ICANN Selects New Top Level Domains

Azog, joined by a bevy of like-mindeds, wrote with the news: "ICANN has selected several proposals for new TLDs for further negotiation. The selected entries, and their proposed TLDs, are: JVTeam (.biz), Afilias (.info), Global Name Registry (.name), RegistryPro (.pro), MDMA (.museum), SITA (.aero), and NCBA (.coop)." Here is the unanimously accepted resolution. cyrdog points to Wired's coverage, and pavelivanov points to the story at CNET. And as several people have pointed out, .web is conspicously absent, even though it seems like a shoo-in. Someone, somewhere is going to get that one day ... Update: 11/17 09:48 PM by H :Check out SatireWire's coverage as well *grin*.

I don't understand...

...why they don't have an infinite number of Top Level domains? Or at least, as many as people desire. Is there some technical reason for this? Or do ICAAN have some unknown interest in keeping the TLD's to a minimum?

KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.

weak start

Is it just me or does this seem like a weak start for new TLDs? My guess is that these new TLDs will become the ghetto of domain names. Real businesses will have .com domains, and wannabes will have .biz. But new TLDs are always good, because they remove an artificial scarcity that damages small websites.

Re:TLD Moderation, the slashdot way

.name Score -1, Silly This is probably the worse option for "personal" domains i can think of. Let alone sorting problems with two people having the same name (who gets the domain? the oldest?)

Oldest? Of course not. The solution to who gets the domain will be the fairest, most equitable, most reasonable, and most common solution know to man.

The person who can afford to hire the best lawyers.

Thanks ICANN for keeping .COM #1

ICANN's new TLD choices are more lame than I'd expected. I figured on some heavy-hitting TLDs like .WEB and .NOM or even .TEL. Instead ICANN chose what amounts to token TLDs...because for all intensive purposes the new TLDs will have limited appeal and usefulness...for example:

museum: How many people will actually use that TLD?
Heck, many people can't even spell museum!

biz: redundant to .COM and in the eye of some people .biz has negative connotations and will instill images of con artists and second rate businesses in their minds; many people will feel that real business uses .COM

.info: Actually not a bad TLD...but certainly not a top TLD choice in my view since its appeal will be limited.

.name: Terrible!! .NOM would have been a much better choice...why did ICANN pick .name over .nom??

.aero: About as limited as .museum - why so many limited use TLDs...doesn't make sense to me.

.pro: Seems redundant to .name in the sense that .pro is also aimed towards individuals - many people who register their name in .name will also do so in .pro.

.coop: The most ridiculous TLD of the bunch...some ICANN folks flew the coop when they chose to approve this one...coop is a totally useless TLD.

Bottom line is that .COM's dominance is not threatened in any way from these new TLDs...in fact the contrary will be true....COM will be more valuable and sought than ever before. Thanks again ICANN for keeping .COM #1!!

Why some obvious ones weren't accepted...

Apparently, it's not just a matter of their saying "gee, a .foo would be cool," but it's a matter of giving the new .foo over to the person/organization who submitted the proposal.

They dropped .xxx and .kids because the applicants weren't competent to run a registry service.

So, it didn't come down to logical divisions, but to registrars. Just like .mil is managed by one organization (DoD), so would .xxx or .kids.

Personally, I am glad ".kids" didn't make it. It's an idiomatic word. (Is it related to that infamous .cx image?). I also prefer the three-letter ones, just in consistency.

I also didn't like the .web thing. Isn't the www. convention enough? Or would Foobar Inc., need to move their web presence to some new toplevel domain?

No more names, a proposal

The basic problem with DNS is the fact that the host names are in letters, which make up words, which make up names, which make up law suits. Not to mention the simple clashes between genuinely same-named companies and individuals.

I can remember my phone number, even though it is 11 digits long with the UK area code, and my computer can remember numbers much longer than that. This is a hint to the solution. Give hosts numbers rather than names. IP addresses, of course, don't work as they change, so a central register of numbers needs to be set up, which in itself is an issue as power corrupts (see ICANN).

I'm thinking of a system where there is a string of digits separated by dots (eg 1.3412.1823), where the initial number would indicate a continent, then the following groups of numbers would be networks of machines, until the final number (1823 in this example) would be a specific machine in the second last network (3412 in the example).

The original authority would be allowed to assign network numbers in the individual continents for a fairly large one-off lifetime fee. The owners of a network number would then be free to assign numbers within their own space at whatever fee they like, but with the provision that the right to sell subnet numbers gets transferred to anyone they assign a number to. So the owner of 1.3412.1823 could assign 1.3412.1823.1 , .2, .3 etc to whoever they liked. Such reselling would be required to be on the same on-off lifetime fee basis (although the fee might be different) as the top level authority.

