ICANN's Brand-Named Internet Suffix Application Deadline Looms 197
AIFEX writes with a snippet from the BBC: "'Organisations wishing to buy web addresses ending in their brand names have until the end of Thursday to submit applications. For example, drinks giant Pepsi can apply for .pepsi, .gatorade or .tropicana as an alternative to existing suffixes such as .org or .com.'"
Asks AIFEX: "Does anyone else think this is absolutely ridiculous and defeats the logical hierarchy of current URLs?"
If bullshit sells (Score:3, Insightful)
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What is wrong with selling something if a customer or person likes it? /. so I'll pose this question:
It's just an address, although I find it similar to a customised number plate, nobody really cares. Not sure about the rest of people on
How often to you manually type a web address like this?
I know that I don't, it is usually copied and pasted, linked in an email, linked from another site or I get automatically redirected. If brands officially register a .brand address then at least I know the website I
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It confises people for one. Do you know how many people get confused by a name@lastname.com email address?
It also doesn't match the rest of the somewhat organized hierarchy.
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By that logic, the RMV could start selling licenses to drive the wrong way down one way streets because customers like them. ICANN is not meant to be in the business of offering "innovative and exciting new products". They're in charge of a system that they're supposed to keep operating smoothly. Instead of doing that, they only seem to be interested in exploitation.
No (Score:3)
No.
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While I see a need for .xxx I do not see a need for .brand suffixes. The best reason I see for top level suffixes is to tell what kind of a site it is. But considering the exhaustion of short names, I understand their pain. Lots of businesses are going with .net or .org or .cc etc simply because they can't find anything usable in under 25 characters. When faced with the best available .com being "ronshorsebarnseattle.com" or "horsebarn.org", the choice becomes obvious. But I think adding more available
Re:No (Score:5, Insightful)
Obvious example of where a brand suffix would make sense: Apple/iPhone/iPad/iOS, Android, etc.. For example:
"Check out our new mobile Tux racing game at www.disgruntledpenguins.apple or download the Android version at www.disgruntledpenguins.android.
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I'd say "go to www.disgruntledpenguis" would be a far more obvious answer, especially if the app is going cross-platform.
Now, someone like Apple might want to buy say, .itunes, so if you wanted a particular app, you could go to "pages.itunes" to see the iTunes p
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Good point. What's wrong with "apple.disgruntledpenguins.com" and "android.disgruntledpenguins.com"?
Re:No (Score:4, Insightful)
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You're forgetting that the "page" for an iOS app is produced by Apple, contains reviews from Apple, etc. It's not something that can exist on a website in somebody else's domain. I'm assuming Google has similar functionality in its marketplace.
Also, the point of a domain name, to some extent, is guessability. If every app from Google's store, for example, could easily be found by typing its name dot android, it would be a win.
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You're forgetting that the "page" for an iOS app is produced by Apple, contains reviews from Apple, etc. It's not something that can exist on a website in somebody else's domain. I'm assuming Google has similar functionality in its marketplace.
You can make a website for an iOS app and link that page to the Apple iTunes store page for that app.
Also, the point of a domain name, to some extent, is guessability. If every app from Google's store, for example, could easily be found by typing its name dot android, it would be a win.
So you can guess the TLD, but so what? "angrybirds.apple" is no easier to guess than "angrybirds.com".
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Too late, I already registered those and am putting those to use. However I do have an alternative name which I was going to use but now am not going to, and it is a very desirable name for which I will sell you the domains for only $19999.99 each. The domain names are irritatedavians.apple and irritatedavians.android.
Seriously though - I think "disgruntled penguins" would be an AWESOME name for a made-for-Linux angry birds clone.
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I see little point in using the already-fading-away "www" if you have a brand name TLD though.
However, domains such as "disgruntledpenguins.android" might not sound like an internet domain AT ALL.
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Or even more braindead, just disgruntledpenguins.com and have that redirect to the detected platform subdomain with a chooser if it can't be determined which you belong on. (And a chooser on each page to get to the other one, of course.)
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But I think adding more available suffixes is going to cause more problems by public confusion than it solves for the website owners. I wish there were an option C.
