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The Beginnings of a TLD Free-For-All?
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Mon Jun 23, 2008 02:08 PM
from the bad-ideas dept.
from the bad-ideas dept.
Mordok-DestroyerOfWo writes "According to the BBC, ICANN is considering opening up the wholesale creation of TLDs by private industry. While I'm sure this is done for the convenience of the companies and has nothing to do with the several thousand dollars they will be charging for each registration, I was curious what the tech community at large thought about this idea. It seems to me that this will simply open the doors for a never-ending stream of TLD squatters."
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[+]
ICANN Wants To End Commerce Dept. Oversight In 2009 58 comments
Ian Lamont writes "ICANN's current Joint Project Agreement with the US Commerce Department is set to expire in September of 2009, and ICANN wants to become more autonomous and switch to a global governance model, says ICANN's executive officer. The agreement between the nonprofit ICANN and the Commerce Department has been in place since 1998, and was renewed in 2006 despite international protests.
A few US-based groups named in the article — including the Center for Democracy and Technology, the trade group TechNet and a conservative think tank iGrowthGlobal — would like the agreement with the Commerce Department to continue, in part to provide 'accountability.' The ICANN officer quoted in the article says expiration of the Commerce Department agreement would not remove accountability, as ICANN still has a contract with the US to operate the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority and must follow California law governing nonprofits. The Register is running a related story about why some people are uncomfortable with the United States' influence on ICANN. We discussed ICANN's request for independence a few months ago."
[+]
ICANN Moves Against GoDaddy Domain Lockdowns 146 comments
An anonymous reader writes "ICANN is finally taking action against Domain Registrar GoDaddy's controversial 'lockdowns'. GoDaddy has long had a policy of 'locking down' domain names for 60 days after a customer updated their contact details. This put customers in a Catch 22 position: ICANN requires customers keep their contact details up to date, or risk having the domain forfeited. Yet during the lockdown period the customer is prevented from transferring the domain from GoDaddy to another registrar. If the lockdown ran over the domain's expiry date, customers were forced to renew with GoDaddy or lose the domain. ICANN proposes to ban this practice. ICANN who is charged with overseeing the Internet has long been accused of giving domain registrars a free ride. But recently after ICANN failed to discipline Network Solutions over a front-running scam, they found themselves both on the wrong end of a lawsuit by lawyers Kabateck Brown Kellner. Is ICANN's action a signal of increased vigilance in policing registrars, or is it a PR move paving the way for a complete removal of US Government oversight?"
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Your Rights Online: ICANN Takes a Step Toward Ending Domain Tasting 155 comments
An anonymous reader writes "For years, domain squatters have exploited an ICANN loophole: whenever a domain name is registered, ICANN collects a 20-cent fee from the registrar. To allow for non-paying customers, the registrar can return it five days later for a full refund. The loophole has let unscrupulous registrars constantly create and refund domain-squatting websites, selling 'what you need when you need it' advertising. The problem has grown so bad that every month the world's top three domain squatters, all located in Miami with the same address and represented by the same lawyer, recycle 11 million domain names. After years of complaints, ICANN has finally begun moving on the problem. On April 17 ICANN's Generic Names Supporting Organization voted to make the ICANN 20-cent fee non-refundable. If the ICANN board ratifies this position in June, those top three squatters will be getting a monthly bill for $2.2M. News of the ICANN changes has been applauded by legitimate Internet businesses, tired of having to choose nonsense names because all the good ones have been squatted. ICANN has published an analysis of the economics of ending domain squatting."
