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The Internet Networking

VeriSign Could Add 220 New Top Level Domains 116

darthcamaro writes "At the end of this month, the first round of applications for ICANN's expansion of the generic Top Level Domains will close. While we still don't how many applications in total there will be, we now know that VeriSign — the company that runs .com and .net is backing at least 220 of them."
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VeriSign Could Add 220 New Top Level Domains

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  • by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 27, 2012 @06:27PM (#39828071)

    How many of these TLDs can be shut down extra judicially at the behest of political or business interests without due process?

    Immigration and Customs Enforcement....for the Internet!?

    No US controlled TLDs for me thank you very much. I boycott US domains, US hosting, and travel to the country itself.

    • by hemo_jr ( 1122113 ) on Friday April 27, 2012 @07:30PM (#39828635)
      Verisign has shown itself to be too willing and accomplice to the U.S. government with its willing participation in domain shutdowns. We need more independence from the the body that has this much control.
    • Do you also boycott US intellectual property such as x86 chips, Nvidia and ATI GPUs etc?

      No, of course not.

      • by Fjandr ( 66656 )

        Well, there's no kill switch for those products (as far as anyone knows) and they don't give law enforcement the authority to cavity search you, so not really in the same ballpark for boycott purposes. :)

    • by rs79 ( 71822 )

      All domains are US controlled. Period.

      "Going beyond its own ownership of new gTLDs, VeriSign is also positioned to help other applicants in their bids. Bidzos noted that applicants for approximately 220 new gTLDs selected VeriSign to provide back-end registry services."

      NSI is the back end for other applicants. This isn't the same as NSI applying for 220 domains which is what the article hints at.

  • by Baron_Yam ( 643147 ) on Friday April 27, 2012 @06:28PM (#39828081)

    Making them worth much less than you might expect, given that the Americans have recently shown they're quite willing to apply their laws to foreigners if they can reach them. .COM's fine because companies are already invested in it... but who would bother using a new TLD with that risk?

  • by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 27, 2012 @06:30PM (#39828107)

    I'm going back to Usenet.
    It has better structure than this mess.

    I'll come back when the web has been completely killed off. Wait... damn it you get what I mean.
    Down with the web.

    • by Anonymous Coward
      Yeah, fuck the web, lets post on the slashdot usenet group!

      Oh wait...
  • "According to Bidzos, 12 of the 14 gTLD applications are transliterations of .com and .net. "

    Please tell me that this doesn't mean Verisign is poised to scoop up: .nte .ten .ent .tne .cmo .moc .mco .ocm...

    to resell them to domain typo-squatters?

    • No-no-no, you misunderstand completely. It's not to resell them to domain typo-squatters. It's to sell them to those law-abiding companies that already have their domains in .com/.net/.org, and who want to protect their trademark investment from possibly being abused by domain typo-squatters. ~

      • by Capt. Skinny ( 969540 ) on Friday April 27, 2012 @08:33PM (#39828997)

        It's to sell them to those law-abiding companies that already have their domains in .com/.net/.org, and who want to protect their trademark investment

        This is why new TLDs are of little value to anyone. Instead of treating it as a namespace that makes more domain names accessible, companies treat their second level domain as a TLD, making the TLD just about as significant as the "www" in front. Purveyors of domain names don't help, they actively promote the practice. Porn sites were up in arms when .XXX was in the news, claiming "it will only cost us more to register the new domain name and protect our trademark." These folks are missing the point of creating new TLDs. They are namespaces which serve to increase the number of second-level domains that are available to the community. All this "protecting my trademark" whining has to stop before internet DNS turns into the US patent system.

        • by Anonymous Coward
          It doesn't matter what the intended use of a product is. It matters what the customers think of it.
      • by rtb61 ( 674572 )

        Great scam isn't it. Verisign get little to no money from the after market for domain names, so the only way they can ramp up profits every year, a requirement under the God of US capitalism, is to increase the number of TLD,s forcing existing companies to not only buy them up but to have to rent them year in and year out for the foreseeable future.