Explain this confusion you worry about?
Most people seldom type in a url anyway. They click links, or book marks.
Or they just type pepsi in the url bar and let the system deal with it, popping up a search with the desired target listed first in most instances
Would not pepsi also own pepsi.com, and pepsi.co.uk so if users fell into old habits they still arrive at the right place?
How long will this confusion last?
Will it in any way be debilitating?
Personally, I fail to see any risk here, as long as the domain
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There are bound to be some corner cases, but it seems to me that pepsi is probably pepsi everywhere on earth.
Beyond that, it may come down to first come first serve like most other things in domain registration.
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Re:No (Score:5, Interesting)
I see a need for .xxx
If the objective is to keep kids from seeing Pr0n, the better approach is a .kids TLD. This way you can have contractual requirements (and penalties) that the content there must be kid-safe. Of course that opens the debate as to what is "kid safe"... I don't want my kids exposed to evangelical Christian propaganda anymore than the religious retards want their kids to find out about birth control and evolution.
It's never going to be safe to let your kids out on the wild, wooly .com internet without supervision. It's a pipe dream by lazy parents, a textbook example of the low-effort thinking that promotes conservatism [sagepub.com].
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I see a need for .xxx
If the objective is to keep kids from seeing Pr0n, the better approach is a .kids TLD. This way you can have contractual requirements (and penalties) that the content there must be kid-safe. Of course that opens the debate as to what is "kid safe"... I don't want my kids exposed to evangelical Christian propaganda anymore than the religious retards want their kids to find out about birth control and evolution.
I had unused mod points for weeks... now that I need them they are gone. I would have to agree, this is a better approach.
.localhost (Score:5, Funny)
We need a .localhost
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Watch it get approved, and the ensuing anarchy
Where is the anarchist milleonair when you need one.
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Seriously. We do need ".local" TLDs reserved officially. But all ICANN does is money grabbing. .local is for mDNS and similar stuff: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.local [wikipedia.org]
They should also reserve a ".here" TLD for a RFC1918 style usage, for instance if people may want to run their own DNS and area servers so that airconditioner.here to refers to the airconditioners at their current area, and https://here/ [here] goes to the main page for the current area. While people can do that already, a TLD (or more) should be re
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".localdomain" isn't really standard either, though I have seen it in some places as well. Mainly, /etc/hosts - I've never seen it in use anywhere.
".here" is pretty clean in that it refers to you current location (room? building?), which I don't really understand the scopt of "localdomain". Is it just this PC? Or the entire subnet?
".local" is standard-ish, and means the entire subnet, use in zeroconf/avahi/bonjour.
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We need a .localhost
You joke, but that domain is actually reserved per RFC 2606 [ietf.org]. ICANN has no authority to issue it, and the IANA would reject it, even if ICANN attempted to approve it. (The IANA is actually part of ICANN, but only the IANA portion can actual make changes to the root zone. The rest of the organization exists just to create a business model for registrars.)
Seems commercial... (Score:5, Insightful)
... but remember that the TLD was supposed to be just that, the top-level domain. Why not allow massive organizations to have their own namespace? Granted, I do think they should be expected to provide all infrastructure services (root servers, etc.) necessary for such operations, but I don't see this as anything except a return to the original design.
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I agree with this.
I don't see anything inherently disasterous about this, provided we keep the well known domains, and very non-specific ones free for general use.
Re:Seems commercial... (Score:4, Insightful)
I came here to post only one thing, and I'm going to post it. I hate ICANN. Starting with
Re:Seems commercial... (Score:5, Informative)
For example, at my previous company, inside the local intranet I could type 'bugzilla' in the URL bar and it would resolve to the bugzilla of our company. It's really convenient. And now this sort of system will be impossible because it might conflict with the .wiki domain name space.
Seems like someone has never heard of default domains [tldp.org] and doesn't understand how domain name lookups work from the client side.
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This would no longer work with custom TLDs, as you'd have a chance of colission.