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IT: ICANN Asked To Shut Down "Worst" Chinese Registrar 119 comments
Ian Lamont writes "Anti-spam service Knujon has released reports highlighting how certain registrars in the US and abroad have consistently failed to live up to certain WHOIS-related obligations under ICANN's Registrar Accreditation Agreement (RAA) — specifically, the requirement that people or company registering domains provide valid contact information. Now the firm is requesting that ICANN shut down the worst alleged offender, Xinnet Bei Gong Da Software. According to Knujon, none of the WHOIS records in a sample of 11,000 alleged spam sites registered through Xinnet and reported by Knujon to ICANN's Whois Data Problem Report System were corrected in a six-month period ending in May 2008 — and the Chinese registrar continues to register about 100 spam sites per day. In many cases, says the Knujon document (PDF), Xinnet does not have 'any Whois record data for review while the sites are still active' and the spam sites further promote 'seal abuse' by posting bogus BBB, Verisign, and other trusted industry seals. ICANN says it is investigating. ICANN has just posted a draft revised RAA that is open for public comment until August 4. However, the wording of Section 3.7.8, governing registrars' obligations to check and correct domain owners' contact information, hasn't changed."
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ICANN Board Approves Wide Expansion of TLDs 490 comments
penciling_in writes "The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has approved the relaxation of the rules for the introduction of new Top-Level Domains — a move that could drastically change the Internet. 'We are opening up a new world and I think this cannot be underestimated,' said Roberto Gaetano, an ICANN board member. The future outcome of this decision was discussed on Slashdot a few days ago. It also seems, based on this post on CircleID from last month, that ICANN was already in preparation mode of mass TLD introductions. The new decision will allow companies to register their brands as generic top-level domain names (TLDs). For instance, Microsoft could apply to have a TLD such as '.msn', Apple apply for '.mac', and Google for '.goog'... The decision was taken unanimously on Thursday, June 26, 2008 at the 32nd ICANN Meeting in Paris."
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Sweet (Score:5, Funny)
Now I can finally realize my dream and create the ".isgay" TLD.
Re:Sweet (Score:5, Funny)
Dibs on .slashdot
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Re:Sweet (Score:5, Funny)
DANCE MONKEY BOY,DANCE! And to show my appreciation to my customers I would allow those burnt by WinME and Vista to throw rotten vegetables at him every Thursday afternoon,which would be broadcast live on technet for those who couldn't get away from work. But that is just my dream,your evil thoughts may vary.
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Re:Sweet (Score:5, Funny)
I fervently pray for your dream to come to true. I really do.
So umm, do you need a captain of the guard in your royal court? Would he get to mess around with the jester too?
Just askin'.
Any applications to fill out? Hello?
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Re:Sweet (Score:5, Funny)
You know, I am really tired of silly, childish, and unrealistic posts by immature child-like idiots on /.
Fortunately, this isn't one of them. I for one, welcome you, my consumer-rage TLD overlord.
Make sure you give him the little stick with bells and a tiny Ballmer-puppet head.
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Re:Sweet (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:DIBS!!!! round 2 (Score:5, Funny)
wtf.FTW!
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Worse (Score:5, Insightful)
It's worse. What they are proposing is nothing less than the total elimination of the current DNS and replacing it with AOL keywords. And raising the price a hundredfold while they are at it. And making sure it stays centralized under ICANN's control by cutting out the national registrars.
Within six months of going live .com will be but a memory as every entity with enough budget to buy bandwidth to actually run a server on buys their own TLD, or keyword. Ford.com becomes ford. google.com becomes google, mail.google.com probably becomes googlemail or mail.google, assuming they don't just outbid every other webmail company and just have 'email' or 'mail.' Just send to userid@email.
And domains will all be to the highest bidder with ICANN getting the money instead of domain squatters. Old legacy domains will be taken as a sign of a cheap bastard who can't afford a 'real' name.
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Re:Sweet (Score:5, Funny)
Even better, I'm going to register .corn Imagine going to google.corn! In some fonts it looks like google.com. Even better www.somebank.corn!!! Yeah! I'll be rich!
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Re:Sweet (Score:5, Funny)
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Worst idea ever (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Worst idea ever (Score:4, Informative)
They should visit film.disney.com, kids.disney.com, and fun.disney.com. The DNS works backwards, and people should learn that just as they learn how an email address works and how to work web forms.
