Netherlands want to register the TLD .politie
(the Dutch word for police)
I think it is a ridiculous waste of public money.
And what if the word politie exists in other languages as well?
Of course they already hold politie.nl
And that should be it.
"All these words are yours except .europa."
Set your phasers on "funky"!
>It has also objected to names such as '.sucks' and '.wtf,' stating that these names have 'an overtly negative or critical connotation.'"
We wouldn't want to have any criticism on the Internet, would we?
---Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A START
www.australia.sucks
I don't see the problem.
I guess this is a case of the biggest guys slugging out for who has rights. Ouch, could be some collateral damage to bystanders! THERE IS ONLY ONE ARMY AND IT IS OUR ARMY!!!! COME AND HAVE A GO IF YOU DON'T AGREE! ooh could be nasty....
(actually to be fair probably the US are just arguing .army shouldn't be there as it's just too much trouble sorting out everybody wanting their army to have it...)
Feel a bit sorry for the folks in South America mind, 20 years time and maybe the amazon shipping company will be history while hopefully the river and its ecosystem will still be around for a while to come...
Is it really censorship to keep a semblance of order? To me a TLD doesn't seem like speech, but rather a protocol. Personally, I think by turning TLDs into speech we are opening a can of worms. But that ship may have sailed out the barn door long ago. Probably down the series of .tubes
/. should have a poll about this.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
The rotten and corrupt Domain Name System.
It's just like AOL keywords all over again.
Just allow any TLD as long as they pay $50 million 95%+ of which goes to a foundation that brings the internet and technology to people who don't have access to them yet. I would be even fine if that money goes straight to Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Given how megaupload's raid was partially justified in it having an American TLD all these .baby domans seems like a move to extend US net jurisdiction.
But... the future refused to change.
I'm trying to figure out why the Australian government would find .app offensive. Other than pure commercial greed, I mean. I wonder if someone is trying to get .blackfriday
-Kinsey
I can't think of anything more outrageous and distructive to the DNS system than allowing a bunch of useless new TLDs which only serve to enrich ICANN, phishers and name protection rackets.
I guess I should be appalled and dismayed when you develop a structure on the Internet which explicitly allows governments to weigh in on decisions and it quickly devolves into childish nonsense... Nobody could have possibly predicted this??? ..give me a fucking break.
Giving governments a taste of say/power over the happenings of the net is bad policy it only encourages governments to seek more power which only results in bad outcomes.
It might seem silly but those extra layers in the ISO model are getting to be more and more important to the design of protocols and operation of the network. Being sloppy, greedy and a total sellout (ICANN) instead of clever and concerned about the freedom and well-being of users is a recipe for disaster.
If Slashdot editors weren't just after cheap headlines they might have picked up on this:
Domain: Capitol
Australian objection: The useofgeographicnamesat the secondlevel:Thestring(.capital) is a generic geographicterm,and DeltaMillLLCdoesnotappeartohaveproposedsufficientmechanismstoallowcommunitiesto protecttheirnamesandreputationsfrommisuseatthesecondlevel.
So it seems that Australia is actually trying to prevent what many here fear, that there will be a ton of meaningless top domains which will force people either to register their sub domain to protect their brand/identity or have it exploited by someone else.
As for the giggles about .sucks wanna bet the company behind that isn't about protesting or free speech but "you want to prevent [your name here].sucks from appearing in search result, why not register it yourself, that will be 1000 dollars please. A tiny amount to the internationals, costs of doing business but feed a leech and it will only suck more.
I am with Australia on this and I think they should use their power to block ALL requests. Get the whole idea shutdown. Someone in government in Australia seems to be awake and the rest of world is asleep at the wheel as usual or to interested in just their own tiny section to see the big picture.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
It'd be great if we could get them to object to and block every single new topical TLD.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
Australia has objected to names such as '.baby,' '.app,' and '.beauty' among other. It has also objected to names such as '.sucks' and '.wtf,' stating that these names have 'an overtly negative or critical connotation.'"
I call dibs on Australia.Sucks!
I mean, way to go Australia, that's thinking out of the box! If you prohibit negative and critical TLDs, then negative and critical speech will go away and everyone will be happy. I wish I had thought of that...
(Fuck you Australia. No really, fuck you.)
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Damn, beat to the punch. But that doesn't matter, what matters is http://australia.sucks/ works even though it doesn't at time of writing. Or typing. Whatever.