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For example, at my previous company, inside the local intranet I could type 'bugzilla' in the URL bar and it would resolve to the bugzilla of our company
I'm not sure you understood what was going on there. The internal network of your previous company had a domain, let's say it was "company.local". Your DHCP server on that network was configured to give you "company.local" as one of your default domain suffixes. This means that when your computer tried to look up something like "bugzilla" and fails because it's not a FQDN, your computer automatically tries appending all of your default domain suffixes in order until it finds a match. So it actually look
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Effectively we're just going back to the era before .com and other suffixes existed, and your e-mail address would be something like user@ibm or so. The first years of the Internet when it was possibly not even called Internet yet.
And with everyone wanting their .com domain, it's just like stripping the .com like most sites already stripped the www. part (though in Hong Kong it's remarkable how many websites require the www. and simply give an error if you don't type the www, for example hko.gov.hk fails, w
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Why not allow massive organizations to have their own namespace?
Because we have no definition of "massive" everyone agrees upon, so in the implementation that part will just be dropped and everyone who wants (and can pay the $$$) will get their own TLD.
Basically, we've just ended the hierarchical structure of the DNS. From now on, we have a flat namespace at the top-level. Because, quite frankly, what reason except cost do I have to not shorten the name of my small online game's website from battlemaster.org to just battlemaster?
Misleading summary (Score:2)
Re:Misleading summary (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, but will .coke be for Coca Cola, or the Medellin cartel?
Coca-Cola. Here's why (Score:2)
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or better yet, can I get .coca-cola.pepsi and be sued by both of them?
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I dont think Medellin cartel owns Coca Cola or Pepsi. So, of the two, only Coca Cola can sue.
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Neither, it's been snatched up by a blacksmith.
Two internets (Score:2)
For those who know what they're doing, current domain names work fine.
For everyone else, they're just going to know these sites as terms they type into Google (or Bing, I guess) anyway. There's no point giving them TLDs to make it easier; you can't dumb it down enough to benefit them, and in the meantime, dumbing it down conflicts an already confusing set of standards.
STOP PRESS! Deadline Extended (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/internetimageoverload-287x331.jpg [techweekeurope.co.uk]
Icahn's brands (Score:2)
get over it (Score:2)
Frankly, get over it. The current .com/net/org/Turkmenistan/whatever thing doesn't mean anything. Yeah, ICANN is doing a money grab and that's its own issue, but as a matter of just resolving a damned hostname into an ip address, I really don't care what rules are established.
The only issue I can think of is if a TLD is assigned a host record. Like if com resolved to an IP. If http://pepsi/ [pepsi] resolved, who would win between my local machine named pepsi and the pepsicola pepsi domain? I guess that sort of
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.local is reserved by zeroconf, and probably will be reserved by the IETF committee on a zeroconf-like standard. One way to solve the other problem, what "pepsi" resolves to, would be to use dots somewhere: ".pepsi" is the pepsi site, "pepsi" goes through the configured search domains before assuming its a TLD (which would work well because nobody currently goes to "com").
Plus, we get rid of the "www". Pepsi now says its website is "dot-pepsi". I could get used to that, genericised over all possible TLDs: M
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There is already a standard for that. The root domain is ".", so the fully-qualified "pepsi" TLD would be "pepsi.". Technically the name of this site is "slashdot.org.", not just "slashdot.org".
Not ridiculous (Score:2)
At this point, the only thing ridiculous about it is the deadline.
There is already lack of "logical hierarchy" in full hostnames and their URLs. That hierarchy ended when people started buying multiple names in more than one com/net/org and ICANN didn't bat an eye, and it was further eroded when domains started using the "cute" country codes like "tv" without being even slightly related to those countries.
Since the TLDs are already meaningless, the gates might as well open all the way. It is truly har
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It is truly harmless
How many people do you think will become phishing victims through pay.pal?
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Given that they'd have to pony up $185 grand to start, they'd have to count on getting a LOT of money before some government starts impounding their web sites due to fraud.
The high price doesn't make scamming absolutely impossible, but it's not something you can do with a cheap rented botnet.
