World braces for domain name EXPLOSION
The number of top-level internet domains is set to double over the next few years, after ICANN today approved the launch of a program that will let any company apply to run dot-anything. During a meeting here at the Raffles City Convention Center in Singapore, ICANN's board of directors voted 13-1 with one abstention, to approve …
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Death of Internet, etc...
The only winners here will be scammers/phishers (who I guarantee will find a way to abuse this), typo-squatters and other dubious name registry companies (GoDaddy springs to mind), and precisely *no one else*.
ICANN - Solving the problems that nobody has since 1998.
somebody.corn
somebody.corn should be good for phishing somebody.com (c o r n -vs- c o m)
Nobody needs a new name anyway...
Because these days most of the adverts just say "search for [brand] on Facebook" anyway.
pointless but
i can see apple taking ".apple" and uni-forming all apple reseller to have .apple on their websites. like "www.traffordcenter.apple" .
Now there's a battle royal
Apple vs Apple vs The apple growers associations.
Confusing
What an absolutely HORRENDOUS idea! This is going to make the web as confusing as hell for the average surfer - now we'll have to guess whether the domain name is not only .co.uk, .com, .org etc. but also .wank, .faff, and .guff as well???
I did not
know that the government would be registering new domain names
ICANN should be shitcanned
ICANN is fast becoming less and less relevant, they want the credit of "improving" what we in the IETF did going back to Vixie's original RFC on the DNS (Domain Name Service) by making the namespace commercial.
For the layman, the TLD's are like a country code, and the domain name like a phone number. Set by consensus originally based on ISO codes, these self-proclaimed policy makers are ruled by the Almighty Dollar Bank and Trust.
What these "so-called intelligent representatives" fail to take into account is two-fold. First, the ITU is about to launch a full-scale land grab to take over domains and IPv4/IPv6 addresses just as the do with telephone numbers/country codes. Second, as a pseudo-elected body, they have no real technical implementation skills as IETF members do.
These policy makers are idiots, pure and simple. We can have any TLD we want, it is just a matter of will the root servers (the master name servers) accept a TLD handed to them (yes and no) and will the domains propagate to other DNS servers.
There is going to be a HUGE backlash, where IT administrators (or their policy makers/legal/HR) departments instruct those IT staff to "block certain TLD's" in their company/ISP policy.
So just as you can block a phone number inbound/outbound, the same will happen to these new TLD's.
Net loss, epic fail (again!) for ICANN......
I'm just not sure
I'm just not sure how a small group becomes enabled to charge outrageous fees to participate in a network that they don't own nor maintain. Icann is the tail wagging the dog. Maybe it's time to un-privatize that which originally belonged to the tax-payer.
.mess
The title is required, and must contain letters and/or digits.
Re: squatting
Not for several hundred grand, they won't.
That's actually the one redeeming feature about this new proposal. The immensely high barrier to entry means that only the truly insane will bother.
Re: expensive squatting
There is, as they say, one born every minute.
You might be astonished how much some people would be willing to pay to get shafted.
Location
"...at the Raffles Convention Center in Singapore..."
Why am I not surprised by the location of this shindig? You couldn't see the ICANN boys at the Travelodge, Wolverhampton, would you?
I'm in the wrong job, all the conferences I have to attend are at shitty Hyatts an Hiltons in Northern California.
Drink Up!
Is that the same Raffles that make those rather deadly drinks called Singapore Slings? That would explain how this got passed. After sinking a few of those, driving home in your flying car would seem a good idea.
.catastrophe
ICANN is a laughing stock. Without efficient hierarchy, the DNS loses all relevance as a discovery & naming scheme. The only beneficiary here is ICANN; everyone else suffers from confusion, cost, and in the long term a grossly polluted namespace.
.ROFL
..crazy money making policy.. so their junkets will get funded.
What a horrendous mess
The whole concept of TLDs was to have a small - repeat small - forest of strictly hierarchical trees that could be easily parsed and verified. Instead we'll end up with a massive jungle of inconsistencies that will unverifiable, opening the doors to confusion, malicious abuse and plain old-fashioned error.
Even the basic task of parsing a user-supplied URL for validity on a web form will be impossible, as there will be no predictable extent or content for the TLD.
But what the heck? We already have the same problem with RFC 5322 - compliant email addresses - right from the start. The entire infrastructure is creaking to ruin as we bow low to the almighty buck.
Acting outside the public interest
Those who look into the history of the chairman will find that this isn't exactly the first time.
How many on the ICANN board stand to gain financially from this change?
Impartiality
So in the event of a dispute who whould decide who gets ,for example, .birmingham .paris or .london even?
.birmingham, .paris, .london
Alabama, Texas and Ontario* (obviously!)
* There's probably a London somewhere in the US, but I can't think of one off the top of my head so I'll head north...
Filtering
I'm already seeing mail admins look at this situation and asking how to configure resolvers to only accept the existing set of TLDs (presumably while still getting updates to those, instead of just serving the root zone locally).
Imagine, your university's school of business uses "business.example.ac.uk" and people internally are used to mailing around to <fred@business>; what happens when "business." becomes a TLD? We know to not use existing TLDs for sub-domains, but when anything can become a TLD, all bets are off.
If you thought .biz got you high spam scores and wasn't worth trying to communicate with, you haven't seen anything yet.
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