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Re:Worst idea ever (Score:5, Insightful)
Disney already has registered TLDs for the localized versions of it's site for other regions and any further categorical distinctions for content can be accomplished with subdomains. There's not really any need for Disney or any other large corps to make use of unique TLDs. While this doesn't stop spammers from setting up their own dubious TLDs and trying to lure people there, after a few publicized incidents of scams I think it would become fairly common knowledge that people should stick to trusting
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Re:Worst idea ever (Score:4, Insightful)
Great observation. That is exactly why any TLD that is not .COM automatically has to have less value. .ORG has slightly less value since that is seen as charitable and foundations, but .NET is even a little suspect in most cases.
Once you move farther away from .COM you see progressively less and less value to the point that the only value left is one of speculation.
Hence, this new development is a squatters paradise. This might be a good thing then.
We can strictly regulate squatting on the .COM's and let all the squatters speculate and have their market of illusions (delusions really) on any other randomly created TLD :)
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Re:Worst idea ever (Score:5, Funny)
I would suspect .con would see some value for typosquatters as well.
But, at least that TLD would be an accurate description...
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Re:Worst idea ever (Score:5, Funny)
Moving away from that original intent, it's become ingrained in most casual user's minds that this is the obligatory suffix of a typical web address. .net and .org are only sightly as recognizable as additional suffixes.
Exactly. That's why I always visit slashdot.com, I know it's the real Slashdot. That .org site is an obvious scam, filled with pointless 'news' links and inane comments.
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Re:Worst idea ever (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.regular-expressions.info/ [regular-expressions.info] is actually quite a useful site.
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Re:Worst idea ever (Score:5, Funny)
I think it'd actually be fitting for phishing sites to be using .con.
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Re:Worst idea ever (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately, this isn't the worst idea ever, at least for ICANN. Extortion it is, but extortion isn't really a bad idea if you're the one doing it, else it wouldn't be so popular.
However, opening the TLD floodgates doesn't help anyone other than ICANN and the registrars. Additional TLD's which are functionally equivalent to the existing TLD's are not useful. Additional TLD's are useful with respect to any exclusivity they enforce. .com, .net, .org, are all functionally equivalent these days. .edu, .gov, and .mil are actually, in fact, useful. They are useful specifically because I can't get one. The proposed .bank had some hope of being useful, although it suffers from the endemic problem of appointing someone or some organization to decide for the whole world, what constitutes a bank. .xxx or .porn has some hope of being useful, because it is self-exclusive in that there's somewhat of a disincentive to having a .porn domain if you are not, in fact, in the business of providing porn.
Of course, nothing useful will come to pass. It's too tempting to sell domains to everyone, and the useful things that could be done with TLD's could be done with SLD's as well, but aren't. It would be useful, for example, to have a company that already does work in the field of corporate information such as Dunn & Bradstreet, to start offering "vetted" corporate listings, such as "yourcompanyhere".dnb.com. But they don't do it, because a) it wouldn't really be all that useful, and b) because very few people would use it and thus c) very few companies would buy it.
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Re:Worst idea ever (Score:5, Informative)
When was the last time a multi-million dollar corporation was embarrassed about anything?
Corporations are just like people, except, you know, completely different.
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Re:Worst idea ever (Score:5, Interesting)
Generally it is true that it wouldn't be an issue if two companies with the same name are in different industries. However, in this case it would be a problem, because of Disney's widespread brand recognition.
The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) in 2000 sued the World Wrestling Federation (WWF) and successfully forced them to change their name. They had an agreement in which the wrestling federation could use the initials, but it was determined there was some violation of that agreement.
And the last time I checked the World Wildlife Fund hasn't gotten into professional wrestling.
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Re:Worst idea ever (Score:5, Funny)
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3rd post & (Score:5, Funny)
what is wrong with you people?!
Generic TLDs caused the problems (Score:5, Insightful)
It's OK if the TLDs are brands (not generic like com, net or org) and there is some factor which limits them to resale use (otherwise we just punt the .com problem up a level.)
The big mistake was having generics in the first place. Trademark law figured out hundreds of years ago you don't grant people monopoly ownership rights in generic terms. To get ownership rights in a term it must be non-generic, not have meaning other than the meaning you created in it. Thus nobody owns the word "Apple" with regards to fruits, but you can own it with regard to computers, or records. Even better are made-up terms like Xerox and Kodak.