I'd like to think that when there's that much money on the line, ICANN isn't going to just tell everybody "caveat emptor" when a TLD is being used for a scam. That was an excuse they could use when a domain name cost fi
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Yep. The .com TLD has been the default ever since the beginning, and with the exception of .edu, all of the other TLDs are primarily for people who couldn't score the .com version (or those who do trying to keep people from duplicating it in another TLD.)
There's value in a curated TLD like .edu, though only as long as people know that it's curated. The expense of scoring a vanity TLD will keep scammers out to at least a small degree. And maybe somebody will establish a well-known, well-curated additional TL
Re:Not ridiculous (Score:4, Interesting)
That hierarchy ended when people started buying multiple names in more than one com/net/org
The hierarchy was over when .com was created. There was no reason not to use .co.us, .co.uk, etc - which would have retained a hierarchy.
.com domain for personal non-commercial use.
It was *completely* over when the first person registered a
Thanks for breaking many email address validators (Score:2)
Webmail:
To: complaint@mail.pepsi
ERROR! Invalid email address.
Re:Thanks for breaking many email address validato (Score:4, Insightful)
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.morons (Score:2)
'nuff said.
Too late (Score:5, Insightful)
The hierarchy is already dead. .com, .net and .org were supposed to have distinct uses. But they don't everyone goes for .com first and then grabs a .net or a .org if what they want is unavailable. The country codes were supposed to organize sites that were specific to certain countryies. instead they're used to make stupid domains like tw.it
ICANN's only criterion here on whether this is a good idea is whether it will generate lots more money in newly registered domains. Better grab your top level domain before someone squats on it and makes you look bad
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The country codes were supposed to organize sites that were specific to certain countryies. instead they're used to make stupid domains like tw.it
Too bad single-letter names are impossible to register, or I could make a fortune on t.it.
Seriously though, shaving one character off a shortened URL is actually useful for Twitter (if you care about proper punctuation in a tweet, for example, and are hitting the 140 character limit).
ICANN's only criterion here on whether this is a good idea is whether it will generate lots more money in newly registered domains. Better grab your top level domain before someone squats on it and makes you look bad
You're dead on there. This is precisely how these domains are marketed to businesses by registrars.
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But they don't everyone goes for .com first and then grabs a .net or a .org if what they want is unavailable.
And this is the real issue, as far as I know .com is now bigger than all the other domains combined and many, many of the other TLDs are bought only to stop squatters. Effectively we already have a flat namespace, if this wasn't such a money grab they could just say all dotcoms (of 3+ letters to not collide with country TLDs) are now TLDs and reassign all the .com DNS servers to TLD DNS servers. It's not like my grocery store has a .com or my university a .edu in the real world, why should they online? No,
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Certainly true in the uk, and its own hierarchy is well used. Companies tend to sit on .co.uk ie. The Guardian [guardian.co.uk] (although companies are the ones most likely to go elsewhere if needed), universities sit on .ac.uk i.e. University Of Manchester [manchester.ac.uk], health related sit on .nhs.uk i.e. NHS Direct [nhsdirect.nhs.uk], charities seem to sit on .org.uk i.e. The Mens Health Forum [menshealthforum.org.uk], and government websites sit on .gov.uk i.e.HRMC [hmrc.gov.uk]
True there are people who abuse it, but generally you can be assured that if you are on for example ac.uk, it real
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They may be used for their original purpose, but they're not used exclusively for that purpose. With the .com, .net, and .org suffixes being overcrowded, people have gone to country specific TLDs to find other options. A few years ago, websites started using the Western Samoan TLD (.ws) to mean "website". People have been using the Montenegro TLD (.me) as a vanity suffix. And this is in addition to the more clever uses that people have used, like the GP post mentioned with "tw.it".
So yes, it may be tha
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They may be used for their original purpose, but they're not used exclusively for that purpose.
That depends entirely on the whim of the registrar, and each registrar is a law unto themselves. Some take money for old rope, others hold the line against the ravening hordes.