This way the number resolution can still work in much the same way as name resolution does now, with zones of authority and the work of resolving a number to an IP address is shared out as it is now.

With the top level fee being large, the next level would mostly be ISP's who make money back by selling on at a lower fee per number.

The separation between IPs and host "names" is maintained and ALL the crap about who owns trademarks and shit is lost. Think about it: all the disputes are gone, especially if network owners are required to assign in sequential order.

A distributed system for the very top level would be nice to prevent abuse of power, but perhaps the organisation set up to run it could be held in some sort of trust rather than being a private company. IANAL.

I personally think that something needs to be done or there's only about 5 years life left in the web before the whole thing is bogged down in disputes and namespace is saturated.

TWW

Who put these people in charge?

I was actually looking forward to the new domains. I thought they would create some good ones that might be worth using. I find these new ones to be most illogical, however. Except for .biz and .pro, they are all over three letters! Judging from how unsuccessful .us has been due to its long extensions (see nic.us [nic.us] to see how long they are; domainname.city.state.us), you would think that they'd learn. What about .web? And how about .porn or .xxx, which would finally make it easy to create filters that didn't have large rates of misblocking pages while not blocking all pages that they are supposed to (see peacefire.org [peacefire.org])? I could have done a better job than them and I'm just a teenager.

The whole point of this was to get rid of the congestion that has overtaken .com, .net, and .org. There is no way that creating extensions that only apply to a small percentage of people will work. We need to get rid of this appointed web authority.

Re:.xxx

I agree -- there should definately be .xxx, and it should be strictly enforced through the force of law. And any site that habitually links to pornographic material should be forced into that domain, so that we wouldn't have to see it.

For example, one website that should be prevented from finding its way into any clean, god fearing home is this one [slashdot.org] -- you would not believe some of the filth [goatse.cx] and perversion [rotten.com] that is constantly being linked to from that site.

And I know that all of the hard-core anti-porn crusaders would agree with me on this, too -- I look forward to the day when viewing evil, bad, rotten sites is difficult, in exactly the same way listening to evil, bad, rotten songs, or watching evil, bad, rotten movies is getting difficult up here in Fargo, ND.

I look forward to the day when ISP's are all large, scared multi-national corporations, filtering content based on almost arbitrary labels. It works so well with the only "record stores" left around here (like Wal-mart and Target), and it works so well with the homogonized movie theatre chains, too. I feel so cacooned and protected, knowing I'll never see an NC-17 movie or buy an uncensored BloodHound gang song again. I will be even safer when I couldn't view bad websites even if I wanted to.

And I know that my definition of "bad" will be the same as yours. It just has to be! I know exactly what you shouldn't be seeing or listening too!

Re:No number of new TLDs will remove the scarcity.

What a *great* way to keep the money flowing in, eh? It must be getting pretty darn difficult to register any reasonable sort of domain names (ie. single or paired words that make sense) these days.

Well, the whole market is opened up again. The domain squatters will throw a pile of money at the registrars, who will kick money back to ICANN.

And then the trademark disputes will begin, enriching the lawyers.

And most of the rest of us will be left out of the loop, 'cause we were to slow to jump in at the start. :*)

--

Re:I don't understand...

As far as technical reasons go, there is the potential for the root nameservers to become overloaded, both in terms of number of hits, and in terms of memory needed to store all the TLD's. However, the COM nameservers are already very stressed out as it is, so the odds are that things will get better rather than worse.

The real reason we don't have infinite TLD's though is that we'd just be moving the problem up a level. Instead of fighting over "foo.com", Foo Inc. and Joe's Foo Emporium will fighto over ownership of the "dot foo" namespace. And now, they'll have to compete with the Foo Foundation (formerly foo.org) and Foo University (formerly foo.edu).

No, the real solution here is twofold. We need

• A Usenet style hierarchy [deja.com] By polluting the top level namespace with ".biz" et. al., we're actually moving away from this goal.
• A Product/Concept/Keyword matching system. Search engines [google.com] and things like Real Names(tm) [realnames.com] are helpful, but the former aren't precise enough, and for the latter, I'd prefer an open system.

--

.web is absent because...

According to the AP story [excite.com], .web was not accepted because of "concerns that it has already been unofficially registered."

ehhhh?


__

Not retarded, fantastic!!!

I just hope I can be the first person to try to get the chicken.coop domain name. WOOHOO!

