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The Beginnings of a TLD Free-For-All?

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday June 23, @03:08PM
from the bad-ideas dept.
The Internet Networking
Mordok-DestroyerOfWo writes "According to the BBC, ICANN is considering opening up the wholesale creation of TLDs by private industry. While I'm sure this is done for the convenience of the companies and has nothing to do with the several thousand dollars they will be charging for each registration, I was curious what the tech community at large thought about this idea. It seems to me that this will simply open the doors for a never-ending stream of TLD squatters."

Related Stories

[+] ICANN Wants To End Commerce Dept. Oversight In 2009 58 comments
Ian Lamont writes "ICANN's current Joint Project Agreement with the US Commerce Department is set to expire in September of 2009, and ICANN wants to become more autonomous and switch to a global governance model, says ICANN's executive officer. The agreement between the nonprofit ICANN and the Commerce Department has been in place since 1998, and was renewed in 2006 despite international protests. A few US-based groups named in the article — including the Center for Democracy and Technology, the trade group TechNet and a conservative think tank iGrowthGlobal — would like the agreement with the Commerce Department to continue, in part to provide 'accountability.' The ICANN officer quoted in the article says expiration of the Commerce Department agreement would not remove accountability, as ICANN still has a contract with the US to operate the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority and must follow California law governing nonprofits. The Register is running a related story about why some people are uncomfortable with the United States' influence on ICANN. We discussed ICANN's request for independence a few months ago."
[+] ICANN Moves Against GoDaddy Domain Lockdowns 146 comments
An anonymous reader writes "ICANN is finally taking action against Domain Registrar GoDaddy's controversial 'lockdowns'. GoDaddy has long had a policy of 'locking down' domain names for 60 days after a customer updated their contact details. This put customers in a Catch 22 position: ICANN requires customers keep their contact details up to date, or risk having the domain forfeited. Yet during the lockdown period the customer is prevented from transferring the domain from GoDaddy to another registrar. If the lockdown ran over the domain's expiry date, customers were forced to renew with GoDaddy or lose the domain. ICANN proposes to ban this practice. ICANN who is charged with overseeing the Internet has long been accused of giving domain registrars a free ride. But recently after ICANN failed to discipline Network Solutions over a front-running scam, they found themselves both on the wrong end of a lawsuit by lawyers Kabateck Brown Kellner. Is ICANN's action a signal of increased vigilance in policing registrars, or is it a PR move paving the way for a complete removal of US Government oversight?"
[+] Your Rights Online: ICANN Takes a Step Toward Ending Domain Tasting 155 comments
An anonymous reader writes "For years, domain squatters have exploited an ICANN loophole: whenever a domain name is registered, ICANN collects a 20-cent fee from the registrar. To allow for non-paying customers, the registrar can return it five days later for a full refund. The loophole has let unscrupulous registrars constantly create and refund domain-squatting websites, selling 'what you need when you need it' advertising. The problem has grown so bad that every month the world's top three domain squatters, all located in Miami with the same address and represented by the same lawyer, recycle 11 million domain names. After years of complaints, ICANN has finally begun moving on the problem. On April 17 ICANN's Generic Names Supporting Organization voted to make the ICANN 20-cent fee non-refundable. If the ICANN board ratifies this position in June, those top three squatters will be getting a monthly bill for $2.2M. News of the ICANN changes has been applauded by legitimate Internet businesses, tired of having to choose nonsense names because all the good ones have been squatted. ICANN has published an analysis of the economics of ending domain squatting."
[+] IT: ICANN Asked To Shut Down "Worst" Chinese Registrar 119 comments
Ian Lamont writes "Anti-spam service Knujon has released reports highlighting how certain registrars in the US and abroad have consistently failed to live up to certain WHOIS-related obligations under ICANN's Registrar Accreditation Agreement (RAA) — specifically, the requirement that people or company registering domains provide valid contact information. Now the firm is requesting that ICANN shut down the worst alleged offender, Xinnet Bei Gong Da Software. According to Knujon, none of the WHOIS records in a sample of 11,000 alleged spam sites registered through Xinnet and reported by Knujon to ICANN's Whois Data Problem Report System were corrected in a six-month period ending in May 2008 — and the Chinese registrar continues to register about 100 spam sites per day. In many cases, says the Knujon document (PDF), Xinnet does not have 'any Whois record data for review while the sites are still active' and the spam sites further promote 'seal abuse' by posting bogus BBB, Verisign, and other trusted industry seals. ICANN says it is investigating. ICANN has just posted a draft revised RAA that is open for public comment until August 4. However, the wording of Section 3.7.8, governing registrars' obligations to check and correct domain owners' contact information, hasn't changed."
Firehose:The beginnings of a TLD free-for-all? by Mordok-DestroyerOfWo (1000167)
[+] ICANN Board Approves Wide Expansion of TLDs 483 comments
penciling_in writes "The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has approved the relaxation of the rules for the introduction of new Top-Level Domains — a move that could drastically change the Internet. 'We are opening up a new world and I think this cannot be underestimated,' said Roberto Gaetano, an ICANN board member. The future outcome of this decision was discussed on Slashdot a few days ago. It also seems, based on this post on CircleID from last month, that ICANN was already in preparation mode of mass TLD introductions. The new decision will allow companies to register their brands as generic top-level domain names (TLDs). For instance, Microsoft could apply to have a TLD such as '.msn', Apple apply for '.mac', and Google for '.goog'... The decision was taken unanimously on Thursday, June 26, 2008 at the 32nd ICANN Meeting in Paris."
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  • Sweet (Score:5, Funny)