Georgia's gonna be pissed... (Score:3)
Yeah, Georgia is not going to be happy when they lose their entire country domain space to General Electric. GE has a market cap of something like 10X Georgia's GDP, so I assume it would be a slam dunk that the TLD be turned over to the rightful owner.
why the time limit? (Score:2)
if the tld's are to be sold only to entities holding global, dilution protected(nobody can use them, even for unrelated products, for example can't sell pepsi socks..) why is there a deadline on it? because they wanted to hurry up the registrations?
btw how much does it cost to buy one of these?did they make any limit on how many they're going to make of these? because there could be hundreds of thousands of trademarks which would qualify..
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if the tld's are to be sold only to entities holding global, dilution protected(nobody can use them, even for unrelated products, for example can't sell pepsi socks..) why is there a deadline on it? because they wanted to hurry up the registrations?
Because everything that can be invented has already been invented. No need to allow later registrants.
More seriously: They probably expect the first rush to contain conflicting applications, so it is best to deal with those in a single batch.
Evolution (Score:2)
At first, when you wanted to check out Pepsi, you had to guess & write:
http://www.pepsi.com/ [pepsi.com]
And then browsers realized that non-http protocol became rare (gopher:// anyone?), so people could write:
www.pepsi.com
And then people realized that "www" was superfluous, and so people could write:
pepsi.com
Now it is suggested that the .com is superfluous in most cases, so people simply could write:
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Now it is suggested that the .com is superfluous in most cases, so people simply could write:
pepsi
You already can, in any sort of modern browser. No need to create a new TLD, it works today.
TLDs, search and your privacy (Score:2)
So I have a question: Google Chrome (and some other browsers) treats the address bar as a search bar. How will that work with new TLD's like "pepsi", does every search (for a single word) first get a DNS lookup, and then if fails, searched for at Google (which means all your personal searches leak to your ISP and any DNS server along the way), or do we include a whitelist of every new tld in the browser?
what a joke (Score:3)
Keep in mind the person that started all this was Eugene Kashpureff who ran around in the mid 1990s trying to sell brand name top level domains to big business. The powers that be thought this was a horrific idea and over the next 15 years captured the whole thing so a bunch of old white guys ran it then did the exact same thing, but it just costs 15X more an they get the money now.
If nothing else it serves as a great example of what happens when government takes over technology and all future technology need to keep this in mind so it can never happen again.
And keep in mind it was ISOC (the Internet Society) that handed this to the government while all along saying it was "for the good of the net" and never mind they made hundreds of millions by doing this.
Commerce doesn't like it (Score:2)
The Department of Commerce is putting ICANN's contract out for re-bid partially because they think this is a bad idea.
Personally, I think that not only is adding new TLDs bad, some of the old ones should be wound down. ".biz" is a bad neighborhood. Nobody can figure out what ".info" is for. ".aero" never took off. And the entire domain list for ".museum" is about five pages long.
logical (Score:2)
No, it's the logical conclusion of the Internet becoming commercial. When things are run for-profit than logic takes second place behind profit. Basically, if there's a buck to make, someone will do it, whatever "it" is. And in this case "it" is mutilating the DNS.
No reason I can think to put forth the effort (Score:2)
Cookies (Score:3)
I'm a little surprised how little I've seen so far on how difficult this makes security for browsers. Because most of the TLDs now are country codes such as .uk, and those countries in turn have their own sub-TLDs suck as example.co.uk, browsers keep a list of which TLDS and sub-TLDs are real suffixes. This lets them know that mail.google.com can read/set cookies for google.com, but evil.co.uk can't read/set cookies for all of "co.uk", much less safe.co.uk.
As you may have guessed, this doesn't always work out properly. It's kind of a crap shoot with sites that use the country TLD directly, such as nhs.uk. With unlimited and variable TLDs, this implementation becomes even more questionable.
Does anybody know if browsers have gotten smarter about this in the past few years, or are we racing towards one of those security nightmares that forces content companies and standards bodies to actually get their acts together?
