ICANN Backflips Again 94
angry tapir writes "The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has backflipped again on the process for evaluating applications for new generic top-level domains such as .bank and .lol. The proposal to evaluate applications in batches of 500 had been subject to criticism from registrars, particularly the 'digital archery' component, which would be used to determine which batch an application would be part of. Last month, ICANN scrapped digital archery altogether, and now ICANN has announced that it will seek simultaneous processing of all applications. The reason people were annoyed at the batching process was it meant that even if an application for a new domain was complete and correct, and even if a domain application was not contested by anyone else, it could end up going live years after other new TLDs did. Given it will cost over a couple of hundred grand to run a new TLD, people were upset. The whole gTLD process has been fraught with delays and security breaches."
Dumb idea (Score:5, Informative)
ICANN apparently can't solve one of the most basic object oriented programming problems: Namespace organization and integrity.
There's only a couple of organizational schemes that make sense; Geographical, topical, and organizational. Of those, the third was the first used: Separating domains on the basis of their function; educational, commercial, non-commercial, and governmental. Then we tried to launch geographical, which meant that agents within the system would need to register on both basis; You'd have, for example, usairforce.gov, and airforce.us. But then ICANN botched big-time; they tried to organize based on... er, nothing. Rather than a couple hundred nodes on the root, you now have effectively an infinite number of roots.
The results were predictable: Complete and total chaos as everyone tried to register every possible permutation of trademarks, organization names, governments -- and although the cost of running a gTLD was in the tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars (which, itself, seems rather retarded; Why does adding a name to a file containing a list cost a hundred grand?) -- there are literally hundreds of thousands of organizations and individuals with the desire and cash to do so.
And they all threw their money at the problem at the same time. Now they're stuck because there's hundreds of millions sunk into the program, and they can't go back on the process. It's a bureaucratic cluster-fuck beyond even what our most inept governmental organizations can do.
At this point, the entire DNS system should be scrapped and start over from scratch. But that won't happen for years and years. Eventually though, it'll have to happen... when it does, I hope they pick one organizational scheme and stick to it.