New ICANN TLDs May Cause Internet Land Rush 443
wiryd writes "A new ICANN proposal would allow applications for almost any TLD. From the article: 'Tourists might find information about the Liberty Bell, for example, at a site ending in .philly. A rapper might apply for a Web address ending in .hiphop. "Whatever is open to the imagination can be applied for," says Paul Levins, ICANN's vice president of corporate affairs. "It could translate into one of the largest marketing and branding opportunities in history."'"
Welcome to the age (Score:5, Informative)
of horrible urls. How will people still be able to understand URLs if the are horribly malformed? Soon, people will not be able to distinguish between a TLD and a domain and people will fall to cleverly constructed scams.
Also, no domain is safe. Everybody can now claim google.philly or google.hiphop and companies can do nothing about it(or start countless lawsuits). This is a bad idea and implementing this will cause the www to be more confusing than it is now.
largest marketing and branding opportunities? (Score:5, Informative)
"It could translate into one of the largest clusterfucks in history."
FTFY
Sure. Anybody... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Can we stop it? (Score:5, Informative)
Where do we sign up to have this not happen?
You must be new here. You had a chance. ICANN took comments on this [icann.org] last year. Apparently not enough people spoke up about the problems, because they are going forward with it anyways.
Re:Epic Security Problem in My Opinion (Score:4, Informative)
No the point of DNS was to replace the unmanageable /etc/hosts issue.
Re:Alternative viewpoint: (Score:3, Informative)
Domain names important (Score:3, Informative)
The age of the domain name is over in my opinion. People find information by going through search engines, I would guess a very small population still types www.whatiwant.com when surfing. They would have learned their lesson a long time ago that that's not a smart idea.
I don't think that's true at all, lots of important sites can be easily remembered, and that's a good thing. Otherwise, we place all of our information, some of it vital, into the hands of a few big companies, like Google, who would then hold the keys to the castle. It's almost like they're a one-man DNS server converting what you want into a site name. I think we'd be better served to pare things down a tad so there weren't so many damned TLDs, rather than just give up. If we did give up, why not eliminate names altogether?
But honestly, the problem's not that dire, domain names are still usable. Let's say I want info on the Obama administration, for instance. I type in "whitehouse.com" and find a great deal of valuable information, some interesting images, and end up feeling a lot better about the direction this country is headed.
Re:Alternative viewpoint: (Score:1, Informative)
Most people will never look beyond the first two screens of search engine hits - the greater the amount of information published on the web, the more that is referenced on pages 3 and beyond.
Re:Alternative viewpoint: (Score:3, Informative)
mp3.com
buy.com
cars.com
linux.com
and of course ...
timecube.com
Re:Time to ditch DNS (Score:3, Informative)
Even in a distributed system there is somebody at the top. There has to be, otherwise where do you start from a blank slate?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_hash_table [wikipedia.org]
Re:Can we stop it? (Score:3, Informative)
ICANN has never given a damn what anybody says anyway. I was a member of the At-Large community that elected representatives to the At-Large Advisory Committee. Anyone remember how well that went? From Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:
"In the Memorandum of Understanding that set up the relationship between ICANN and the U.S. government, ICANN was given a mandate requiring that it operate "in a bottom up, consensus driven, democratic manner." However, the attempts that ICANN have made to set up an organizational structure that would allow wide input from the global Internet community did not produce results amenable to the current Board. As a result, the At-Large constituency and direct election of board members by the global Internet community were soon abandoned."
If they don't like what others have to say, regardless of how good the advice may be, they simply ignore you and proceed in whatever way they believe will gain them more power, influence and money. That's the simple explanation for this move.