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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You mean the lut (look up table) ?
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Censorship and seizure (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Censorship and seizure (Score:4, Informative)
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Verisign has shown itself to be too willing and accomplice to the U.S. government
Not only Verisign but also ICANN
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True, but...
wait for it...
ICANN has more domains.
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When the feds walk in with a court order you sorta have to go along with is. This is silliness.
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Do you also boycott US intellectual property such as x86 chips, Nvidia and ATI GPUs etc?
No, of course not.
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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. :)
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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.
All these TLDs would be under American control (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Oh fuck this. (Score:3, Funny)
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.
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Oh wait...
transliterations of .com and .net (Score:1)
"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?
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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. ~
Stop the "protecting my trademark" whine (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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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
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Actually, its more that the quality of journalism has fallen so low, that I don't automatically trust a journalist to know the difference between transcription, transposition, and transliteration.
I'm somewhat pleased that its not outright capitalising on typosquatting, but I'm not exactly sure what positive benefit transliterations of .net and .com would be to users of the internet.
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At least it is not a case of transubstantiation...
Christ that could get ugly.
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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.
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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?
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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]
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I want http://dot.dot.dot/ [dot.dot] myself.
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Re:transliterations of .com and .net (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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.
Sure, why not (Score:3)
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.
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Exxon. You misspelled it twicet.
220 TLDs?! (Score:2)
Too much of a good thing? (Score:3)
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.)
Re:Too much of a good thing? (Score:5, Funny)
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Ahh the good old days: "I've got this really good website you should go to. It's Ayche tee tee pee colon slash slash slash dot dot org." "What?"
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Then there's all the spelling out. "That's J-O-C-K-F..." How annoying will that be?
You think that's bad...
Wait, wait until they add internationalization by allowing UTF-32 characters in TLDs.
Because the TLD space needs to be monetized more.
--
BMO - Monetize the Eschaton!
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You mean... http://www.icann.org/en/news/announcements/announcement-05may10-en.htm [icann.org] ?
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I don't know about you, but I've fallen into the habit of pronouncing http:/// [http] as "huttup".
Re:Too much of a good thing? (Score:4, Funny)
It's pronounced "Throat Warbler Mangrove".
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Here we go (Score:2)
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or .local
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.DO .NOT and .WANT (Score:5, Insightful)
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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.
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I don't understand why people are flaming Verising for doing what they do best - business. But ICANN
I think it's outstanding... (Score:5, Insightful)
shit.
Re:I think it's outstanding... (Score:4, Funny)
FTFY!
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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.
slashdot.org is taken.... (Score:1)
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No; that's not even the good news. It's all bad news--all these domains will make people move all their actual web sites from the collapsing DNS black hole to "web sites" on apps, Twitter and Facebook (with a side of YouTube and trendy_html5_website).
The only lining this cloud has is a blustery shitstorm--nothing silver about it.
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Do you have $200k up front and then $60k a year to blow? Then sure.
Regex (Score:2)
Well, there goes the accuracy of my domain name regexes.
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I guess we'll just have to start using the IANA TLD list (http://data.iana.org/TLD/) to check against.
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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.
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.com is geek-speak (Score:3)
Then there are Macs (Score:2)
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
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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.
.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.
Personally I prefer a Google search, as I've ended up on porn sites often enough.
Oh wait, IE9 still adds
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Re:.com is geek-speak (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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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
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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.
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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.
Will they all be English words? (Score:2)
Sounds Profitable (Score:2)
Now all those big companies will have to buy 220 more variations of each of their domains. Big bucks coming in for the registrars!
Another reason to move to IPv6 (Score:2)
Of course they are! (Score:3)
185k * 220 = PROFIT!!!!!!!!
Will break many heuristics (Score:3)
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?
Maybe not so many (Score:2)
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
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unnecessary money grab (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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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.
fuckers (Score:2)
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?
Verisign's own bids (Score:2)
I suppose that versign will be grabbing .idiots and .greedybastards for their own use -- they seem accurate descriptions of why they are doing this.
How this happened, and what to do about it (Score:5, Insightful)
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
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.
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