    by Jailbrekr (73837) <jailbrekr@digitaladdiction.net> on Monday June 23, @03:10PM (#23907513) Homepage

    Now I can finally realize my dream and create the ".isgay" TLD.

    • Re:Sweet (Score:5, Funny)

      by arth1 (260657) on Monday June 23, @03:20PM (#23907703) Homepage Journal

      Dibs on .slashdot

      • Re:Sweet (Score:5, Funny)

        by hairyfeet (841228) <bassbeast1968 AT gmail DOT com> on Monday June 23, @04:11PM (#23908535)
        As long as I get dibs on .sucks Hell can you imagine how much money I'll make just from screwed over consumers? comcast.sucks,bestbuy.sucks,walmart,etc. I'll make a fortune! Then I might get a chance to live my dream: to buy out Microsoft and force Ballmer to be my personal court jester,complete with stupid hat and pointy shoes. He will have to do the monkey dance for my amusement and I will send him to crush my enemies with chairs and his super B.O. I can see it now...


        DANCE MONKEY BOY,DANCE! And to show my appreciation to my customers I would allow those burnt by WinME and Vista to throw rotten vegetables at him every Thursday afternoon,which would be broadcast live on technet for those who couldn't get away from work. But that is just my dream,your evil thoughts may vary.

    • Re:Sweet (Score:5, Funny)

      by UnknowingFool (672806) <minh_duong@yaho o . com> on Monday June 23, @03:36PM (#23907961)
      Or how about my dreams of a .cowboyneal TLD? Tell you what you can have cowboyneal.isgay and I'll take isgay.cowboyneal. Yours is for most normal folk while mine is for the Yoda speaking /. crowd.

  • Worst idea ever (Score:5, Insightful)

    by kramer2718 (598033) on Monday June 23, @03:11PM (#23907537) Homepage
    Creation of new domains is like extortion. For example, Disney will have to pay for disney.fun, disney.kids, disney.parks, disney.film, etc. just to make sure that those don't turn into porn sites or worse.

    • Re:Worst idea ever (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Floritard (1058660) on Monday June 23, @03:31PM (#23907877)
      .com was originally supposed to mean strictly commercial sites was it not? Moving away from that original intent, it's become ingrained in most casual user's minds that this is the obligatory suffix of a typical web address. .net and .org are only sightly as recognizable as additional suffixes. I think it would be difficult to get people comfortable with the idea that the TLD can be any word you want. If anything .com will just be seen as the most legitimate address and anything else will be automatically suspect.

