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."
Re:Worst idea ever (Score:3, Interesting)
ICANN should make domains more expensive (Score:3, Interesting)
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..
Re:Sweet (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Zone Defense! (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
spam.spam.spam.bakedbeans.and.spam (Score:1, Interesting)
They're nuts. Let there be a *bit* of contention for the limited number of TLDs so that finding the relevant domain is more likely rather than the thousands of squatted variations, and so that a company or person has a decent chance of affording the limited number of variations that are possible to derive from their name.
There's plenty of domain-space "land" out there if so much of it wasn't bought up and occupied so cheaply by so many speculators. Put those guys out of business by enacting some effective rules and prices that will discourage squatting and front running, and the relatively limited current namespace problem will solve itself. Otherwise it's going to be the biggest namespace grab in internet history, to nobody's benefit but perhaps the registrars.
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".
Why do we need TLDs again? (Score:1, Interesting)
Why don't we ditch TLDs entirely and say that a valid domain is a string of alphanumeric characters that are seperated internally by dots/underscores/dashes/etc and delimited by //
Re:Worst idea ever (Score:3, Interesting)
They can buy them and have them resolve to nothing, or they can let someone else buy them and have them resolve to hardcore pornography.
Not buying them is a lot more embarrassing.
Re:Better than the current system (Score:1, Interesting)
Originally the domains names assignments were intended as: .org was for non-profit organisations .com was for commercial ventures .edu was for educational institutions .net was for clouds networks (X.25)
And everyone else had country codes (.us, .uk, .fr , .ca ). The UK orginally wanted to have the paths flipped round for some reason ie. uk.co.university.department.staffname), although that has been dropped.
Scotland wants to have their own TLD (.sco), so there might end up being a (.eng) for England - theres a .ie for Ireland, and Wales [namesatwork.com] wants to have a TLD as well.
Having country, regional or geographical based TLD's is probably the best, as you can identify where the spam is coming from.
Re:Wait - I've got a MUCH better idea... (Score:2, Interesting)
How it might work... (Score:3, Interesting)
I wouldn't be surprised if ICANN made the rule that your 2nd level name aliases the TLD. So Disney.com would also own *.disney.
TLDs would no longer be categories, they'd just be the site name. http://ilovecats http://cnn http://teslamotors
Makes sense to me.
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...
Re:Worst idea ever (Score:3, Interesting)
Or they can just create .disney TLD and ignore the subdomains of other TLDs. Just like anyone can create disney.somedomain.com and it will be of no interest to them.
Re:Focus on country code. (Score:4, Interesting)
They should make it a reflection of .com (Score:3, Interesting)
They should simply make it a reflection of .com. If you own abcde.com you, and only you, are entitled to abcde TLD. There are couple hiccups with other tlds... but that could be resovlved:
So if you have dotcom, and leaving .com off won't conflict with an existing TLD, you can pay another X$ fee and get it as a TLD. If you don't pay the fee, you don't get it, but nobody else can get it either.
No massive influx of squatter problems, trademark problems, spammer problems etc. PennyArcade.com and only pennyarcade.com can get the PennyArcade TLD, CocaCola.com can get cocacola, microsoft.com can get microsoft... intel.com can get intel, ibm.com can get ibm.
And ca.com, us.com, com.com can't get ca, us, and com respectively. They'll live.
The idea of organizational TLDs was a mistake from the get-go. If we could just get rid of them entirely I'd advocate that. But due to conflicts between legitimate .net / .org / .com sites that's not really practical.
So lets just do second best, and give the vast majority of .com's the option of leaving off the .com.
Re:ICANN should make domains more expensive (Score:3, Interesting)
#1 is good, #2 sounds good on paper but would be hard to enforce (would Google just be a "page of ads"?)
I'd add #3: increase the ICANN registration fee for each additional domain being created at once by $0.05 for the first 10, then $1.00 for the next 100, then $10.00 for each one after that. It would have negligible effect on anyone but squatters, and would have the added bonus of helping to fund ICANN. Squatters could still register on the cheap, just not tens of thousands of domains at once.
Re:Generic TLDs caused the problems (Score:3, Interesting)
I doubt that there are only 14 machines handling all root server requests for the entire world. I'm almost certain that each IP address goes to a load-balancing machine that controls a farm of servers. As you say, this scheme would result in far more use of those servers, meaning that the farms would have to be expanded.
Re:Worst idea ever (Score:2, Interesting)
Fair Use has nothing to do with trademarks. IP world can get confusing if you're not paying that much attention.
Legacy names grandfathered? (Score:3, Interesting)
Seems to me that the current holders of legacy names in the flat namespace of UUCP Mailnet, who have retained their legacyname.tld counterparts in .com, .edu, .net, or .gov, should be able to get them as TLDs, and free of charge, as a continuation of the legacy.
Failing that they should have first refusal.