This is just a proof of concept!

A complaint a lot of the people who are posting here are making, is that "what about the .tld_I_like, why didn't they add that?". ICANN are not looking to introduce all the TLDs that will be introduced, this is a proof of concept. They are trying for the first time ever to introduce new TLDs, and they are worried about the stability of the internet, because, for example, if the people in charge of a TLD are not capable of keeping their DNS servers up all the time, you will face instability. Also, the extreme rush for registrations once these new TLDs are opened are a matter of great concern for ICANN. This rush could take down a registry that is not very well prepared and very capable of handling these registrations.

If the introduction of new TLDs works this time, maybe your favourite TLD will be introduced next time, and maybe from then on, TLDs will be introduced more often.

Also, someone asked why there has to be limits on TLDs, and not an infinite number. This is because you have to have the root-servers on the internet where a name lookup can start if you are looking up a name, and the way DNS works is to cache lookups around the net, since it is hierarchical, thus alleviating the root-servers' workload. The stability of the root-servers are actually essential to the stability of the internet as it is used today.

Re:Who put these people in charge?

That's a good point, but I think that's what the domain names preceding the .TLD is for. Sites that have .com .org and .net are pretty general and I think it's good that anyone can register them. If there were only little ones like .museum not much congestion would be eliminated and there wouldn't be places to go for people that didn't fit in a little category. I think it would be good to add some that would apply to medium groups of people like .radio (or .tv if there weren't already one with the high prices). What we're talking about here is the difference between several, consistant medium ones as opposed to a few tiny ones that are so obscure that nearly no one will use them.

What??? No dot-slash?

Here I thought dot-slash would be the perfect TLD for discussion groups, bulletin boards, news nets, etc..

Of course, there is the little matter of how nice guys that don't copyright names could have trouble with infringement...

TLD Moderation, the slashdot way

IMHO, the accepted proposals are very, very bad choices, as far as domain names go. And that is the matter, isn't it? What TLDs to support, not _who_ is going to support them.

Let me moderate them one by one:

• .biz Score 1, Redundant A dot-com wannabe? What does this entail, other than having the people that already own dot-com trying to sue for the dot-biz?
• .info Score -1, Redundant Hmm, i wonder what this one if for? Any use i can think of for this one can be better served by info.domain.something...
• .name Score -1, Silly This is probably the worse option for "personal" domains i can think of. Let alone sorting problems with two people having the same name (who gets the domain? the oldest?), i don't really think this is going to be very popular. I wouldn't want one, would you? IMHO they should have gone for .home, .ind (for individual, or independent, or whatever you want it to mean) or something of the kind.
• .pro Score 4, Interesting This looks like it can actually be used to some effect. Of course, if it's targeted at professionals of some sort, i wonder if it is going to achieve its objectives. I see a lot of www.windows.pro domains popping up for magazines, companies, and so on. But that's probably what they want anyway, to sell domain names, right? Being useful to people is for sissies...
• .museum Score -1, Troll dot-what? Is anyone here in their right minds? How many of those are there going to be? 100? 200? 5000? What's next? dot-church? Too limited, too long, too hard to remember if there are only going to be a few of them.
• .aero Score -1, Redundant Too limited. Too self-serving. Too redundant. Except if it's meant as a domain for airheads...
• .coop Score 2, Interesting This one could be interesting, but isn't this covered by .com or .org already? It could prove limited in usage.

In general, the new domains are either redundant or too limited in usage. The criteria for appraisal of the proposals were not, in my oppinion, in the best interest of the Internet Community. ICANN could have started off a whole lot better.

I always knew I was going to miss Jon Postel, i just didn't know I was going to miss him this much.

Good Point

• .kids [and] .tel ... seemed too ambiguous.

Yeah, what's to stop me from putting up a website with the URL:

http://sex.with.kids

...and its companion site:

http://promise.not.to.tel

Nothing can stop me. I'm evil.

.pro is really a Usenet-style name system

If you read the application [icann.org], the second level will be

• .med - Medicine
• .law - Legal
• .arg - Agriculture
• .ins - Insurance
• .fin - Finance
• .aer - Aerospace
• .rx - Pharmaceutical
• .trv - Travel
• .art - Arts & Entertainment
• .pub - Publications
• .auto - Automotive
• .npo - Nonprofit
• .acct - Accounting
• .trans - Transportation
• .util - Utilities

So it is really more like a Usenet-style name system. Ex: ford.auto.pro, citibank.fin.pro, northwest.aero.pro, etc.

Re:Not retarded, fantastic!!!

C.Everett.coop?