      Disney already has registered TLDs for the localized versions of it's site for other regions and any further categorical distinctions for content can be accomplished with subdomains. There's not really any need for Disney or any other large corps to make use of unique TLDs. While this doesn't stop spammers from setting up their own dubious TLDs and trying to lure people there, after a few publicized incidents of scams I think it would become fairly common knowledge that people should stick to trusting .com or the localized regional version thereof.

  • 3rd post & (Score:5, Funny)

    by tinkerghost (944862) on Monday June 23, @03:13PM (#23907565)
    I still get to call dibs on XXX?
    what is wrong with you people?!

  • Generic TLDs caused the problems (Score:5, Insightful)

    by btempleton (149110) on Monday June 23, @03:15PM (#23907621) Homepage

    It's OK if the TLDs are brands (not generic like com, net or org) and there is some factor which limits them to resale use (otherwise we just punt the .com problem up a level.)

    The big mistake was having generics in the first place. Trademark law figured out hundreds of years ago you don't grant people monopoly ownership rights in generic terms. To get ownership rights in a term it must be non-generic, not have meaning other than the meaning you created in it. Thus nobody owns the word "Apple" with regards to fruits, but you can own it with regard to computers, or records. Even better are made-up terms like Xerox and Kodak.

    Anyway, we goofed by selling things like drugstore.com. We should fix that where we can, and not make it worse. If names are for resale only (you can't have your own sites in a TLD you own except for nic.TLD) and the names can't have any meaning for you to get a monopoly, then it can work.

    Things like .xxx and .mobi and there rest are bad because they have a meaning, and grant a monopoly in internet naming to that meaning.

    Full details are at http://www.templetons.com/brad/dns/ [templetons.com]

    • .mobi is bad for a different reason - it ties a specific service (web for mobile devices) to a domain name. Having a .xxx domain name isn't a terribly bad idea, but it needs to be done 20 years ago before all of the porn sites got .com domains. If domain names worked more like trademarks, with each TLD representing an area, then this would work well - you could have apple.computer and apple.music being different companies (well, until Apple Inc. licensed the trademark from Apple Records).

      The other part of the reason why this is potentially a bad idea is technical. The DNS scales very well because it's a tree. Hardly anyone queries the root servers (a couple of years ago 95% of queries were answered with NXDOMAIN) because their ISPs caching name servers store the locations of the most common TLDs (.com, .org, .cctld, etc.). The load is then spread around the TLD servers (and, again, most common queries are cached). Adding new TLDs increases the number of hits on the root servers, which makes those 14 machines a lot more critical, which is probably what ICANN is trying to do.

  • ICANN showing their irrelevance (Score:5, Interesting)

    by damn_registrars (1103043) on Monday June 23, @03:15PM (#23907623) Journal
    As if their total lack of real control over domain registration wasn't bad enough already, now they want to sell TLDs? Come on, we're close enough to arbitrary mish-mash as it is.

    The only good that could potentially come from this would be if the spammers found it worthwhile to start placing all their spamvertised domains under TLDs like .viagra and .pirate, so it would be easier to screen them.

    But we all know how likely that is..

  • I cannot wait... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 23, @03:17PM (#23907659)

    http://first.post

  • Worthless (Score:5, Insightful)

    by EdIII (1114411) * on Monday June 23, @03:24PM (#23907767)

    For every new TLD that gets created it just adds that many more TLDs that company has to buy to cover their trademark, company name whatever.

    This is just ridiculous.

    www.compaq.xyz has zero value. I never even understood why .net was created either. I can understand .ORG, and maybe even .INFO, but not .NET.

