VeriSign Could Add 220 New Top Level Domains

darthcamaro writes "At the end of this month, the first round of applications for ICANN's expansion of the generic Top Level Domains will close. While we still don't how many applications in total there will be, we now know that VeriSign — the company that runs .com and .net is backing at least 220 of them."

All these TLDs would be under American control

[Baron_Yam]

Making them worth much less than you might expect, given that the Americans have recently shown they're quite willing to apply their laws to foreigners if they can reach them. .COM's fine because companies are already invested in it... but who would bother using a new TLD with that risk?

.DO .NOT and .WANT

[Zocalo]

Seriously, can anyone come up with a point for this other than a money making scheme for ICANN? Verisign "protecting" its ".com" and ".net" brands, presumably by registering the likes of ".con", ".c0n", and ".cum" (bet the people who opposed ".xxx" will love the last one), kind of proves the point, does it not? The only thing I can come up with is that because ".info" and most of the rest of the last batch of gTLDs are widely regarded as a cesspit this is the attempt at a do-over in the hope that the scammers won't be able to pony up the cash but trademark obsessed companies can and (apparently at least a couple of hundred of them) will.

I think it's outstanding...

[rastoboy29]

..after all, with all these new TLD's it will solve the problem of...uh...I mean, it will help greatly with...uh...um.

shit.

Stop the "protecting my trademark" whine

[Capt. Skinny]

It's to sell them to those law-abiding companies that already have their domains in .com/.net/.org, and who want to protect their trademark investment

This is why new TLDs are of little value to anyone. Instead of treating it as a namespace that makes more domain names accessible, companies treat their second level domain as a TLD, making the TLD just about as significant as the "www" in front. Purveyors of domain names don't help, they actively promote the practice. Porn sites were up in arms when .XXX was in the news, claiming "it will only cost us more to register the new domain name and protect our trademark." These folks are missing the point of creating new TLDs. They are namespaces which serve to increase the number of second-level domains that are available to the community. All this "protecting my trademark" whining has to stop before internet DNS turns into the US patent system.

Re:.DO .NOT and .WANT

[mkiwi]

The reason Verisign does all this is to make MONEY. They are running out of revenue streams so they had to create 220 more out of thin air. The whole thing is a racketeering operation where every company ponies up money to protect their trademarks after new TLDs come out. Verisign laughs all the way to the bank.

unnecessary money grab

[sdnoob]

it is a safe assumption that every applicant of one of these vanity TLDs already has at least one other existing domain...

so... WHY THE FUCK ARE THESE STUPID THINGS NEEDED? this is nothing more than a money grab by icann and the sponsoring registrars.

fuck 'em. fuck 'em all.

once the list of vanity domains comes out.. i'm just going to add them all to the malware domain blocks already in my hosts file. i won't use 'em or any site that redirects an established .COM (or whatever) to the fucked-up vanity name.. even if a major online site starts 301-redirecting existing tools, pages or sites i use, to go through their new vanity domains (which i'm gonna call SLD for Stupid Level Domain). i'll find something else to replace 'em -- that's the beauty of the internet, competitors are only a click away.

Re:transliterations of .com and .net

[Solandri]

Please tell me that this doesn't mean Verisign is poised to scoop up: .nte .ten .ent .tne .cmo .moc .mco .ocm...

to resell them to domain typo-squatters?

Y'know, if ICANN were truly looking out for the best interests of the net, they would reserve all those TLDs as well as foreign transliterations (.xom -> .com), and automatically remap them to .com, .net, etc. So if you accidentally typed randomdomain.cmo, you'd automatically be sent to randomdomain.com.

So I guess we'll see if ICANN wants what's best for the Internet, or they just want more money.

How this happened, and what to do about it

[Arrogant-Bastard]

This has happened because ICANN has become a perfect example of regulatory capture: that is, the people running it are (for all practical purposes) the people that it's supposed to be regulating. Insider deals and quid pro quos are now the rule. That's what we got the .xxx TLD: nobody needed it, nobody wanted it, but there was money to be made -- primarily by extortion of non-porn sites, driven to purchase .xxx domains before someone else did by a fear-mongering campaign.

And that's why we'll get 200 or 400 or whatever more TLDs: because the registrars, not content with selling domains to spammers by the tens of millions (yes, really -- and that's probably an underestimate by an order of magnitude), want MORE money. (Why do you think GoDaddy is pushing .co as a .com alternative, as utterly ridiculous as that is?)

The solution to this is to make these new TLDs completely worthless and unusable. And we can. As soon as the list is announced, do the following:

1. If you run a DNS server: mark these TLDs as invalid/unresolvable. (You could use DNS RPZ to do this if you use a DNS that supports it, like BIND.)

2. If you run any HTTP proxies or filtes, blacklist these TLDs.

3. If you run a mail server, then block all email from or to these TLDs.

4. If you maintain a blacklist of spammer/phisher/abuser domains, add these TLDs to it.

And so on. The idea is to make them disappear from your operation's view of the Internet, just as we've collectively done in other cases -- with spammer-operated networks and similar. Except in this case, we should be able to do all this before they even go live, driving the value of a domain in any of these TLDs to zero.

Yes, I'm quite serious. The only people who want these are ICANN and their cronies. There is absolutely no obligation or need on our part to go along with this scam.