Slashdot Mirror
First New Generic Top Level Domains Opening
umdenken points out that the first batch of generic Top Level Domains will go live within the next several days, including .bike, .guru, .clothing, .holdings, .singles, .plumbing, and .ventures. (Early access began Jan. 29th.) ICANN CEO Fadi Chehade says there is currently huge demand for ICANN to reopen their program to let companies run their own gTLD. He said, "Many, many brands and many, many communities didn't know about the GTLD program. I get significant amounts of questions about when can we open the next round, because certainly there is a bit of angst that if Canon [who applied for the .canon gTLD] uses this to do an incredible mass customization campaign to win users to their product, I'm sure the brand next to them will say "Why aren't we doing this?" So I do believe this will snowball. But many will find a .com or whatever they have now will be good enough, and I believe that one excludes the other." He also said the $185,000 price tag to do so is likely to drop.
Domain peddlers are going bonkers now, I tried to get my name as a .guru, but it ended up costing a small fortune...so I steered away. At first...40 bucks seems nice for a 1 year .guru name, but then there are "early registration fees" so called landrush fees that can cost several thousand dollars, and they even have hefty admin fees that costs several hundred dollars...stay away from the scammers, and they're plentiful right now.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
That's the idea, anyway. In practice .com became such a buzzword everyone wanted one.
And while I am at it, the order of the domain should have been reversed. So instead of e.g. tech.slashdot.org.us, It would have been better to go for us.org.slashdot.tech as you then follow the tree. Even neater if there would have been no dots, but slashes instead:
http://us/org/slashdot/tech//d... (Please note the second double slashes to show where the domain ends and the file system begins.
Actually in the 80s that is pretty much how it was.
UUCP mail was routed from one mail server to another to another before finally (hopefully!) landing in a users mail spool on a server they frequently checked more than others. This one done with whats called "bang paths" as they used ! as the separator, and the route was listed left to right ending with a double colon and the username.
Even at the time DNS replaced hosts.txt on the ARPAnet, there were still other connected networks like BITnet and CSnet using different protocols that used mixed forms of routing paths, and neither network required NSF approval to join like the ARPAnet did.
BITnet was IBMs VMS network, and anyone that had a VAX with the RSCS software installed and could afford a leased line was able to get on the network and get data to/from the arpanet.
There was a serious perceived threat from these other protocols, most of which lacked a unified or centrally managed naming lookup scheme (although that is exactly what RSCS was, although only for VAX)
At the time each protocol pretty much only looked out for their own, except for DNS which was advertized as "generic" and "non-proprietary" as only IP was required. DNS was also an open standard like IP and TCP. That was enough for DNS to "win" and become the one true naming system.
I'm not sure why they decided to use a right to left hierarchy beyond just trying to differentiate themselves from existing protocols...
But it doesn't follow the URL/URI standard because that wasn't to be invented for another 10 years or so.
As you say, hindsight is always 20/20
Because some nuclear power somewhere thinks that those countries should have sovereignty, and no other nuclear power wants to seriously dispute the issue.
Countries are countries because there is a military protecting them. As countries, they have sovereignty. They make their own laws, and so it makes sense to give them a TLD on which their laws apply.