Domain registry touts dot-surnames for $500k Could it be the ultimate in internet vanity addresses? A British company thinks the "ultra wealthy" will be prepared to splash out a cool $500,000 (£317k) to get their own top-level family domain name. CentralNic has launched dotFamilyName, a service it says is designed to help "high net worth families" apply to ICANN next …
Are the company names being sold by that lot in the US being added to DNS? Serious question.
And still nobody seems to be addressing how the DNS is supposed to cope when we have millions of domains at the same level as the standard TLDs. The hierarchy that DNS relies on is gone, hence it does not scale. Zone transfers will grow exponentially
Why not an individual TLD for everybody and everything on the planet? I'm sure the DNS root servers are up to it, eh? I mean, having a logical hierarchy to spread the load is so passé nowadays, isn't it? If it should happen to melt down, ICANN can always offload the job to some Google or Amazon cloud, can't they? Nothing to worry about.
</sarcasm>
Meanwhile, I wonder if someone at the ITU is watching this and wondering if they can maybe get away with reorganising the international dialling schemes in order to sell rich people 4 or 5 digit phone numbers at $500k a pop.
ICANN has laid out quite strict rules for this first (and possibly last) round of new TLDs. Applications are restricted to significant communities and large corporation conglomerates. Attempts to install personal/vanity TLDs will be rejected, leaving the applicants with the loss of any down-payment , and if they somehow manage to get through the first triage, likely the high cost of re-evaluation as their claims are disputed.
There's also a non-trivial amount of "personal" data to pass to ICANN, and some will be made public, which will make many people wary. I doubt that some of those "glamorous" personalities will hand over a bunch of their their criminal and financial records, which is mandatory for the managing entities of applicants.
I for one am eagerly waiting for publication of the applications around the end of next April.
It wasn't exactly hard to see this one coming. Yes, just go flatspace, because sod it, it doesn't matter a whit any longer. Even the price is no longer justifyable. Just say "yes" to anyone who asks for any reason and charge five bucks a year. It covers .com SLDs, so why not TLDs? You sayin' your software ain't up to it? You sayin' that?
It's "TLD" not "extension", Kevin. I do expect anyone working for a tech rag to know that much. And yes, I know that a lot of tech rags do employ people who keep using wildly inappropriate terms for well-defined techie things. And that when the terminology in many cases --including this one-- is so simple. You sayin' you can't do any better? You sayin' that?
There is no reason to place DNS trust in the root 13 , any service can provide DNS trust and more importantly TLD for a lot less money. If you don't like it then stick to the authority file that came with your software.
Bandwidth doesn't cost what it used to, TB cost $10 a month not $10,000 like it used to.
It's just down to operating systems, or nowadays browsers as to whom you trust.
and nothing to do with good structure of the Internet. The naming system has got to be something that will survive & grow over the centuries to come. Instead some get-rich-quick Del boys have dreamed up a scheme for a fast buck. I would be much happier if they registered one top level domain & put all of these under there ... something like .plonker would seem about right.
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