New .tel TLD Now In Use

rockwood reports that the .tel top level domain has been deployed, "in a first attempt at pushing the recently approved .tel... The top-level domain .tel was approved by ICANN as a sponsored TLD launching on Wednesday, December 3, 2008 to trademark owners of national effect and on February 3, 2009 to anyone who wishes to apply. Its main purpose is as a single management and publishing point for 'internet communication' services, providing a global contacts directory service by housing all types of contact information directly in the DNS."

.mobi?

[larry bagina]

sounds like .mobi. And probably as irrelevant.

Just in under the wire

[MosesJones]

Brilliantly "I CANN but I shouldn't" manages to win the dumbest, stupidest, most pointless idea of the whole sodding year.

I mean just having a "standard" of I don't know VCF and using MIMEtypes from a web page would give you the ability to do this sort of connectivity address book stuff within the existing infrastructure. Now the idea is that everyone should register an equivalent .tel (errrr how do they do that when there are different companies at the .com, .net, .org, .co.uk, .fr etc addresses).

Quite astonishingly badly stupid and I applaud their genius by making sure it will be in everyone's mind as the "worst idea of 2008" is compiled. The only person who might be happy about this is the 2000-2007 undisputed winning partnership of Bush/Cheney for their "Threatening China", "What Torture?" "What WMD?" "Mission Accomplished", "What problems in Iraq?" and many other household favourites.

As my mother said "Just because 'you can' doesn't mean 'you should'". I propose a name change to ICANN to "Please god no we can't be trusted with this responsibility"

too late

[Anonymous Coward]

all these one-roof TLDs would maybe have been worth something if they were there from the beginning. But everyone wants a .com because everything on the interwebz is a www.*.com or .org for organizations as if it lent credence to their validity. It's just far too late now and serves little use, and practically no guarantee of homogeneity.

Uh, what?

[TheRaven64]

How is that meant to work? I already use existing domain names for 'Internet communication' services, like email and IM. I can already use DNS to map telephone numbers to these with RFC 2916 or map arbitrary domains to them with RFC 2915. So, what exactly, is the point of .tel?

Enum

[Imagix]

Uh, didn't this used to be called Enum? (e164.arpa.)?

What happened to .net?

[ampmouse]

I could be wrong, but this sounds very similar to the purpose of the .net TLD! Why so many new useless TLDs?

Re:Uh, what?

[Hans Lehmann]

So, what exactly, is the point of .tel?

The point is to make money for the registrars, of course, since now every major web site will have to register foo.tel to go along with foo.com, foo.org, foo.biz, foo.info,......

Re:Huh?

[onefriedrice]

Perhaps by DNS space he means the fact that organizations who want to register their website under all the TLD's in order to protect their name will have yet another TLD. As the number of domains that point to the same IP address increases, so does the number of pointless DNS requests.

Re:YAY! Just what we needed!

[mcgrew]

You misunderstand what I mean. If you have a TLD for .food and another tld for .aero, mcdonald.food could take you to McBurgers, while mcdonald.aero would take you to McDonald Aircraft.

mcgrew.nerd might take you to me, while mcgrew.funny would take you to the comedian with my name. I'm not suggesting that "mcgrew" be a TLD, just that there aren't enough TLDs to go around. I don't think five is a nearly big anough group.

Yet my lastname.com is not available

That's because the squatters took every goddamned name on earth back in the nineties.