ICANN Proposes New Way To Buy Top-Level Domains 198
narramissic writes "Late last week, ICANN put up for comment a new top-level domain (TLD) proposal that would open up the market for generic TLDs on the Internet, basically allowing anyone with $185,000 to buy a new TLD. ICANN has based the cost of a generic TLD on what it believes will be the cost to evaluate applications and protect the organization against risk, said Paul Levins, ICANN's executive officer and vice president for corporate affairs. Any excess money would be redistributed based on the wishes of the Internet community, he said. As of late Tuesday, there were only a couple of comments on the proposal."
Pete and Repeat walk into a bar (Score:5, Informative)
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/10/24/1716233&from=rss
Re:Internet governance and the common man (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Cost Plus Pricing is Stupid (Score:2, Informative)
Complaint address (Score:4, Informative)
I strongly encourage people to write to that address and voice your opinion on the issue. That is, after all, why it is called a public forum.
Re:Mod Article +1 Funny (Score:3, Informative)
Worse than that. They expect the application fees to "protect against risks". Now, just what 'risks' could that possibly be? It's not like they could hit somebody with a truck, or a building might fall on somebody. Just what sort of risk is involved in maintaining a database that links tediously formatted names with a 32-bit number?
Re:How do they define administrative costs? (Score:4, Informative)
"Where the hell is ICANN at a time like this? "
That is nothing to do with ICANN's mandate, which is purely technical administration. You have a legal problem. Icann doesn't do anything about spam or ponies because they're not technical issues. Instead Icann focuses on, um trademark stuff which the government thinks is technical. Plus you're not rich enough for them to care about.
Now, as for this "we'l do good things with the money" crap. I aint getting fooled again. The NSF directed NSI to retain 33% of all original domain names sales to put into an NSF "intellectual infrastructure" fund. "Intellectual infrastructure" was people and this money was for workshops, research grants and to, in the words of the man who made the fund, "keep the IETF *process* (not the ietf per se) pure".
Congress appropriated it and gave it to Mike Roberts when he initially captures ICANN, for his useless Internet2 backbone. Never mind companies all over the world paid into that faund.
Plus, if they want companies to be able to survive risk better, why are they taking 180K from them. How many companies are lest risky cause they gave away 180K for nothing?
Now if it were me and I wanted to test a TLD I'd proably just tell you guys about it and by morning, of the server was still standing, I'm sure I'd have a pretty good idea what works and what doesn't.
Re:Mod Article +1 Funny (Score:2, Informative)
Just what sort of risk is involved in maintaining a database that links tediously formatted names with a 32-bit number?
Proliferation of phishing and social engineering, primarily - and let's not forget the various technical risks that DNS system as a whole has had over time.
I believe the money as a risk avoidance is to be understood as "your average small-time conman or a parents'-basement script kiddie can't afford the registration costs, and it would be prohibitively expensive even for big-time criminals to spend and immediately lose an investment that big".