        Catch with this, the blatant greed game is likely to piss off a bunch of other countries who are likely to turn around and cripple Verisign's get rich quick s

    • by sqrt(2) ( 786011 )

      You are confusing the meaning of transliteration to mean transposition. Transliteration is the conversion of characters from one alphabet into another based on closest approximation, usually of by sound.

      • by vux984 ( 928602 )

        I was thinking more that the article had them confused. But yes, transposition would be the situation I alluded to.

        I'm not really sure that transliterated versions of .net etc have much point either though, except maybe to typosquatters in other countries?

    • by wanzeo ( 1800058 )

      Domain squatting and name exhaustion has gotten so bad, it is nearly impossible to create a website brand that doesn't use either some crazy portmanteau or a whole sentence strung together. I welcome the idea of adding hundreds of gTLDs, because over time it will make any one of them less important.

      No more will I contemplate shelling out $7,000 because the domain I really want is being squatted. Instead, I will just add one of the hundreds of gTLDs, and make that my brand name.

      Also, dibs on http://slashdot. [slashdot.dot]

    • by Solandri ( 704621 ) on Saturday April 28, 2012 @01:54AM (#39830305)

      Please tell me that this doesn't mean Verisign is poised to scoop up: .nte .ten .ent .tne .cmo .moc .mco .ocm...

      to resell them to domain typo-squatters?

      Y'know, if ICANN were truly looking out for the best interests of the net, they would reserve all those TLDs as well as foreign transliterations (.xom -> .com), and automatically remap them to .com, .net, etc. So if you accidentally typed randomdomain.cmo, you'd automatically be sent to randomdomain.com.

      So I guess we'll see if ICANN wants what's best for the Internet, or they just want more money.

      • In the long run, what's best for the Internet might just be what nets them more money. No true geek would prefer a much larger percentage of the Internet economy now over a fixed percentage where the total size of the Internet grows exponentially at a slightly faster rate.

  • by nurb432 ( 527695 ) on Friday April 27, 2012 @06:35PM (#39828163) Homepage Journal

    its already a complete cluster now anyway.

    It made a lot of sense in the early days: org, net, gov, com but those days are long gone.

  • Did Verisign get a deal on these? How do you justify that sort of an investment?? How do they figure out what 220 TLDs they're going to register? The top domains that are mistyped by users?
  • by Toe, The ( 545098 ) on Friday April 27, 2012 @06:37PM (#39828185)

    So if I see an e-mail that says, come to scifi.jockfarts, it just might be a real domain, because .jockfarts is now a TLD? It's hard enough to distinguish TLDs now with all the silly countries-gone-commercial such as .co and .ly. Adding 200+ more is going to be highly annoying.

    Then there's all the spelling out. "That's J-O-C-K-F..." How annoying will that be? Like when people used to say, "Ayche tee tee pee colon backslash backslash doubleyou doubleyou doubleyou" before they got to saying the actual domain name. (Yes, I know it's a slash, not a backslash, but try telling them.)

  • Let's hope none of those top-level domains is named 'intranet'.
  • .DO .NOT and .WANT (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Zocalo ( 252965 ) on Friday April 27, 2012 @06:41PM (#39828229) Homepage
    Seriously, can anyone come up with a point for this other than a money making scheme for ICANN? Verisign "protecting" its ".com" and ".net" brands, presumably by registering the likes of ".con", ".c0n", and ".cum" (bet the people who opposed ".xxx" will love the last one), kind of proves the point, does it not? The only thing I can come up with is that because ".info" and most of the rest of the last batch of gTLDs are widely regarded as a cesspit this is the attempt at a do-over in the hope that the scammers won't be able to pony up the cash but trademark obsessed companies can and (apparently at least a couple of hundred of them) will.
    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by mkiwi ( 585287 )

      The reason Verisign does all this is to make MONEY. They are running out of revenue streams so they had to create 220 more out of thin air. The whole thing is a racketeering operation where every company ponies up money to protect their trademarks after new TLDs come out. Verisign laughs all the way to the bank.

