ICANN Might Pre-Register gTLDs To Placate Critics 70
judgecorp writes "ICANN is to be congratulated for succeeding in expanding the Internet beyond the Latin alphabet. However, the organization is facing a harder task in extending the Internet's global top-level domains (gTLDs) — its proposal to open up the gTLD space has been plagued by controversy and delays. INCANN faces struggles with trademark owners and competing businesses — but even so it is being criticized for acting slowly (as seen in transcripts from the recent meeting in Seoul). It now seems likely the body will have a pre-registration scheme to gauge demand and placate critics by getting something moving on new gTLDs."
So (Score:2, Interesting)
When will Slashdot move under .slashdot?
Re:So (Score:5, Interesting)
For that matter, Slashdot isn't really an organization, so why is it under .org?
Nobody uses those anyways (Score:2, Interesting)
It isn't a .com(pany) either. It has nothing to do with .net(work related services).
Technically it should be slashdot.info but really, who cares? The gTLDs have lost their meaning and that is a good thing - it is impossible to moderate them well so it is better if people don't assume they should be given any attention.
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That argument is pretty weak, is it better to remove all trafic lights so people don't assume it's safe to cross a junction?
ICANN has fucked up gTLDs and everything they do seams to make it worse, now im not saying they should go around taking domains back, but if they made sure decent rules were in place then a domain name might actually mean something.
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Well, it's tried in some places: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsPCsW3_aUY [youtube.com]
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Traded on the stock exchange under LNUX ticker symbol. How is it not a company?
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" For that matter, Slashdot isn't really an organization, so why is it under .org?" .org isn't really for organizations. it's a catch-all. The way the rfc is worded, com is for commercial organisations, net is for network infrastructure org is for things that don't fit any of these. It's just shorter than ".other".
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except that .net has been used for so many things totally unrelated to network infrastructure (I myself have a .net and its just a small personal site)
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hey me too! and the dot com was available but I liked the dot net. set me apart.
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Remember that a fully qualified domain name ends in another dot, so it would really be "slashdot.slashdot." or you could go with "slashdot.slash." or "slash.slash."
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H T T P Colon Slash Slash Slash Dot Dot Slash Dot.
Sounds like morse code. @_@
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I'm just surprised that colon.slashdot.org isn't being used. "idle" could have used that name,
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Well considering what comes out of one's colon, that would certainly be a more appropriate subdomain for idle.
so-- ./. (Score:2)
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aich tee tee pee colon slash slash slash dot I don't mean slash dot dot org I just mean a slash and a dot
Re:So (Score:4, Funny)
Forget about .slashdot, .dot is where the real fun is!
"Ok, so the address is slashdot.dot - I'll spell it out for you. (attempting to add emphasis) It's http colon slash slash slashdot dot dot.
- Dot dot dot... So an ellipsis? How do I type those on a computer?
- No, I mean slashdot, as in S-L-A-S-H-D-O-T, then a dot, then dot spelled out.
- Oh! Ok, thanks!"
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"I'm reading slashdot.dot"
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" When will Slashdot move under .slashdot?"
http://slash.dot/ [slash.dot] has worked for a decade for those in the know.
Christian Neilson on the BOFH-net list suggested it and set it up.
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Just tried - that link is dead
Plato,Jesus and Shakespeare used Ascii. So can you (Score:4, Insightful)
No it isn't.
If you think phishing and typosquatting are bad now, think of how bad it will be when people see a link that looks like logon.[pictogram of a cat sitting on a stool].bank and it redirects to logon.[pictogram of a cat sitting on a stool with its tail curled a little bit at the end].bank that's owned by Lavaturian gangsters.
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i've got a lil greek in me.
Yeah, but which one ran Linux . . . ? (Score:2)
I see it this way:
Plato: BeOS - Like, very deep, man. Thoughtful.
Shakespeare: Mac OS X - He was fashionable . . . big collars and all. And he just wanted to write, and did not want to be bothered with technical details.
Jesus: Let's see - The Emperor of Rome, Tiberius (Bill Gates) controlled the known world at that time. Some yokel from some hick province starts a movement that challenges the monopoly, by preaching an alternative. Tiberius hires a hatchet man, Pontius Pilate (Daryl McBride), to "take
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Well, call me a goofball, Slashdot is sane enough to drop extended byte chars. Saner than ICANN.
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you do realize that there are a LOT of non-ascii characters which look up to 100% the same as the real latin characters but have different unicode representations.
