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."
This is getting stupid. (Score:4, Insightful)
We all know the new top-level domains (and some of the existing top-level domains) are basically a money grab and a way to force people to pay as many times as possible for their name.
And the registrar system, which supposedly enables competition, is also just a money grab. For each top-level domain we have one registry, which is a simple database run by one organisation, but then we have a whole lot of commercial infrastructure and multiple companies around it which serve no purpose except to skim profits off the top.
Now the problems with the new TLD registration process are starting to make ICANN and the domain industry look incompetent as well as greedy, for those of us who hadn't decided that was the case already.
So, what can we do? I know it's been suggested and unsuccessfully tried before, but is it time someone replaced ICANN?
People keep suggesting decentralised DNS, but I'm not convinced it's a workable solution. If there's no central authority controlling the DNS, there's nobody who can give your domain back when someone breaks into your system and steals it, or when you accidentally lose your crypto keys.
Why we need new TLDs again? (Score:4, Insightful)
What was the official reason from ICANN for new TLDs again? .net, .com, .de, .org anyway to secure it's trademark. For example Disney: all TLDs redirect to the domain go.com with is registered with Disney Enterprises Inc., except .gov. So the only clasification that survived is .gov, all the others are basically the same.
The current scheme don't make sense anymore anyhow, a company have to register
After the introduction of cTLDs, there was no purpose for the ICANN anymore, other then to ensure that each country gets one cTLD. With a cTLD each country can make their own DNS sub-tree, like .co.uk. So there would be no issue what-so-ever with the long discussed berlin domain: just make .berlin.de, .munich.de, etc. and if a US company wishes they can get also their own domain: pepse.us.
Mark my prediction: there will be a time in the near future where the meaning of a TLD is gone and you can choose your TLD freely. That will be the final money grab of ICANN.
Firefox already got rid of the protocol part of the URL (the http://./ [.] So why we not just get rid of the TLD part? (It's already in firefox, for http://slashdot.com/ [slashdot.com] I can just enter "slashdot" in the URL bar).