Anyway, we goofed by selling things like drugstore.com. We should fix that where we can, and not make it worse. If names are for resale only (you can't have your own sites in a TLD you own except for nic.TLD) and the names can't have any meaning for you to get a monopoly, then it can work.
Things like .xxx and .mobi and there rest are bad because they have a meaning, and grant a monopoly in internet naming to that meaning.
Full details are at http://www.templetons.com/brad/dns/ [templetons.com]
Re:Generic TLDs caused the problems (Score:5, Insightful)
The other part of the reason why this is potentially a bad idea is technical. The DNS scales very well because it's a tree. Hardly anyone queries the root servers (a couple of years ago 95% of queries were answered with NXDOMAIN) because their ISPs caching name servers store the locations of the most common TLDs (.com, .org, .cctld, etc.). The load is then spread around the TLD servers (and, again, most common queries are cached). Adding new TLDs increases the number of hits on the root servers, which makes those 14 machines a lot more critical, which is probably what ICANN is trying to do.
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ICANN showing their irrelevance (Score:5, Interesting)
The only good that could potentially come from this would be if the spammers found it worthwhile to start placing all their spamvertised domains under TLDs like
But we all know how likely that is..
Pointless (Score:4, Insightful)
This will have one and only one useful effect - It will add more TLDs we can safely block as spam sources (yeah, suuuure we see a lot of legit
I cannot wait... (Score:5, Funny)
http://first.post
Wait - I've got a MUCH better idea... (Score:4, Funny)
I've had it with this hugely confusing system of names and TLDs, so here's my proposal:
We drop DNS completely and establish a completely numerical system of finding things on the internet. Each machine will just get a simple number. No more wondering what everything is called - just type in the number and presto - you're there! No fighting, no trademarks, no registrations, just "Here's your number pal, have fun."
Should work fine - right?
Re:Wait - I've got a MUCH better idea... (Score:4, Informative)
There were a could of crazy schemes to add letters to the phone dial pad--but could you image how complex and confusing that would be! If you're older than 35, when you were growing up do you remember anyone looking for the letters on the dial.
And in my day, we had real dials on the phone--none this fancy DTMF stuff for us.
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Re:Wait - I've got a MUCH better idea... (Score:5, Funny)
Of course, maybe I'm giving the moderators too much credit. After all, why was your post modded troll? On second thought, maybe the moderators are smoking something today.
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Worthless (Score:5, Insightful)
For every new TLD that gets created it just adds that many more TLDs that company has to buy to cover their trademark, company name whatever.
This is just ridiculous.
www.compaq.xyz has zero value. I never even understood why .net was created either. I can understand .ORG, and maybe even .INFO, but not .NET.
This only creates whole new markets for domain squatters. Who gives a crap about .MOBI? I certainly don't. I don't see any major wireless carriers using it on a regular basis. The mobile blackberry website I go to is still a .COM
This is made all the more ridiculous by the fact the most people have a hard time differentiating between TLDs as it is. Even I have problems sometimes and put a .COM when it should be a .NET. The fact that those 2 websites are wholly different entities is just crazy.
This is all about money going into the pockets of some people, and nothing about adding value to the Internet.
There are only two, and will forever be only two, TLDs which have any value associated with them whatsoever.... .COM and .ORG. That's it. Everything else is reserved anyways, and you can substitute a country TLD for .COM and .ORG when appropriate.
For those that would argue that point, ask yourselves honestly.... when you think of a domain name which TLD do you think of putting after it first?
Re:Worthless (Score:5, Informative)
I use it to point to my home NETWORK. While I would like to have
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Re:Worthless (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Worthless (Score:5, Informative)
It took years for
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Spammers, etc. will LOVE this (Score:5, Insightful)
This sort of thing would be a godsend for spammers & phishers. It'd make it so much easier for them to forge websites to try to scam people. Just imagine creating a TLD that's something like "comm" instead of "com" or "C0M" (zero instead of oh), etc. It'll create a security nightmare out of what is already a major pain in the @ss.
