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."
Hmmm... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Yes! (Score:5, Interesting)
In all seriousness, we have enough ghetto TLDs already...Shelling out 200k for a TLD that may languish in obscurity forever sounds like a risky proposition.
The only real use I see for it is for sites that are forced to register massive numbers of subdomains: having your own TLD would give you a lot of flexibility in that situation. Otherwise? I'm just not getting it.
Problem? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:The question we should ask ourselves (Score:3, Interesting)
>>Is how many orders of "herbal viagra" do you need to sell to pull in $185,000 to register .v1agra (or other such clever alternate spelling) to run your spamming operation with no registrar oversight ever again?
That would be awesome. I'd setup my local BIND servers to think they are the TLD for .v1agra and point it all to 127.0.0.1. I would then block any e-mail coming form @*.v1agra.
But the majority of spammers wouldn't do this because of how easy it is to block.
What I can see is a security nightmare. In todays mind set, I will register .c0m Or .C0M with a zero. .0rg aka .0RG.
Now how hard is it going to be to spot the different between http://ebay.com/ [ebay.com] and http://ebay.c0m/ [ebay.c0m] for the average joe?
Mindset of a few years down the road. Now common are domains like http://checking.uowbank/ [checking.uowbank] So as a hacker I register U0WBANK replacing the o with a zero. Will your font let you tell the difference in my phishing e-mail?
I'm not against the idea of more TLDs, but I can see how it will complicate security. Of course, if you allow any TLD then why not drop the entire TLD idea alltogether?
Let one register not EBAY.COM but EBAY. So it's HTTP://eBay You could basically do that with these opened up TLDs, but only those with $185k to burn will have something so nice. So we will end up with http://microsoft/ [microsoft] and http://apple/ [apple] but poor guys like me will still have .com at the end.
My $.0185
Re:money? (Score:5, Interesting)
Since when are your eyeballs the "community".
The Internet, like television, has become a farm, where website developers raise eyeball-bearing click-monkeys like you and sell them wholesale to advertising resellers.
Once again, as with TV, you are not the customer of the Internet, you are its product.
And what happens with local hostnames? (Score:5, Interesting)
Many of us have named many of their local machines with a short name having no dots. Maybe as many use have a search setup for their local domain. So what happens if I happen to have a local machine named "tube", and someone decides to register the "tube" TLD and puts an A record on it, which he most likely will -- after all, if you owned a TLD, wouldn't you put your website there?
You got it right, a big mess. And that's just the first thing that comes to mind that open TLD registration might disturb.
I don't have any problem with TLDs being a mess. There is no way to put such a big system as the world DNS in good order and keep it tidy, and after you are used to it, it doesn't make much difference. It might even be better, or at least no worse, than it would have been if there were strict rules about who and what.
However, opening the main namespace for open registration sounds to me like a bad idea. That's a big no-no for me. Especially when it is everyone's main domain namespace, and we are already using it excessivly for a lot of stuff.
The good thing is that the impact wouldn't be that big as, while many companies could afford a TLD of that price, I hope there won't be a huge rush for registrations, and honestly, I don't have any boxes named 'ms' and 'ibm', and even if I have, renaming one or two wouldn't be much a trouble.
But even then, this shouldn't be allowed. At all.
Re:And what happens with local hostnames? (Score:3, Interesting)