Once it's possible to do so, you can bet your ass that the first domain registered will be citibank.com (but with a Unicode 1D694, the "mathematical monospace small k". Then the phishers can send you an email saying "Please log in at citiban.com and folks will hover, check the URL, say "nope, no funny business there, that's clearly Citibank, and g
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Fear, doom and gloom.
Unfounded [icann.org] fear, doom and gloom, for the most part.
Homoglyphs are not a problem that somehow escaped the attention of the tens of thousands of people whose work contributes indirectly to ICANN. Top level domain registries are required to use a single script per domain, so you can't register a Greek and Latin 'A' in the same label. Mathematical symbols, including 1D694, are never allowed.
Multiple representations of the same character are already taken care of in the IDN ToASCII()
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Thanks for the insightful reply. I didn't know about most of what you said and I appreciate the information.
Multiple representations of the same character are already taken care of in the IDN ToASCII() operation; they are case-folded, order of accents is fixed, and composed and decomposed variants map to the same result.
I don't understand that part, but it's clear that you know what you're talking about so I assume it's a valid point ;)
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Nobody said they could. Having the first four letters (or characters) the same is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for words to be synonyms.
Re:Plato,Jesus and Shakespeare used Ascii. So can (Score:4, Informative)
> "ICANN is to be congratulated for succeeding in expanding the Internet beyond the Latin alphabet.
The problem isn't that ICANN expanded "the Internet" beyond the Latin Alphabet (or at least the subset enshrined in ASCII's alphanumeric characters plus hyphen)... the problem is the collateral damage it caused, and continues to cause, because they did the equivalent of dumping a freeway interchange in the middle of an already-thriving residential neighborhood.
ICANN (possibly with IETF) needs to do three things:
1) Work with IETF to extend DNS so that TLD registrars can define a specific subset of UTF-8 that's valid for its subdomains. By definition, .com/.net/.org should be forever restricted to the historical [A-Za-z0-9\-] subset to put an end to homograph phishing. In other words, no TLD could indiscriminately include everything from legacy-ASCII to Klingon, Runes, and ancient Egyptian. They'd have to pick the characters used to write a single real language and stick with it.
2) Require that TLD character-validity rules be fully normalized against characters between 0x30 and 0x7f. In other words, if there's a letter in the language's unicode codepage that looks just like ASCII 'i', they can allow ASCII 'i', or the language's own version of 'i' with its own UTF-8 value, but NOT both. The choice of which 'a-zA-Z' to use would largely depend upon which value gets generated from a keypress by a keyboard in the target country.
3) Create new TLDs for writing systems used in more than one country, by at least 50 million people... preferably, short and understandable to anyone in a country that uses that writing system. So, Chinese might get .{zhong} or .{zhongwen} (but the PRC itself's country TLD might be .{zhongguo}), Cyrillic might sensibly get the characters that resemble .NHT (backwards 'N') which apparently is the abbreviation for "Int" in Russian, Ukranian, Serbian, and probably most other languages using Cyrillic, etc, and conveniently looks vaguely like ".NET" to everyone else (but the backwards-N would ensure only a complete idiot could think it really WAS .net). Ditto for Arabic. Languages almost synonymous with a single country (Hebrew, Greek, Japanese, Korean, etc) or spoken by fewer than 50 million real people in daily business wouldn't get their own TLDs... but their countries would get a new country TLD in the writing system (along with their old 2-letter TLD).
The point is, the way internationalization has been rolled out so far has created a worldwide party for fraud and phishing via homograph attacks. An end needs to be put to it NOW. If someone has an existing IDNS name that would be invalidated by the new rules (say, {nurren}.com), they'd get first chance at it in the new .{zhong} TLD (nurren}.{zhong}). If there were two or more existing .com|.net|.org domains that clashed (say, {nurren}.com and {nurren}.net), they'd have to share the TLD and settle for distinct subdomains of it, like {something}.{nurren}.{zhong} and {somethingdifferent}.{nurren}.{zhong}.
Wow (Score:1, Funny)
How many translations of "goat.se" are there?
Don't forget the 40 who are waiting from year 2000 (Score:4, Interesting)
There are 40 applicants who paid ICANN $50,000 each in year 2000 who ICANN has strung along all these years, neither granting nor denying. These include IOD's application for .web.
ICANN needs to deal with this leftover business from 9 years ago.
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Thank you for bringing this up Karl; right now there's a certain Euphoria about IDN's and tons of people who didn't do any work on them are patting themselves on the back: it's newsworthy; people come up to me on the street and tell me the news.