    This only creates whole new markets for domain squatters. Who gives a crap about .MOBI? I certainly don't. I don't see any major wireless carriers using it on a regular basis. The mobile blackberry website I go to is still a .COM

    This is made all the more ridiculous by the fact the most people have a hard time differentiating between TLDs as it is. Even I have problems sometimes and put a .COM when it should be a .NET. The fact that those 2 websites are wholly different entities is just crazy.

    This is all about money going into the pockets of some people, and nothing about adding value to the Internet.

    There are only two, and will forever be only two, TLDs which have any value associated with them whatsoever.... .COM and .ORG. That's it. Everything else is reserved anyways, and you can substitute a country TLD for .COM and .ORG when appropriate.

    For those that would argue that point, ask yourselves honestly.... when you think of a domain name which TLD do you think of putting after it first?

  • Spammers, etc. will LOVE this (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Iphtashu Fitz (263795) on Monday June 23, @03:25PM (#23907785)

    This sort of thing would be a godsend for spammers & phishers. It'd make it so much easier for them to forge websites to try to scam people. Just imagine creating a TLD that's something like "comm" instead of "com" or "C0M" (zero instead of oh), etc. It'll create a security nightmare out of what is already a major pain in the @ss.

  • Misquoted by the BBC (Score:5, Informative)

    by Myrddin Wyllt (1188671) on Monday June 23, @04:13PM (#23908569)
    I actually listened to the original interview on Radio 5 Live (lunchtime today), and Dr Twomey's comments seem to have been taken out of context.

    Firstly, the interviewer started under the misapprehension that domain names were running out, which Dr. Twomey corrected, and said the problem was with IPv4 addresses. The following comments then followed, which concern the introduction of IPv6:

    Dr Paul Twomey, chief executive of Icann, told BBC News that the proposals would result in the biggest change to the way the internet worked in decades. "The impact of this will be different in different parts of the world. But it will allow groups, communities and business to express their identities online. "Like the United States in the 19th Century, we are in the process of opening up new real estate, new land, and people will go out and claim parts of that land and use it for various reasons they have. "It's a massive increase in the geography of the real estate of the internet."
    This is included in TFA, where it is implied that he was referring to domain names.

    The comments he actually made about DNS and TLDs were much tamer, mainly relating to internationalization and the use of unicode URLs.

    I listened to this while driving, so I may have misunderstood slightly, but there was definitely no sense of "OMG TLD free-for-all" in the interview as broadcast.

    • Raising prices will just force out the casual user. Right now I can get hosting and domain registration for $35-50 a year. I like having my own domain for personal use, but charging $250 a year for the registration it would make it a really expensive luxury.
      For any vaguely competent squatter, ads and possible sale of the domain would still make up for most of even that cost, so they wouldn't suffer at all.

      • Re:ICANN should make domains more expensive (Score:5, Insightful)

        by GleeBot (1301227) on Monday June 23, @03:29PM (#23907857)

        2) Require an actual site (not just a page of ads) go live at any give
        address within 30 days.
        Your second point assumes that domain names are registered exclusively for putting up Web sites. There are plenty of legitimate uses for domain names that don't require putting up a public page for the entire Internet to see. Heck, there may even be some value in someone creating, say, a parody site that looks like a page of ads, or doing so to hide a real site.

        I'd rather not have a registrar deciding whether or not to revoke my domain name registration just because they didn't think the content was non-trivial.

      • You missed

        3) Prohibit exchange of domain names. Don't want one? Let it expire and it goes back into the pool. No, you can't sell it, any more than you can sell your telephone number.

        But again, this wouldn't benefit the registrars, so it won't happen.

      • Re:Wait - I've got a MUCH better idea... (Score:5, Funny)

        by dfm3 (830843) on Monday June 23, @04:22PM (#23908677)
        Having your post modded "Funny" has no effect on your Karma, while "Insightful" does. So, there are a number of moderators who give out the insightful moderation to posts that they think are exceptionally funny or witty.

        Of course, maybe I'm giving the moderators too much credit. After all, why was your post modded troll? On second thought, maybe the moderators are smoking something today. ;)

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