ICANN Releases Draft For New TLDs 168
NdJ writes "Looks like a whole new domain name battle ground is about to open up. ICANN have just made available their How to Apply for a New Generic Top-Level Domain Draft Applicant Guidebook. It won't be cheap for the individual, but certainly achievable for many domain-name-pimps. 'The Evaluation Fee is designed to make the new gTLD program self-funding only. This was a recommendation of the Generic names Supporting Organization. A detailed costing methodology — including historical program development costs, and predictable and uncertain costs associated with processing new gTLD applications through to delegation in the root zone — estimates a per applicant fee of $US185,000. This is the estimated cost per evaluation in the first application round.'"
Re:Makes some sense... (Score:2, Informative)
Punycode is the preferred IDN system at this time, as does not require making major changes to virtually every running DNS server. The vast majority of the Unicode character set is encode-able using it, so adding a larger character set does not seem to be necessary.
Re:Now all i need is 185K for .sex (Score:3, Informative)
Can you imagine how much money there is to be made off of .sex?
Now I need to figure out how to raise the money and get it. Though I am sure there will be many fights over that one.
Its worse than that.
I pulled this from http://www.icann.org/en/topics/new-gtld-draft-agreement-24oct08-en.pdf [icann.org]. Apparently they also charge a crazy QUARTERLY fee to keep it in existence. So much for my genius idea of creating a donation site and taking votes on the most inadvertently funny/abusive TLD to register.
"Section 6.1 Registry-Level Fees. Registry Operator shall pay ICANN a Registry-Level Fee equal to the greater of (i) the Registry Fixed Fee of US$18,750 per calendar quarter or (ii) the Registry- Level Transaction Fee calculated per calendar quarter as follows. For any quarter in which the Registry-Level Transaction Fee as calculated in this Section 6.1 exceeds the Fixed Fee, then the Registry-Level Transaction Fee shall be paid. The Registry-Level Transaction Fee will be equal to the number of annual increments of an initial or renewal domain name registration (at one or more levels, and including renewals associated with transfers from one ICANN-accredited registrar to another) during the applicable calendar quarter multiplied by US$0.25 (the âoeTransaction Feeâ) for calendar quarters during which the average annual price of registrations (including all bundled products or services that may be offered by Registry Operator and include or are offered in conjunction with a domain name registration) is equal to US$5.00. For calendar quarters during which the average annual price of registrations is less than US$5.00, the Transaction Fee will be decreased by US $0.01 for each US$0.20 decrease in the average annual price of registrations below $5.00, down to a minimum of US$0.01 per transaction. For calendar quarters during which the average annual price of registrations is greater than US$5.00, the Transaction Fee will be increased by US $0.01 for each US$0.20 increment in the average annual price of registrations above $5.00."
Re:Vote with your feet and check out OpenNIC (Score:5, Informative)
Hey guys. Fancy seeing you here.
People have to understand that ICANN has this power because people choose to point their nameservers at the legacy root servers. Take them out of the loop and poeple, not governments make the decision about what tlds are "legitimate".
We'll see just how much "change" is really coming in America. Remember that icann was mandated by the USG to be a voting member oriented organization. From the get-go there was a coup d'etat by a bunch of old white guys whove held on to it since then, in the interest of big business.
Ten years ago when icann was formed it had two diectoives. Accomplishing these two goals was why icann was (on the face of it) formed. 1) make new tlds 2) do something about trademarks. In reality when icann was coopted by the old-white-guys their real mandate was to stall new tlds which they did for 10 years and now of course only big business can afford them.
But I get a snese it Lucy and Charlie Brown playing football here. Recall than in 1999 they accepted $50K applicaitons for new tlds and took about 20 or 30. Their vetting of the tld applications was so badly done that the day one of them went live a court tied them up with an injunction for running an illegal lottery. Something that had ben pointed out to them well in advance, but they knew better. Dumbshits.
So there are still a bunch of companies that paid $50K and got bugger all. They're supposed to pay another $185K for another spin of the wheel?
Keep in mind there is a backlog of tld applications lodged in varios root server consrtiums around the world, plus an IANA published list of TLD applications receievd from 12 years ago, per the instuctions on the ogiginal internic form inviting people to do so, in accodance with the provisions of the original internic contract.
If they can't figure out how to tell if a tld is bullshit for less than $185K they have no right being in this business - but we've known that all along. These are not the best and the brightest, these are the control freaks that got government jobs, and now that they're losing control, they're just freaks.
Jacking in from the razors edge,
rs79
Re:Why now? (Score:5, Informative)
"I always assumed the reason behind .org, .net, .com and country TLDs was to keep things organized and consistent. Why have they decided to do what appears to me as simply going back on themselves?"
It's documented. Look at the "msggroup" archives from the era, it's the first mailing list at a time when there was only one mailing list. They say this is how it went down. The network was young, maybe 1000 nodes or so, and totally arbitrary hostnames were about to be phased out in favour of hierarchical DNS names. This would eliminate the problem of the host table getting huge, and the bigger it got the more often it needed updating.
DNS names were decentralized. Nameservers point to other nameservers which point to nameservers, thus the whole name database management problem went away as the data was decentralized.
But about the only thing poeple agreed on was "." or dot. Remember at the time the network was being used by military and aerospace contractors and universites. That's pretty much it.
So there was .mil, .nato, .arpa and then .com and .net for "commercial networks" (not that any existed then) and .net for "network infrastructure" - it was supposed to be for routers and stuff. >org was for "anything else" and wasn't "for non profits" as the icann bozos now claim. Check the rfc.
Nobdoy really like the names, they argued about it for about a month, then Jon Postel just decided, and that was that.
Steve Wolff is the guy that took the network out of the hands of the US government and freed it so anybody could do anything. But in moving administration of the network he *forgot* about the domain system so it stays in the hands of the US government. Where of course it was immediatly taken over by special interest groups where it's been ever since.
Don't expect any ratinal name schemes out of thesde clowns. If you look at the 2000 Marina Del Rey ICANN conference video where they picked the .museum and .coop winners you'll hear Darth Cerf say "I don't like the way that plays on the ear" and that was that, for $50K application for a tld that's how much thought you got, made only more ironic by the fact Cerf is deaf.
For $50K a deaf guy says it doesn't sound right to him.
I'm dying to see what the $185K test is although I suspect it involved telepathy, midgets and a sausage.
Re:Might as well... (Score:4, Informative)