Re:Spammers, etc. will LOVE this (Score:5, Funny)
I thought the obvious TLD for phishers was .con
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Misquoted by the BBC (Score:5, Informative)
Firstly, the interviewer started under the misapprehension that domain names were running out, which Dr. Twomey corrected, and said the problem was with IPv4 addresses. The following comments then followed, which concern the introduction of IPv6:
The comments he actually made about DNS and TLDs were much tamer, mainly relating to internationalization and the use of unicode URLs.
I listened to this while driving, so I may have misunderstood slightly, but there was definitely no sense of "OMG TLD free-for-all" in the interview as broadcast.
Public comment opens today, closes tomorrow. (Score:5, Informative)
ICAAN released a final draft for public comment today, June 22, 2008. [icann.org]
Public comment closes June 23, 2008.
Re:ICANN should make domains more expensive (Score:5, Insightful)
For any vaguely competent squatter, ads and possible sale of the domain would still make up for most of even that cost, so they wouldn't suffer at all.
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Re:ICANN should make domains more expensive (Score:4, Interesting)
Of course, that would limit domain names to basically the corporate-only world, since how many private individuals would pay that much just to have their blog or family website at its own name?
You want to get rid of squatters? Simple:
1) Elimintate "tasting" completely.
2) Require an actual site (not just a page of ads) go live at any give address within 30 days.
That would, however, reduce the registrars' profits, so you'll never see them happen.
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Re:ICANN should make domains more expensive (Score:5, Insightful)
address within 30 days.
I'd rather not have a registrar deciding whether or not to revoke my domain name registration just because they didn't think the content was non-trivial.
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Re:ICANN should make domains more expensive (Score:5, Interesting)
You missed
3) Prohibit exchange of domain names. Don't want one? Let it expire and it goes back into the pool. No, you can't sell it, any more than you can sell your telephone number.
But again, this wouldn't benefit the registrars, so it won't happen.
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Re:ICANN should make domains more expensive (Score:5, Insightful)
That idea falls apart when you start dealing with 'internet properties'. For example, my company owns .com and is going to build out a portal on it. Down the road, we may want to sell that to another company that already has an interest in the market.
With your idea, we would be unable to actually transfer that domain name to the company, essentially tying ourselves to them in perpetuity, and requiring them to rely on us not going out of business. Bad idea.
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Re:ICANN should make domains more expensive (Score:4, Interesting)
I agree with you. What you suggest is similar to what is required outside of "cyberspace".
However, the 30 days part is a little short. Perhaps even 6 months would be short. It seems you want a real substantive site, and sometimes getting the domain name first is an integral part of the business plan. Getting funding can take even longer, which is sometimes required to get a functional site online.
Requiring that the DNS is not parked, and is in use by an actual server which gives up a page describing your site with contact information and a construction link might be enough.
However, Web sites are not the only services which are used by a domain name either. I actually have plenty of domain names that are only used for email and other services too.
So I like your idea, but you would have to carefully consider what are the requirements of a domain being considered "live".
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Focus on country code. (Score:4, Insightful)
Let each country manage its own servers.
Does anyone in the USofA really care if Britain allows sitename.xxx.uk ?
Does anyone in Germany care that there is a sitename.mobile.us ?
All the .com and .org and .net and ... were okay when the Internet was tiny and mostly USofA only. But it showed a complete lack of forward planning. Decentralize the names. Let each country work it out. Particularly for the countries using alphabets that don't match 100% with USofA English.
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Re:Focus on country code. (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:DNS has failed anyway (Score:5, Insightful)
Hey, I don't know about you but I'm find just memorizing IP addresses.
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Re:Bad Idea....Bad Bad Bad (Score:5, Interesting)
Never mind the levels of confusion it would be creating.
Especially when I start registering common file extensions, like .exe, .bat, .jpg, .txt...
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Re:Bad Idea....Bad Bad Bad (Score:5, Funny)
I expect Commander Taco to register http://slashdot.dot/ [slashdot.dot] immediately upon its availability.
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