what a total, and ultimately pointless mess this all is
subject says it all
The world's governments have had their say about new generic top level domains (gTLDs), lodging more than 200 objections laid to proposed new names. Australia, oddly, leads the list of complainants, racking up more than 100 with objections to .sucks and .wtf (on grounds that the name has “has an overtly negative or critical …
Think up boneheaded schemes, invite people to argue, facilitate the arguing. It's been this way well before this farce of a TLD expansion endeavour. Why would you deign serve on their board if you're not a glutton for verbal punishment? No, I don't think ICANN can be fixed, neither from within as Joi Ito once keynoted, nor without. Unless it involves nuking from orbit. Maybe.
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Whoops. I withdrew that because I decided it was a bit of a silly thing to say. Didn't beat you to the punch obviously.
To elaborate, a lot of the Australian warnings (and there sure are a lot of them) appear to be about consumer protection and and competition law. They appear to be worried that the claiming of generic terms and descriptions for entire markets could turn out to be anticompetitive, which I don't think is an unreasonable concern.
Many people like to think/pretend otherwise, but the internet is part of the real world. The real world is legislated by governments, most of whom are elected (to varying degrees) by the people.
So it's the Australian people who are objecting about .antivirus and .book , and I'm fine with that. I'm more concerned that no-one else did.
If governments didn't take an interest in this sort of thing they would rightly be criticised for ignoring a vital part of modern life.
I'm not one in favour of lots of regulation but these new gTLDs are crazy. They are just going to confuse everyone and I can't see any reason apart from greed for them. It's also a move to give big business an unfair advantage. Now small, medium, and large businesses are all just .coms (or similar). I think all this is valid reason to dismantle the whole ICANN and start again. These people should be shown the door pronto.
Surely a better system would have been to exclude brand-names from the process entirely - so no .coke or .google, only allow government authorised entities to take over country names, city names etc..., and generic terms should only be allowed to be operated by an independent company without specific links to the industry it reflects (so, no amazon running .book).
That way you end up with organisations like Nominet running .wales or .london, and organisations like Tucows running .bank.
Seems like it'd be the only real fair way to do it. The way they've done it seems like everyone will be stuck in a giant argument for years over it, especially when something slips through the net and you end up with apple owning .phone...
But what about duplicates like Texas(USA) vs Texas in Queensland, or Roma(italy) vs Roma(Qld) or Athens(Greece) vs Athens(Georgia- Usa) or indeed Georgia (USA) vs Georgia(former Soviet Republic) or Newcastle (on Tyne) vs Newcastle (on Hunter) unless they put a country tld on the end of the gTLD eg .roma.it vs .roma.au (now my brain really hurts)
Which is why we have country-level tlds. It means patagonia can have patagonia.ar and the shop can have patagonia.com and everyone is happy.
This has basically flattened the whole DNS into the root domain to get more cash for icann rather than the registrars.
Dumb plan, badly executed.
This whole thing reminds me of the dvorak keyboard.
The dvorak layout was invented to speed up typing, but because people had got so used to typing on a qwerty it actually slowed them down.
This is a similar thing. if I want to go to Amazon I know the address is amazon.com because after more than 15 years using the Internet the standard tlds are very much engrained. Also web browsers will auto complete tlds for you, Google chrome looks up the addresses as you type, most people go to websites via a search engine.
It's just a solution looking for a problem.
"if I want to go to Amazon I know the address is amazon.com ... most people go to websites via a search engine."
That's exactly the whole point. The whole point of the naming system /was/ that humans would have absolutely no need to remember addresses, a magic box called a computer would do all the difficult remembering stuff, a user would use a directory to invisibly get the address, things like bookmarks and search engines.
How on earth knows the telephone number of their local pizza shop? You don't. The whole point is you use a service-to-telephone-number translation service called a, duh, telephone book and look for "pizza". You don't mash your fist into the telphone and type "pizza" into it.
This scheme is the idea of brain-dead retards who don't understand the difference between something's name and it's address.
The Internet is for porn. Didn't you know? It's been the killer app since the start. Just look back at Deja or what's left of Gopher. (Actually best not to do that from an address attributable to yourself.)
Has .balls or .ass been vetoed? I'll go and register my interest in any sucks.<new tld> domain now to spite them.
"We would like to object to the registration of the domains .object and .crookedbastards. These domains will obviously be used to point out what your incompetent governments/companies/organisations are up to and thus will reduce our ability to keep the rest of you in the dark for as long as possible, hopefully long enough that we can empty the coffers and get somewhere that doesn't have an extradition treaty."
Sounds to me like the AUS government thinks it is the worlds "conscience". Either that or else their "bent" politicians are a bit more open about their bent-ness than elsewhere.
Anyways, who cares about TLDs these days? As JG says almost all of us go to a website via either a bookmark or search engine results lists these days. I'm old school and even I only type in an address if it's quicker than searching for it.
Perhaps we should apply for the TLD ".crafwan" and then AFTER it's approved and in place we run a mass campaign to popularise the use of crafwan to mean "abuses others". Then we could register Cameron.crafwan, Saville.crafwan, and ICANN.crafwan. Why did I choose crafwan??? Short for Crafty Wankers obviously.
jira.domain.com
, now offers something.jira.domain.com