Two New TLD's Near Approval

Iphtashu Fitz writes "The Associated Press is reporting that ICANN is nearing approval of two new top level domains: .travel and .post. The Universal Postal Union in Bern, Switzerland, wants ".post" for national postal services, local post offices, business partners and stamp collectors around the world. Private companies that provide postal services, such as Federal Express and UPS, also would be eligible. The Travel Partnership Corp., a New York-based trade group, seeks ".travel" for travel agents, airlines, bed and breakfast operators, tourism bureaus and others in the travel industry. ICANN is also considering eight other TLD's including .asia, .eu, and .jobs but they haven't progressed as far as .travel and .post. More information here."

Re:seriously.

[mopslik]

It's there, only they use ".xxx"

Re:seriously.

[KidHash]

RTFA They're considering .xxx

Only on /.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why isn't there a .porn?

And from TFA:

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, in advancing the applications for postal services and the travel industry, said they were still considering eight other proposals including ".asia," ".jobs," and ".xxx."

Only on /. can a poster who clearly didn't RTFA be modded +5 "Insightful" within 1 minute...

Yes, I must be new here...

Wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

Please find the RFC that states that. Until then, I'll quote RFC 1591: [faqs.org]

COM - This domain is intended for commercial entities, that is

companies. This domain has grown very large and there is
concern about the administrative load and system performance if
the current growth pattern is continued. Consideration is
being taken to subdivide the COM domain and only allow future
commercial registrations in the subdomains.

NET - This domain is intended to hold only the computers of network
providers, that is the NIC and NOC computers, the
administrative computers, and the network node computers. The
customers of the network provider would have domain names of
their own (not in the NET TLD).

ORG - This domain is intended as the miscellaneous TLD for
organizations that didn't fit anywhere else. Some non-
government organizations may fit here.

Please note:

ORG is for "miscellaneous organizations", NOT non-profits. The idea of .org being for non-profits is some sort of wierd meme that everyone believes, for no particular reason.

NET is for "only the computers of network providers, that is the NIC and NOC computers", NOT ISPs.

Re:Right.

[legirons]

Is it just my imagination, or have all the useful applications of new TLDs been completely ignored by those considering them?

Problem: Lots of people are losing lots of money from websites posing as banks. Banks all use .com domains, which can be bought by the general public for $15. Gee, I wonder if we'll ever find a solution to this horrible problem?

Problem: Tens of companies can legitimately own trademarks on a word, but they're in different areas of business, or different countries. There's only one .com domain for them all to fight over. Looks like someone completely missed the usefulness of acme.music, acme.oil, acme.travel, acme.computer domains. Or in a context we recognise, apple.computer and apple.music

Of course, we don't want to look too hard for fear of finding the real problem. One company making a lot of money out of the two scarce domains. One company in charge of allocating new domains. I'm glad those companies are so separate, democratic, and independant...

.med

[ewg]

I nominate .med, for hosptials and other non-profit medical institutions.

Re:Wow, they did it

[Bitsy Boffin]

It's about delegation. The root servers have to hold information about every top level domain (.com, .net, .org, .biz, .us, .uk, .nz ......).

If you were to allow any-old-tld, then the root servers have to do an absolutely mammoth task in serving all lookups for the TLDs.

It is totally unscalable.