ICANN solution is backward (Score:5, Insightful)
The ICANN solution seems to use seemingly sound logic to conclude the exact opposite of what makes legal and practical sense. They require the new TLDs owners to be trademark holders. Instead, they should forbid them from being trademark holders. The word "apple" is trademarked by a consumer electronics company, a cruise company, a famous musician, various fruit growers, a bank, etc. So it does not make sense to give .apple to Fiona Apple, Apple Vacations, Apple Computers, the Washington Apple grower's association, the New York Apple Country, Apple Federal Credit Union, or any other apple-related entity.
Intead, a 3rd-party should be able to hold .apple, and license it for computers.apple, fiona.apple, vacations.apple, wa.growers.apple, ny.growers.apple, etc. That's how DNS was designed to work, how trademarks work, and it is completely fair. By giving .apple to Apple Computers it makes the DNS system a mix of hierarchy and non-hierarchy, while assigning one trademark holder special rights over another trademark holder. I foresee *lots* of new jobs for lawyers thanks to ICANN.
goodbye ICANN? TLDs not needed (Score:2)
It's already backwards... (Score:2)
"Does anyone else think this is absolutely ridiculous and defeats the logical hierarchy of current URLs?"
A logical hierachry would be com.example.www/somepage.html
Why they opted to make it a little endian scheme, I'll never understand.
I propose .icann (Score:2)
If they keep this shit up we can just re-root their entire namespace there and give the new root to some organization that's chartered with organizing things sensibly instead of maximizing profit.
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I'm pretty sure the average person will sometimes be confused (like when you give them a .name email address) and otherwise not give a damn.
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Re:Only if you have pointy ears... (Score:5, Insightful)
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It should also be done on the country code level: bank.nz, bank.uk, etc. Then asb.bank.nz and kiwibank.bank.nz / kiwi.bank.nz.
Also to force bank.us rather than .bank in general.
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I think you mean 'seizing' instead of 'ceasing'.
You could not purchase a top level domain in the early days of the Internet.
By design, you want TLD's to be very rich. What's the point in owning a TLD if you can't afford reliable bandwidth, reliable, servers, etc?
More importantly, what's the tangible difference between www.pepsi.com and www.pepsi? Does Pepsi own sooooo many subdomains that it would actually help them to have their own TLD other than for marketing reasons?
This is the Internet. We need to thin
Famous trademarks (Score:2)
The only issue here is price, which makes it impossible to buy if you're not either very rich, or a big company.
As I understand it, brand TLDs are intended for trademarks that qualify as famous under dilution law [wikipedia.org]. If you're not a multinational company, you probably don't represent such brands.
Aaaah... how good it was at the beginning, when getting a new domain name up didn't cost a dime...
And then NetSol took it over and it cost $70 until the separation of registrar and registry allowed GANDI to jump in and establish the price expectations of the past decade.
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Back when the euro was weaker (Score:2)
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As I understand it, brand TLDs are intended for trademarks that qualify as famous
Does this mean that the brand becomes the registrar for that domain?
Because I was hoping to get coke.pepsi for my web site.
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If you do not want USA to have control over your domain get one in a freedom loving country.
What "freedom loving country" would you suggest? no, this is not an attempt to troll, I'm seriously looking for one.
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Somalia, land of anarcho-capitalism?
-l
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Norway.
Hope you like the cold.
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Switzerland where they ban architectural styles because of bigotry, and Iceland... I'm not sure it's safe to be male in Iceland.
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Switzerland where they ban architectural styles because of bigotry, and Iceland... I'm not sure it's safe to be male in Iceland.
... and such is the consequence of real democracy. If most Swiss people don't want their country looking like some backward Muslim state then they can vote to have it banned. No "representatives" to decide that it isn't politically correct or take a bribe from that Saudis, direct democracy.
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If you do not want USA to have control over your domain get one in a freedom loving country.
What "freedom loving country" would you suggest? no, this is not an attempt to troll, I'm seriously looking for one.
Finland [worldaudit.org]
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What constitutes an entity?
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It won't. DNS and ccTLDs is just one part of the bigger picture. The way the Internet backbones are currently interconnected and its operators being mostly under direct or indirect US jurisdiction, there are multiple ways for the US Government to censor sites them deem undesirable... on a global scale. For example, if the US wanted really hard to kill The Pirate Bay, all it needs to do i