.tel Coming Soon

GeorgeK writes "ICANN hasn't posted it on their website yet, but according to one of their board members, the .tel top-level domain was approved." notellmo.tel is going to be one of the first domains sold.

Purpose?

[SkiifGeek]

Is this designed just to be another money maker, or is it actually designed to be useful?

With the .xxx TLD, the consensus seemed to be that the .com TLD would still reign supreme, but the only real use would be a complete TLD for filtering companies to block. It seems like this might be headed the same way.

Surely domain squatters will soon rush the registrar with registration of names suggested like win.tel, mo.tel, nor.tel, and so on, which would really defeat the purpose of a specialised .tel TLD if they could be registered.

Enough suggestions al'eady!

[nmoog]

All of the hilarious domains are substantially less funny when you pronounce the dot. win dot tel? I dont geddit?

Abolish TLDs

[k98sven]

Another TLD.. Who-hoo.

Isn't it time they get rid of them instead? They don't have any meaning anymore. They just create a hassle when you have to remember if that site was '.org' or '.net' or '.com' or whatever.

And this in turn does nothing but generate business for domain-squatters anyway.

The internet is too big nowadays for tacking-on a TLD to provide unique identification. And 'solving' that by creating more TLDs only aggrevates the problem.

And de facto most people are using Google or some other search engine anyway. Guessing at the domain name just doesn't work as well as it once did.

Re:Abolish TLDs

[1u3hr]

Isn't it time they get rid of them instead? They don't have any meaning anymore.

Not quite. I think the CCTLDs are necessary and useful. Also .gov and .gov.cctld. Maybe edu. The rest by the lack of enforcement of any conditions have just become a scam to deceive surfers and fleece companies by forcing them to pay or be squatted by a look-alike or worse. No porn site is going to exclusively use .xxx, no telephone company is exclusively going to use .tel.

Re:Since we're throwing out names....

[Anonymous Coward]

how about just a simple
grep "tel$" /usr/share/dict/words | sed 's/tel$/.tel/' ;)

Re:Why the hierarchy?

[seti]

The whole point of the TLD system is to have distributed authorities for various branches in the tree. The system you suggest would require exactly one authority to manage everything (including dns updates).

Re:Purpose?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, now have you looked at any of those sites? When I said "In the wild", I didn't mean "You can find them if you search Google".

http://www.google.com/search?q=site:int [google.com] gives 27,700,000 results. That's more than the entire .aero, .coop & .museum gTLD's combined, by a factor of about 27. I have never, once, seen a link to site in any of those four gTLDs. They exist (I never claimed the didn't), but they generally exist simply to exist; purposless and unloved. None of those sites ever needed to go in their own gTLD. The numbers speak for themselves; just over 100,000 .musuem results from Google. What was the fucking point?

Well, huzzah....

[Mac Degger]

Ok....it's TLD soup now. With just a few TLD's, it was usefull to have them regulated. But by now there's just a couple too many of them (you gotta try [companyyou'retryingtoreach].com/net/org/biz/tv/in fo/xxx/tel/[countrycode] and hope you get the correct one). I think now it's gone far enough that arbitrary [maybe 3/4 character limited] TLD's wouldn't cloud the already clouded situation.

In this cluttered TLD-age, why not have www.[yourname].[surname]?

Re:Abolish TLDs

[Mr Smidge]

The old .com and .net suffix were put there for a reason, and things could still possibly be put right.

If there were no TLDs, and you registered "prestige", as your own domain name, then it could easily conflict with any number of other people who have legitimate uses for that name:
* Companies in your country called "prestige".
* Anyone in another country wanting the name "prestige" - perhaps it has a different meaning in another country's tongue?
* Companies in other countries.

I think there's definitely a need to separate:
* Domain names in different countries/continents.
* Commercial domains.
* Official government bodies of countries/regions.
* Non-profit organisations, and personal-use domains.

You see, the original system wasn't so bad after all. I think it is just a lack of regulation when registering for domains that has ruined things. And everybody's guilty - I mean, look at me: I own a .net domain name and I'm not an ISP.

However, I don't think there's any easy way to kick things back into shape now. But if it had been done properly to begin with, things would be ok.

If I had my way, the only top-level domains would be .int (international), .eu/.asia/.. (continents), and country codes. No top-level .com or .org addresses. Also, the US isn't special - why should .gov, .edu etc. represent US institutions?

Take a look at these:
prestige.co.us - clearly a company called 'prestige' in the US.
foobar.edu.fr - The 'foobar' educational facility in France.
trade.gov.tv - The trade department of the Tuvalu government (a bit random, but you see my point).

I really do think that these extra TLDs detract from the point of it all. Telcoms are just companies; they don't need their own TLD. I was never even fully convinced about the need for a .net TLD either.

Is there any hope of enforcing a bit more regulation to get things into a sensible state?