      • by Zocalo ( 252965 )
        Which rebuts my point about this being a money making scheme for ICANN how, exactly? Verisign is no doubt charging a sizeable consultancy fee for each of the 200 or so new gTLDs that it isn't registering for itself, presumably including what is necessary to operate a gTLD since it's not quite the same as a regular domain. Verisign does deserve some kudos for finding a way to make some cash off this, but each of the actual originators of those 200 domains, and Verisign themselves for their dozen gTLDs, are
        • by rev0lt ( 1950662 )
          You are right on the money (pun intended) regarding ICANN. There is no reason for keeping up with the silly 80's scheme of TLDs, other than money. And 20 mil for 200 TLDs is pocket change - the real money will come from trademarked companies that will need ssl certificates. And all this will come at zero cost, since virtually any DNS Server implementation and PKI will work with a valid but unrestricted TLD.

          I don't understand why people are flaming Verising for doing what they do best - business. But ICANN
  • by rastoboy29 ( 807168 ) on Friday April 27, 2012 @06:52PM (#39828311) Homepage
    ..after all, with all these new TLD's it will solve the problem of...uh...I mean, it will help greatly with...uh...um.

    shit.
    • by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 27, 2012 @07:28PM (#39828621)

      ..after all, with all these new TLD's it will solve the problem of...uh...I mean, it will help greatly with...uh...um.

      .shit

      FTFY!

    • by rev0lt ( 1950662 )

      all these new TLD's it will solve the problem of...

      Exposing the ripoff that are TLDs and domain naming today. Companies will become less interested in purchasing unused domain names if a ton of TLDs are available. If you could register any domain with a tld upto 32 chars everywhere, do you think companies would fork money for a .xxx? Or a .suckmyballs? Or a .chupamishuevos? Of course not.

  • ....you may also consider: slashdot.og slashdot.rg slashdot.or slashdo.torg ... The spoofing possibilities will be endless. Just what the web needed!
  • by joelpt ( 21056 )

    Well, there goes the accuracy of my domain name regexes.

    • I guess we'll just have to start using the IANA TLD list (http://data.iana.org/TLD/) to check against.

    • Don't change them, unless you really have to. In fact I would be thrilled if all the tools would break when used with a new TLD, browsers would not recognize them as URLs and thus redirect to Google, network admins block them because they could be porn domains like .XXX... Nobody would actually use them if they don't work right for a sizeable chunk of the potential userbase.

      Not that anyone will upset their users (and bosses) for this.

      • by rev0lt ( 1950662 )
        Yeah, because *no one* uses DNS on a local network with custom TLDs. You could register a .suckmyballsificare and most of the software would eat it. Literally.
  • by michaelmalak ( 91262 ) <michael@michaelmalak.com> on Friday April 27, 2012 @10:10PM (#39829565) Homepage
    We've already dropped http:/// [http] and www. ".com" is just the last geeky vestige. From a human, rather than a UNIX, perspective, users should be able to type mcdonalds and get to its website.
    • I guess most people don't know this, but: type "mcdonalds" into Safari for Mac, press Return, and... you end up at the side of the McDonalds restaurant. It's not like that was particularly hard to program: if someone types a word, just add a www. to the beginning and a .com to the end and see what happens.

      The amazing part is that most systems/browsers are too stupid to support this...?

      OTOH, Firefox will do a search for "mcdonalds" and of course the restaurant comes up first. I suppose that's not too bad eit

      • by anss123 ( 985305 )

        The amazing part is that most systems/browsers are too stupid to support this...?

        That feature was common on older PC browsers. They added .com automagically.

        Personally I prefer a Google search, as I've ended up on porn sites often enough.

        Oh wait, IE9 still adds .com/.net/.org on webpages you've already visited and does a Google search + search suggestions otherwise. Neat. I knew that, just hadn't noticed.