But it's not Australia per se. It's a guy called Paul Twomey. He showed up in the late 90s after making a real dogs breakfast of internet regulations in Australia and was about as smarmy as they come so of course he did well in the den of lying clueless shitbag skullduggery that is ICANN and lasted 10 years until he lied to congress and achieved zero deliverables in a decade.
http://rs79.vrx.net/opinions/ideas/internet/domains/eyestar/icann/ceo/salary/
So, after being ousted and replaced by Beckstrom I'd wager he ran around to any governmental authority that would list and for only $way_too_much helped them write a report on the order of ".sucks" sucks.
This was done through the "Government Advisory Committee" or "GAC", and I was there that day when the GAC was introduced by the ITU wonk Bob Shaw as an "essential" part to this. Where "this" was supposed to be "measure the consensus of the internet communty and implement it".
During an open mike session later that hour, I asked for a show of hands for support for this GAC. 11 out of 1000 people raised their hands, all government reps to the GAC even though it hadn't been created yet. It was emphasized this was "advisory" only.
Ok, we heard your advice, now fuck off.
P.S. I still have the .rm files of that day in Berlin fom the Berkman center archives if anyone's interested.
Need Mercedes parts ?
The [Windows operating system published by Microsoft] is now more accurately described as .primaryColorTiles.
I disagree. Look at the exterior of a building at night: the windows make up a grid of little lit-up squares.
I guess my application for .sheila may go through?
A pox on web designers who feel that window.innerWidth == screen.availWidth
I just read all of Germany's early warnings. It is true that there are 20 entries in the table for Germany, but they in fact only filed four warnings. The reason for this is multiple applications for the same TLD and for variations of the same word.
In all of these warnings Germany did not object to the TLD but suggests rules for applicants of second level domains to protect name rights.
And by the way, Switzerland is listed as supporter of the warnings.
We need to put a stop to this nonsense.
The only TLDs we need are country codes. ICANN should have just given control of these to their respective countries and left their root server list uncluttered.
Country governments can use the .gov.* and .mil.* for themselves, give state/province name and abbreviations to their respective local entities, and lease anything else --for a hefty multi-million per year fee-- to commercial registrars (ie: Verisign). The registrars of major high-level-domains (HLDs) would presumably lease their names from several different countries' TLDs.
When it's time for Slashdot to pay the rent, it goes to directly to Verisign's dotORG department and register the "slashdot.org.us" domain. Since Verisign would likely own the org.?? domain for most, if not all, country TLDs they might offer a multi country discount (but really, this is Verisign we're talking about...)
So if Amazon wants to be their own TLD... they'd have to buy an island and declare state sovereignty. But if they'll settle for being their own HLD, they could go to one or more country TLD operators, pay their steep lease rates, and then do whatever they want with the *.amazon.?? name. The .us .eu .uk and .au operators probably wouldn't have any issue with it; but .br might reject their application.
There, problem solved.
please Stop this tld crap, before it runs out of control!
please Stop this tld crap, before it runs out of control!
I'm with you on that sentiment. The whole thing is a complete disaster.
The trouble is, we're way too late. There's a shedload of money at state, and a whole stack of vested interested who want to grab the biggest piece of pie they can for themselves.
If we carry on down the current path, the whole DNS system will become irrelevant. It's already a mess, but it risks breaking down entirely.
The domain names are (for now) pretty close to a common international digital vocabolary. Modern browser location bars mix domains and search terms when you type.
How did they come up with the idea that specific words could be bought by anybody?
I'm not saying the current domain structure is perfect, but releasing gTLDs will seriously destroy it.
If you go to the list at https://gacweb.icann.org/display/gacweb/GAC+Early+Warnings , you'll see a jumbled hodgepodge of requested TLDs, impossible to find anything (except exact matches with Find-within-page). I immediately wished that the list were sortable.
Turns out, it is. The column headers are hotlinks that trigger sorts on the associated column. It's just not at all obvious that that's the case, because they've suppressed almost all standard hotlink cues. The hotlinks are bold, black and centered, standard highlighting for the TH tags that they also are. Nothing but the index finger pointer indicates that the headers are hot. They also didn't provide any commentary that it was sortable, either in title tooltips or in introductory verbiage. Very cool and minimalist, but not in a good way.
In other words, the table sort feature is inaccessible, even to sighted readers, because it denies the reader the information that it's sortable. It might as well not be sortable at all if you don't let the user know.
Anyway, if you want to get a clearer view of the competition for TLDs, you might want to sort by Application (the TLD itself), Applicant or Filing GAC Member. YW.
I call dibs on Australia.Sucks!
Then I guess that I'll just have to settle for http://AustraliaSucks.Baby/
THINK! It's patriotic