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Amazon's Quest For Web Names Draws Foes
quantr writes in with a story about backlash to Amazon's request for ownership of new top-level domain names. "Large and small companies are vying for control of an array of new Internet domain names, but Amazon.com Inc.'s plans are coming under particular scrutiny. Two publishing industry groups, the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers, are objecting to the online retailer's request for ownership of new top-level domain names that are part of a long-awaited expansion of the Web's addressing scheme. They argue that giving Amazon control over such addresses—which include '.book,' '.author' and '.read'—would be a threat to competition and shouldn't be allowed. 'Placing such generic domains in private hands is plainly anti-competitive,' wrote Scott Turow, Authors Guild president, to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, the nonprofit that oversees the world's Internet domain names. 'The potential for abuse seems limitless.'"
I mean a SHITLOAD of money! Did YOU give us a shitload of money?
Your political party doesn't care about your rights and only represents corporate interests.
And then do what they want with the subdomains book. author.
Have gnu, will travel.
the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers... argue that giving Amazon control over such addresses—which include '.book,' '.author' and '.read'—would be a threat to competition and shouldn't be allowed.
You know? I agree with them... of would be like /.-ers raising a kickstarter to take the .grits TLD without giving a damn on the what Natalie would think.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Next you'll be gushing about "new extensions". What is this, computerworld? Sheesh.
Anyone who spent more than five pre-1999 minutes on the Internetties knew that the idea of a free-for-all of generic TLDs was more useless than the pope's nutsack. We watched the bubble burst before October, 2000 and saw what happened with otherwise-untrademark-able generic words was getting us into, and that was still with dotcom, dotorg, and doznet.
About ICANN's control of TLD's some years ago? Yeah... about that. What the hell did people think was going to happen?
Nice edgy comment, but what evidence do you have that ICANN was paid off?
How is this any more controversial than if Amazon bought book.com, author.com, read.com? book.com is owned by B&N. Is anyone jumping in their ass because "The potential for abuse seems limitless?"
Why are we considering new TLDs to begin with? We're taking a good, loose system of categorisation and throwing it away because... why exactly?
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
Price for TLD registration has been set high enough to eliminate many (if not most) small businesses. This move pushes Internet into corporate hands even more.
Everyone loves companies when they are the under dog, when they pop up and offer better services and prices than bigger companies and so on. But once a company like that gets big for making customers happy they eventually start being hated and overly scrutinized just because they are now a big company, even if they still do the same things for customers that made them be praised to begin with.
Like walmart for instance. When walmart started everyone loved them for offering so many products for low prices in bulk quantities and offering a lot of services in one place. Now walmart is a huge corporation and they do the EXACT SAME things as they did starting out people hate walmart for no real reason. Sure they have reasons but its still the same company it was when it was smaller and starting out.
Now people are starting to dislike amazon despite the fact amazon has only gotten better over time and offers more to customers for the same low prices while their selection and selection gets better all the time. But people are fickle, they hate big corporations over time for no reason at all. People love to hate what they once praised. So people are having to nitpick the slightest and smallest things they can about amazon to attack it, even stupid ones like this. Over the next few years the dislike for amazon will grow and grow because once something is attacked by the public they refuse to ever let it go. But guess what? People will still shop with amazon. Its the call of duty effect where in people will hate something outright and constantly bitch about it but will still shovel their money out for it just like people do with call of duty. Like each year everyone on the internet complains about the new call of duty and hates on it and then when it comes out it sells like 750 million copies in the first week.
It doesn't matter who owns "book" or "read". The war is over and .com won.
When this crap actually goes ahead, the usefulness of DNS is gone since there will end up being as numerous useless TLDs as there is ccTLDs.
The entire thing should be replaced as well as the protocols behind it.
HTML is not XML, stop trying to force that crap. Replace HTML with something not terrible and not based on XML bloat.
Things like boolean flags that can be applied to a tag straight up, such as <html 0x21>, none of this value=value crap. (those actually exist, which is awful. shortcircuited attributes should have been supported from day0!)
Actually allow DTDs to be flexible. Screw versions, let people define the rules straight up if they want to. If they want a menu tag to work in an exact way, let them.