        • by rev0lt ( 1950662 )
          You didn't specify which other search engines landed you on porn sites for unintended queries, could you be more specific? :D
    • by peppepz ( 1311345 ) on Saturday April 28, 2012 @02:26AM (#39830421)
      And Peter McDonald should be able to register the same site for his own sheep farm in Scotland. And Mcdo Nald, which in Strobonese means "tasty vegetables", is a notorious vegetarian restaurant chain in Strobonia that should be able to do the same thing. And users should be able to tell at a glance who they're talking to, especially if they're supposedly talking to a bank instead of a fast food chain. The hierarchical name system had a reason to exist, and with a growing internet I've not seen that reason going away, if anything it has become stronger.

      And then who "dropped" http:/// [http] ? Browsers are just hiding it, but last time I checked URLs are still the building block of the free Internet. Here we're talking about dropping traditional tlds in favour of a flat namespace, which is a technical change, not a cosmetic one.

      • by rev0lt ( 1950662 )
        Domain registering has always been about first-come-first-served. You think companies don't pay hefty sums of money for their vaguely-related domain names? They do. And no, DNS doesn't specify the shape of content, but with a more free .TLD scheme you could get something useful such as mcdonald.farms.scotland or mcdonald.restaurant
        The hierarchical name system had a dumb reason to exist - specially considering trademark law was already mature - and domain name usage as it is today was unthinkable at the ti
    • As has been said elsewhere, the advantage of keeping at least some technical identifier is that URLs are obvious. Compare:

      Visit the mcdonalds website

      vs.

      Visit mcdonalds.com

      Incidentally, with the way the Chrome address bar works, you *can already* just type mcdonalds into the bar and go to its website.

      • by rev0lt ( 1950662 )
        And IE will prompt you the results of the predefined search engine. Domain names are increasingly irrelevant.
    • People already do that.

      When I set up a computer for someone, they typically ask me to "change the internet to google", which means setting the home page on their browser to google.co.uk, not changing the browser to Chrome.

      They then type everything, even urls into the google search box and select the appropriate link. If I remove the address bar, they probably wouldn't notice.

  • There tends to be anglo-centrism on the web, but it's never too late to start turning the tide. I'm sure many over in Quebec would love the TLD .tabernac
  • Now all those big companies will have to buy 220 more variations of each of their domains. Big bucks coming in for the registrars!

  • If they are going to add TLDs like confetti, it makes more sense for IANA to allow them to be associated only w/ IPv6 addresses, but not IPv4, since there is no shortage of the former, but an acute shortage of the latter, depending on where one lives.
  • by ravenspear ( 756059 ) on Saturday April 28, 2012 @12:05AM (#39829983)

    185k * 220 = PROFIT!!!!!!!!

  • by Animats ( 122034 ) on Saturday April 28, 2012 @01:12AM (#39830171) Homepage

    All those blog and forum systems that recognize links will be unable to recognize single-world domain names. Or they're mis-recognize as a link every word that's also a TLD.

    You have to put a dot at the end of a domain name for a rooted search, or it's looked up locally first. If you're on a stanford.edu machine, and look up "music" or "art", you'll get the site for that department. If you want the "music" TLD (I wonder who gets that. The RIAA? iTunes? Myspace?), you have to type "music.". Unless you're really into DNS semantics, you probably don't know that.

    Remember AOL keywords?

    • You have to put a dot at the end of a domain name for a rooted search, or it's looked up locally first. If you're on a stanford.edu machine, and look up "music" or "art", you'll get the site for that department. If you want the "music" TLD (I wonder who gets that. The RIAA? iTunes? Myspace?), you have to type "music.". Unless you're really into DNS semantics, you probably don't know that.

