The Beginnings of a TLD Free-For-All? 489
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."
Worst idea ever (Score:5, Insightful)
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]
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
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.
Re:Wait - I've got a MUCH better idea... (Score:3, Insightful)
Just 'rm /etc/resolv.conf' and you're done.
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?
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: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.
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.
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
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.
Re:Pointless (Score:3, Insightful)
Or maybe we should just get rid of the entire second tier of domain names altogether. Why bother having .org or .com when you can just have .slashdot or .disney (to use some common examples from this discussion)?
From a user interface perspective, I can see a lot of value in this. Asking people to remember if a site is a .org or a .com or a .net was probably a mistake to begin with.
From an administrative perspective, it seems to open a big can of worms. The current TLD divisions at least have some sort of reasoning behind them. Arbitrary TLDs will put a lot more load on the TLD registry.
Re:ICANN should make domains more expensive (Score:1, Insightful)
So you won't be able to register a domain for use in email, ftp server, etc, etc?
domain names != web
Re:DNS has failed anyway (Score:5, Insightful)
Hey, I don't know about you but I'm find just memorizing IP addresses.
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 :)
Re:Good lord, why? (Score:2, Insightful)
Usenet-Like naming system (Score:3, Insightful)
Anybody thought about using a co-opted naming system such as used for Newsgroups ?
Think about it....
Re:Worst idea ever (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Wait - I've got a MUCH better idea... (Score:3, Insightful)
Nah, people will want certain numbers and not want others. East Asians won't want numbers with "4" in them as they're unlucky. Christian nutjobs won't want 666, the number of the Beast. Script kiddies will want 1337.
Re:ICANN should make domains more expensive (Score:2, Insightful)
you CAN buy a phone number... Ive seen it done by some local pizza places.
Re:Sweet (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:They should make it a reflection of .com (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:ICANN should make domains more expensive (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:How it might work... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Now I feel stupid (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Bad Idea....Bad Bad Bad (Score:2, Insightful)
.html, .htm, .php, .asp ...
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.
Oh, registrars will love this. (Score:4, Insightful)
So expect the registrars to get behind this quickly and completely. It'll make their cash registers ring, as typosquatters try to register variants of well-known domains and sell them to phishers, and legitimate domain owners race to beat them to it. In the end, a large amount of money will flow to registrars, every TLD except a few gTLDs and the ccTLDs will be blacklisted by default, and lots of people will own worthless domains that nobody really wants.
And ICANN will congratulate itself on a job well done.
Re:Usenet-Like naming system (Score:3, Insightful)
slashdot.bork.bork.bork.bork.bork.bork.bork.bork.bork ?
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.
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.
Re:Sweet (Score:3, Insightful)
"What ICANN really messed up with was the TLD concept reading backwards. It should be ... com.google.etc. It confuses a lot of people to have the order the other way. "
Yeah, look at all the confused people typing in "com.google."
Seriously, the ordering is just a convention. It can go either way as long as it does so consistently.
Re:Sweet (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually they followed a convention, which I believe most countries follow.
The postal convention. Think of how you address a letter.
Most Specific
Next most specific
next most
least
get it?
Re:Worthless (Score:4, Insightful)
I know that the USA owns the Internet, but in a perfect world, the .mil, .gov, .edu, etc TLDs should be .mil.us, .gov.us, and .edu.us respectively.