Create protocols very specifically for simple webpages (such as twitter feeds, or news feeds) that could easily be embedded in iframes (the new improved sandboxed iframes, not the crap W3C gave us previously that had 0 functionality behind them, they still need further improvements though)
I mean something like a hybrid between gopher + XHRs for dynamic content. Very basic styling support, HTML templating system that dynamic content would be filled in to. It would be like RSS, but not terrible.
The DNS for one needs to be replaced entirely with a hierarchical system similar to usenet.
protocol://ccTLD.domain.sub-domains/directories/file.ext
Not only does this solve a lot of problems with DNS right now, it also makes websites LOOK right. (google.mail, amazon.mechanicalTurk, facebook.stalking, etc.)
There could even be a typeTLD between ccTLD and domain that contains the market the website is in. (email, search, education, porn, media, art, banking, whatever)
This would enable a certain level of trust if it were actually enforced. Then any websites that don't want to go the whole Trusted Website route, they can easily grab a domain in the "raw" tTLD. Better name than that though, could poke fun at the old web by making it www, in fact that could also be a route to backwards compatibility. Wait, no, bad idea, screw the old web, they have HTTP, we will have BTP, BETTER Text Protocol, yeah!)
Note that trusted tTLDs are not SSL Everywhere websites. They are just trusted enough to be in that market, SSL will still be a thing.
Also, anyone involved in W3C should be banned from any input ever. The monolithic update age is too slow for something so dynamic, and they are the definition of monolithic updates.
WHATWG was the best thing to happen to the web in recent years and more has been done in the relatively small time they have been around than the entire age of the web. The fact that even Microsoft Jumped In and took up many of the ideas from the new specs very quickly is amazing itself.
Feature-detection is here to stay. And there isn't any overhead unless you are a terrible developer. It is trivial to load different scripts based on features and have them all work together. If you think otherwise, your coding methods are horrible at best, and probably your team skills too.
Hell, your main script should never know anything inside those libraries, they should be black-boxes. Functions can easily ignore parameters that aren't needed too. Main should only ever deal with results (including error resolution), not with internals. Main is your client, functions are workers, they never need to know the working process.
And so many more things that I have no time to type now. There'd be a lot of work that needs to be done behind the scenes to specialize certain things and improve the terrible mess that HTML and partly JS has become, but it is doable.
Would never work though. Web Is Too Big To Fall. If only it would fall off a cliff and die. The web as it is now is horrible and failing. ICANN should equally be banned from having anything to do with newWeb outside of America. They can wreck their "usa." TLD if they want.
ICANN simply needs to rollback this new TLD system and refund the money. It doesn't work.
people are already used to just googling for stuff. Only noobs and idiots type the name of the item they're looking for into the URL textbox.
When you're looking for East of Eden by Steinbeck, do you type "eastofeden.com" in the URL? No, right?
They are right and this is so obvious that anyone who disagrees should be shot as an act of mercy.
Then again, the DNS was basically fucked when they handed it to ICANN. Some things should not be run according to market dynamics.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I haven't typed WWW since the mid 00's. Get with the times.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Okay, how about HTML, then which isn't based on XML bloat (HTML is based on SGML, and predates XML, although an XML serialization of the same content -- XHTML -- was introduced later, sold as a "better" successor to plain-old HTML, but with HTML5 pretty much got relegated to an parallel alternative serialization format rather than an replacement.)
It's really that simple.
Utilities should be owned by the people that use them, not private equity firms in exploiters using foreign tax havens.
Each top level domain should be a non-profit co-op owned by the people that use it and nobody else.
The same goes for scams like sports stadiums that are built with tax payer money and then handed over to private owners by corrupt government moles.
Symantec wants to own the .security domain. They also want it registered as private, therefore they would control who gets their own URL in the .security domain, having the ability to set their own price and to reject any competitor without reason given.
This has their competitors up in arms, not to mention the response from the entire security industry that doesn't revolve around computer malware and intrusion.
I agree. This is amazons way to try and privatize IP addressing for their benefit.
Then your browser is saving you as I come across sites all the time that require www.
I wonder what it would take to stop the release of new gTLDs at this late stage?
The gTLDs are plain daylight robbery of our common words and introduction of extremely unfair monopolies.
I suppose EU could ban the gTLDs but it doesn't seem to be of any concern yet.
"The potential for abuse seems limitless." Hyperbolize much?
They are all destined to go the way of .info... used mostly for spam.