      That's an interesting point, but according to the man page for resolv.conf, the default for the ndots option is 1, meaning "if there are any dots in a name, the name will be tried first as an absolute name before any search list elements are appended to it." While you're correct that "music" won't work properly without the trailing dot, my guess is that most actual sites would be something like "www.music" (or something a bit more whimsical, such as "my.music"). In these cases, the name contains the req

      • by Animats ( 122034 )
        The whole point of paying a large amount of money for a vanity TLD is to get a very short name.
  • by sdnoob ( 917382 ) on Saturday April 28, 2012 @01:13AM (#39830181)

    it is a safe assumption that every applicant of one of these vanity TLDs already has at least one other existing domain...

    so... WHY THE FUCK ARE THESE STUPID THINGS NEEDED? this is nothing more than a money grab by icann and the sponsoring registrars.

    fuck 'em. fuck 'em all.

    once the list of vanity domains comes out.. i'm just going to add them all to the malware domain blocks already in my hosts file. i won't use 'em or any site that redirects an established .COM (or whatever) to the fucked-up vanity name.. even if a major online site starts 301-redirecting existing tools, pages or sites i use, to go through their new vanity domains (which i'm gonna call SLD for Stupid Level Domain). i'll find something else to replace 'em -- that's the beauty of the internet, competitors are only a click away.

    • by rev0lt ( 1950662 )
      Why should you use .com, .net and org? Why use domains at all if often the IPv4 address requires less characters? And how about your local network, what kind of suffixes do you use? Do you use them at all?
      The point of DNS is to translate easy to remember MRIs (machine resource identifiers) into actual usable IP addresses. What TLD is used is more of a political choice than a technical one.
  • by Tom ( 822 )

    Ok, is there anything that we as the Internet community can do? Blacklisting these crap new domains on our own DNS servers sounds like a good step forward, but it won't have any kind of wider impact. Any way to make them not work for a good part of the world? Without impacting the legitimate TLDs?

    First thing I can come up with is finding a meme - they are obviously not gTLDs and vTLDs (for vanity-TLDs) doesn't quite capture it. How about sTLD, for stupid-TLD and with an intentional close similarity to STD?

  • I suppose that versign will be grabbing .idiots and .greedybastards for their own use -- they seem accurate descriptions of why they are doing this.

  • by Arrogant-Bastard ( 141720 ) on Saturday April 28, 2012 @05:46AM (#39830987)
    This has happened because ICANN has become a perfect example of regulatory capture: that is, the people running it are (for all practical purposes) the people that it's supposed to be regulating. Insider deals and quid pro quos are now the rule. That's what we got the .xxx TLD: nobody needed it, nobody wanted it, but there was money to be made -- primarily by extortion of non-porn sites, driven to purchase .xxx domains before someone else did by a fear-mongering campaign.

    And that's why we'll get 200 or 400 or whatever more TLDs: because the registrars, not content with selling domains to spammers by the tens of millions (yes, really -- and that's probably an underestimate by an order of magnitude), want MORE money. (Why do you think GoDaddy is pushing .co as a .com alternative, as utterly ridiculous as that is?)

    The solution to this is to make these new TLDs completely worthless and unusable. And we can. As soon as the list is announced, do the following:

    1. If you run a DNS server: mark these TLDs as invalid/unresolvable. (You could use DNS RPZ to do this if you use a DNS that supports it, like BIND.)

    2. If you run any HTTP proxies or filtes, blacklist these TLDs.

    3. If you run a mail server, then block all email from or to these TLDs.

    4. If you maintain a blacklist of spammer/phisher/abuser domains, add these TLDs to it.

    And so on. The idea is to make them disappear from your operation's view of the Internet, just as we've collectively done in other cases -- with spammer-operated networks and similar. Except in this case, we should be able to do all this before they even go live, driving the value of a domain in any of these TLDs to zero.

    Yes, I'm quite serious. The only people who want these are ICANN and their cronies. There is absolutely no obligation or need on our part to go along with this scam.
    • by rev0lt ( 1950662 )
      Shure, let's piss all over the customers that pay for the infrastructure. The "xxx" TLD is the perfect example of what is wrong with the system - a restricted TLD set. If you could register eg. cocacola.xpto, cocacola.abc, cocacola.rma and so forth, do you think the company would waste money on meaningless (but useful) TLDs? No. TLDs as currently implemented are an artificial limitation to the whole WWW thing. People go nuts over "clever" (easy to memorize) domain names like eat.me or bone.me, and some of t

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