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Dotless Domain Names Prohibited, ICANN Tells Google
New submitter gwstuff writes "Last year, Google filed applications for about 100 top level domains. These included .app, .cloud and .lol, but perhaps most prominently .search, which they had requested to operate as a 'dotless' domain. [Friday], ICANN gave their verdict on the idea that would make this URL valid : NO. Here is the formal announcement, and a related Slashdot story from last year. So that's that. But it may still be granted the rights for the remaining 100. Is prime dot-com real estate going to become a thing of the past?"
doesn't matter what other TLDs are announced. .com is still king for consumers, anything else is a just a toy for the nerdy.
Back in 1993, if you typed the URL http://apple/ into Mosaic anywhere on the University of Vermont network, you would get a page about apple orchards. Of course, this was just UVM's DNS.
"Remember, there never were pineapple-almond cookies here."
I'd like to have "dot". Can you imagine the confusion when people try to communicate what the URL is?
Or could you imagine some madman calling his site "slash" "dot", it would be twice as confusing.
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competition! consumerism! capitalism! money! profit!
Humanity: having the ability but lacking the decency to just cooperate since, well, forever.
...at where the software I currently use the most comes from, the answer is clear: elasticsearch.org lucene.apache.org logstash.net julialang.org kibana.org localstre.am Right ?
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
The domain name system is a hierarchical system of administrative authority. When you choose a domain name, you're really choosing the authority who will delegate your chosen domain name to you. To a marketer or a librarian, there may be different priorities for choosing a domain name, but the administrative authority is the only hierarchical system inherent to the domain name system. As domain names move up the ladder, from second level domains to top level domains, the hierarchy becomes flatter, but it reduces choice: You can only get a TLD from ICANN, whereas you could have gotten your second level domain from lots of registries and registrars. Reduced choice also means reduced diversity: As ICANN becomes involved in managing the interests of domain users instead of domain registries, it will have to deal with conflicts that would otherwise have been dealt with on the TLD registry level, where multiple solutions could have coexisted and competed, and ICANN will reduce that space to just one option: whatever ICANN decides. That's why it was wrong to give TLDs to anything but registries. More TLDs are good, because they could have created more choice, but nobody should have been allowed to use the new TLDs exclusively for themselves, because it moves the competition to the hierarchy level where choice doesn't exist. Operating a registry should have been the only admissible use of the new TLDs.
Most of the new devices connecting to the internet these days don't have a keyboard, who's gonna type in a URL anyway.
Dotless names are used for local hosts (and frequently other shortcuts, like ssh aliases). Many systems use the dot to decide whether to do a global DNS lookup; if there aren't enough dots in there, the local domain gets appended. It's a lot like pathnames with the slash separator, where slash in front makes it an absolute path. What most people don't realise is that there are absolute DNS names too, which end with a period. If someone were to register the "search" top level domain, the URL would look like "http://search." Including the period. On /. of all places, this ought to be known.
E.g. http://uz
Will they have to disable it?
It strikes me as ironic that the company who has marginalized domain names is trying to hoard a bunch of TLDs.
(I mean, do you ever type in 'thingiwant.com,' or do you just toss 'thing I want' in the Google bar?)
After all with hundreds of TLDs added, who can remember where anything is at? Guess I'll have to google it.
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I thought dotless domains were coming, and put full support for dotless domains in SiteTruth.
There was a long discussion of this on the Mozilla developers mailing list. There are some dotless domains right now. A few country codes will resolve to an IP address, and one or two actually have a web site there. Try ac
A lot of software, some of it very low level, mishandles dotless domains. If you look up "ac" in DNS, you'll get a valid IP address. Browsers, though, usually try using it as a search keyword, or try it with ".com" suffixed. There was a concern that if every word typed into a browser's input box had to be checked for being a TLD domain name, it would overload the root servers and delay search responses. DNS TLD "no finds" are relatively expensive operations.
Down at the "getaddrinfo()" level, there's a known bug. There's an exploit for this that drives traffic to subdomains of "com.com", which is set up so that all subdomains of .com.com" are full of ad pages. Right now this is just annoying, but it could be exploited in more ways if single-component domain names became popular.
That's really hard to fix, because it's in the C library on most machines. Applications would have to be rebuilt.
If you put a "." at the end of a domain name, it's "rooted", and local lookups on your local network do not apply. Type "ac." into your browser's input box, and you'll get some domain registrar who bought the Ascension Island TLD.
ICANN actually did something right.