These names in this flat namespace predate the ICANN. They were also transferred intact into the electronic mail routing during the conversion to domain-style addressing. (Indeed, at some sites you can still get mail to them by addressing it to user@legacyname, and at many more by addressing it to legacyname!user.)
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.
dot parody (Score:3, Interesting)
Under US law, parody isn't copyright infringement. So how about copying just about everything in *.com, doing a regex to replace certain words with obscenities, and reposting it as *.parody?
Then when you search, why shouldn't Google assume you're as likely looking for the parody as The Real Thing?
Re:Sweet (Score:4, Interesting)
Sure, but when google.search redirects to msn.search (especially in a sneaky, but not trademark infringy way), people will start to use it more and more. And as custom TLD's become more and more commonplace, less people will think of .com or .co.[country code] as the standard. .com's will become much like .net's or .org's.
What ICANN really messed up with was the TLD concept reading backwards. It should be tld.domain.www, or com.google.mail, com.google.search, com.google.etc. It confuses a lot of people to have the order the other way. And now, if TLD's spread like this, suddenly there are tons of people with .mail etc. that can all look more realistic than mail.google.com.
Re:Sweet (Score:3, Interesting)
Good job. You, like I, am a geek and understand this. My mother does not understand that [subdomain].her-bank.com is still her bank, and made me drive over because she was convinced that there was malware on her computer. No one types in "com.google", but most people don't understand that, at least theoretically, "google.com" and "microsoft.com" have more in common than "google.net" and "microsoft.net".
Further, there already is a convention in English, Spanish, Italian, German, Greek, Russian, pretty much all western countries of reading left to right. At least with e-mail I have the @ sign. X at Y dot com makes sense. X dot Y dot com, while I understand, does not to most people imply the same logical structure. Hell, filesystems put subdirectories on the right. Even URLs do this. As I type this, it is slashdot.org/comments.pl Notice that after the URL I revert to reading left to right.
Re:Worse (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Sweet (Score:3, Interesting)
True. Either way, aslong as it's consistent.
The most-significant part could be at either end, aslong as it's consistent.
Except with URLs it's not. The most significant part is in the MIDDLE which is plainly braindead.
http://3.2.1/4/5 [3.2.1]
That look like a sensible arrangement to anyone ?
Atleast with email it's 3@2.1 so in a sequence, though the oposite one from the one we -normally- use.
US dates share the same sillyness. day-month-year is fine, as is year-month-day, but whoever decided on putting the least-significant part in the freaking MIDDLE as in month-day-year ?
Should be http://org.slashdot/comments.php [org.slashdot]
Re:Worse (Score:3, Interesting)
Here is why I think you are wrong. .US TLD used to be run before '02; I would go into details on that, but when I went to wikipedia it was...wrong.
I've been trying to read up on this, because I'm sort of puzzled as to how, exactly, they are planning to do this.
What I think they are doing is something similar to the way that
What I can see them doing is leaving the primary nameservers alone, and just adding a pointer to the registrar of the new TLD's; when a user surfs in, depending on how their DNS is set up, they would hit one of the big 13, which would point them to the nameserver delegated by the owner of the "vanity" TLD, .disney, which would probably handle full resolution from that point. In order to actually be able to get the vanity TLD, the person applying for it would not only have to show that they have a good reason for getting it, but that they could handle the DNS aspect of it, as well. I'm sure that godaddy & others would offer that as a service, but what I think I'm reading, and what I hope they mean, is that a DNS hosting service wouldn't be an option, the person or group getting the TLD would have to agree to run the nameserver in order to get it. .goatse, for instance, the whole responsibility for what came from that TLD to the rest of the web would be with the person who registered it. Unless, of course, the guy running .goatse signed a contract with a guy named Tod Isney to forward DNS traffic to his computer at todisney.goatse...
That would reduce the overall number of vanity TLD's quite a bit, not add any excessive strain to the root servers, AND provide an easy mechanism to block the inevitable spammers, in addition to insulating them from legal repercussions; if someone wanted to register
Hmm. rambling here, on a theory that probably isn't right.
well, regardless, I think this ties in somehow with the recent efforts to get common carrier status removed from providers of internet services, the way Usenet is currently getting killed.
Re:Sweet (Score:3, Interesting)
You realize that the "postal convention" is broken onto seperate lines? And that partway through it doesn't suddenly get more specific ("slashdot.com/comments.pl" is "2.1/3" as far as general to specific goes)? That "postal convention" was designed to put the recipient first (since mail is to a recipient rather than a location, which is why it is illegal to open mail that came to your address under a different name; and why mail forwarding works), and the rest is only routing information? That's why user@address makes sense to people. Address.TLD does not. Even on /., which site do you expect to have more in commmon with google.com, google.net or microsoft.com. If the answer is google.net, then the TLD system was designed so poorly you don't even expect it to be meaningful anymore.
Lastly, the number of counter examples to what you claim as a standard are innumerable. Look at telephones (a far more apt analogy), Country Code - Area Code - Exchange - Extension.