And per AVC's suggestion they think maybe they can get started on new "g"tld apps, another source of institutional euphoria. I suggested long ago to him to organize a tld-apps "union".
I'm not sure anything short of a lawsuit would awaken the memory of the ICANN 2000
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RT @Techno_Cat http://is.gd/4JAAj [is.gd] "There are 40 applicants who paid
#ICANN $50,000 each" Mike Roberts said there were applicants the U.S. Government denied.
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Deny them all and problem solved!
Who will rid me of this troublesome gTLD madness?
Minimize trademark litigation: Auto-registration. (Score:4, Interesting)
Any existing 2nd-level domain registrant automatically gets assigned a new TLD equivalent to the current 2nd-level name minus the TLD suffix. Collision priority scheme is .edu, then .com, then .org and .net, then .gov, and finally .mil. Ignores ccTLDs.
First, take care of the .edu sites: Automatically register a new TLD for each registered .edu name, such the that new TLD is the 2nd-level part of the existing .edu name. For example, Harvard U. currently owns 'harvard.edu.', so they would automatically receive the new 'harvard.' TLD.
Second, it seems reasonable to assume that the .com names have higher visibility than the .net/.org names, but not quite as over-riding as the grant to the existing .edu holders. Autoregister the new TLD and give it to the .com holder, but allow a weighted bidding process if the current .net or .org holder wants to try to buy the rights: During some designated 6-month period before open TLD registration starts, the .org/.net holder puts a bid of X dolllars in trust, and the .com holder has 60 days to match 20% of X (single-round bid, weighted at 0.2). That weighting is pretty arbitrary--it doesn't really matter what the actual weight is.
Third, whatever's left in the TLD space gets assigned to .gov and .mil names, on the same basis as .edu.
It's not perfect--it totally ignores ccTLDs, and the weighting is arbitrary, and who am I to say that a .com name is more of a claim on the new TLD than a .net/.org name?
But do you think an unqualified, disorganized "land rush" would be somehow better? At least this way, you're limiting the number of trademark/squatting cases that have to be litigated.
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I don't get the point of having a new gTLD if it just ends up being a perfect replica of existing TLDs. Why do we need harvard.cool when we already have harvard.edu?
If anything there should be an outright ban on owning the same name in more than one TLD.
It just seems like another way to get everybody with a domain name to fork over a chunk of change to get another one.
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"Any existing 2nd-level domain registrant automatically gets assigned a new TLD equivalent to the current 2nd-level name minus the TLD suffix. Collision priority scheme is .edu, then .com, then .org and .net, then .gov, and finally .mil. Ignores ccTLDs."
The "move the dot to the left one" argument came up in 1997. I liked it. Course, I suggested it.
Having to pick a "winner" from com/net/org/edu etc means win-lose. Much better I think would be for them to run it in a cooperative manner. Recall that original
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Why don't we get rid of the TLD all together and just type in http://microsoft/ and be done with it?
Helps Squatters, No One Else (Score:5, Insightful)
Every time something new is created, the squatters make millions, and everyone else has headaches. Does that not sum up ICANN's contributions in the last decade?
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"Every time something new is created, the squatters make millions, and everyone else has headaches. Does that not sum up ICANN's contributions in the last decade?"
That makes little or no sense. ICANN hasn't *done* *anything*. They've say on their hands for a decade when they were formed to, and told by the US government that formed them to make new tlds.
Apart from some truly lame tlds burped up in 2000 (the enormously popular .museum and .coop and others, which haven't even broken even yet) there have be
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Some of these problems were the result of ICANN's actions; some were caused by ICANN doing nothing when it should have acted. The GF's point is valid; the DNS is only good for squatters and registrars and registries; what good will more gTLDs do?
What is the point? (Score:3, Insightful)
All new TLDs are immediately filled by the same old names.
If they created a new TLD of .whateveryoulike then you can be sure that all the corporate big names would fill in their names - Microsoft, Sears, Exxon or whoever. After them would come all the domain grabbers who would sit on anything of interest and offer it for "only $499".
It needs to be ensured that this does not just become another land-grab by multiple registrars, like last times...
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All this has EVER been is a way to extort more yearly fees from every corporation on the planet.
That's what our economy is based on now. It is well known to be the best way to make money, since you don't have to do anything in return. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_seeking [wikipedia.org]
Think of it as Mafia 2.0.
Yeah, hurry up (Score:2)