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."
Re:Yes! (Score:5, Insightful)
Good luck. I predict a fierce bidding war for .fart.
Re:money? (Score:3, Insightful)
"wishes of the internet community"
That's just like "The American People" politicians keep talking about: the wealthy top 0.001% Internet Community.
Internet governance and the common man (Score:5, Insightful)
I hate to be cynical (no, that's a lie, I love to be cynical), but what's the point of commenting on this to ICANN.
ICANN has proven again and again that they listen to corporations and governments (mostly the American) but really couldn't care less what the general internet users want. Or even what the general internet users need. Sure, they'll put up some superficial show of consulting the community, but it never amounts to much.
ICANN has been bought and paid for. Really, the only way a normal internet user can comment on ICANN's actions is to take their business elsewhere (ie. alternate DNS roots).
Re:Pete and Repeat walk into a bar (Score:2, Insightful)
Dear idiots that moderated the parent as Offtopic - the story is a dupe. The link is to the original /. posting of the story. Now go email CmdrTaco and tell him you're too stupid to have mod points.
Truth in advertising? (Score:5, Insightful)
This sounds like a pretty bad idea. The first thing that comes to mind is the wholesale registration of TLD's for typosquatting.
At least they'll be able to register a proper domain: .con
Just fraking stop (Score:5, Insightful)
Do we have the basic TLDs? yes, stop...
Does pretty much every country have its own basic TLD? yes, stop...
whoever came up with this idea, please, stop...
especially for that low a price... maybe for $1.85 billion, but not $185,000.
ICANN needs to learn how to play solitaire, maybe then they'd get the reason they're there.
(hint, it's the first rule of both business and IT... "whatever you do, don't touch it").
Re:money? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Yes! (Score:4, Insightful)
The question we should ask ourselves (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, this is a terrible idea for reasons already brought up. [slashdot.org]
Suffixes FTW! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Yes! (Score:3, Insightful)
On the subject of bidding wars, how will they handle multiple applications for the same TLD. Will it be an auction? (no I will not RTFA)
And beyond that, what if a TLD is determined to have value far exceeding $185k? Maybe that seems like a strange question, but it just seems like giving a private organization permanent control over TLDs is a system that might need to be overthrown or subverted in the future.
But maybe that's just me thinking funny things. I do think there's something disturbing about the rate at which domain names have been taken up by squatters. There are plenty of good domain names that are basically unavailable and at the same time unused (unless you count placeholder pages with ads as being "used"), and I wonder whether there might be some alternative way of dealing with these things.
How do they define administrative costs? (Score:5, Insightful)
Firstly, ICANN doesn't do all that they should now to "manage" domains and if they're going to add more, then they should do a more honest job of determining the level of service they will commit to for what is, let's face it, a discretionary option. Nobody NEEDS their own TLD. This is about things that are optional. That being the case, isn't it long past time that ICANN committed to having some sort of effective system to address, for example, claimjumping? I lost a domain a few years back because I was in the hospital for two months, in and out of conciousness for several weeks of that, and yet some fucker has been able to come in and take my domain, use it only to get traffic on the subjects I used it for, and my host provider and everybody else I talk to says that basically I'm screwed. Where the hell is ICANN at a time like this?
Afaict, from the first ten pages or so of TFA, the only costs they assess are those of reviewing and processing the application, which is not how any rational organization would approximate them, Even after the application, there will be costs of some sort to maintain the damned thing and afaic, for something this discretionary they should set the bar higher and commit to providing better service, service that costs money, services like domain ownership arbitration, and then estimate the total costs to incorporate that level of service.
In another point, from spagetti suppers at smalltown churches to sale of air rights by private schools, there is nothing unusual about a non-profit treating sale of non-essential goods as a profit opportunity. The term "non-profit" is an oversimplification, as anybody who has gone around selling candy for their sports team knows. We know that some people would pay tens of millions for their own TLD and we know that nobody NEEDS their own TLD so why shouldn't they charge at least a few million each?
.extort TLDs (Score:3, Insightful)
So what I want is to buy .extort1 as a TLD for 180K and then basically open up shop
so anyone who wants to get foo.com but can't afford it can get foo.extort1 instead.
This means the owner of the name foo will have to pay me to keep their brand pure,
since they'll want to own foo.extort1. Then when I need more cash, I can make a .extort2 and
start selling foo again as foo.extort2 unless foo again pays me to hold their brand.
Well, ok, so probably .extort1 won't sound so good and no one will want to visit it so the
foo owner may not care. But if foo is a brand of shoes and I buy a .shoes or a .clothes or a .footwear or a .america or a .united-states or a .united-states-of-america or a .english-speaking
or even nuisance names like .go or .yes or .buy or .super or .comm then there are going to be lots
of opportunities to extort the owner of foo.com over and over and over.
And to whose benefit? Are there really so many businesses in the world that need domain names? An awful lot of decent domain names don't command much of a price these days now that there are auction sites that show them side-by-side so you can see that the space is really rich with options, and now that domain sales agencies already suggest dozens of reasonable name combinations not yet taken.
This is just a scam pushed by people who want to make money, and it just causes the little guy who is trying to build and protect a brand to scramble. Coke or Disney may not have much trouble covering, since it's a tiny fraction of their operation, but someone trying to build a reasonable brand from nothing may have a great deal of difficulty. And yet, big companies can already afford to just buy out whatever names it wants (or push people out by applying appropriate legal means around an established trademark). And smaller operations can better afford to use a longer name than they can to get a good short name and then never be able to protect it because of a proliferation of more-or-less-duplicates under different top level domains.
And none of this considers the way that heuristics work in text editors, recognizing foo.org as a URL without anyone having to say. When .anything can be a domain name, how will text editors know whether you just forgot to insert a
space or you intentionally wanted to auto-highlight something as a domain name.
There are plenty enough domain names. The one thing there might not be is a fair distribution of them across non-English languages or non-US countries. But that isn't what it sounds like their mechanism will fix. If anything it will take the existing problem and compound it.
Re:Problem? (Score:3, Insightful)
.html might be even more interesting
Re:Yes! (Score:3, Insightful)
Let me count the reasons... (Score:4, Insightful)
Perhaps because it's a blatantly obvious cash-grab by an organization whose ostensible purpose is to serve the Internet community, but instead lives off of it parasitically?
Perhaps because it would require many people to register multiple domain names (possibly thousands) in order to protect their brands, or else leave them open to be registered by squatters and phishers.
Perhaps because there's just no legitimate technical reason for it?
Perhaps because it would be a giant pain in the ass and probably break various pieces of software, requiring people who have no interest in the issue either way to expend energy on it?
Those are just the things that come immediately to mind.