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."

seriously.

[JeanBaptiste]

Why isn't there a .porn?

I think it would be nice to seperate that stuff out.

Right.

[jbarr]

".COM" was supposed to be for commercial companies and businesses. ".ORG" was supposed to be for non-profit organizations. ".NET" was supposed to be for networks and ISP's.

Like this will be controlled any better?

TLDs are BS

[hackstraw]

How many does somone or a comany need to buy to "avoid" ambiguity. I mean every slashdot is taken except slashdot.name, and it kills me that slashdot.com gets any hits for the website slashdot.org. Slashdot used to not even redirect or give you a bozo message for accessing slashdot.com, it just threw the contents of slahdot.org at you.

What are the points of TLDs? I thought they were to avoid ambiguity, yet they promote it. Remember the whitehouse.com vs. whitehouse.gov thing? How about the current suprnova.org vs. suprnova.com and suprnova.net? The USPS can't figure out if they are a .gov [usps.gov] or a .com [usps.com]. Same with the US Marines. Are they a .mil [usmc.mil] or a .com [marines.com]. Keep in mind that .com is supposed to be for commercial stuff. I guess the military is the biggest business in the US, but thats another post.

How many "normal" people know more than the .com domain?

I go on these rants from time to time, and I feel as though I'm in the vast minority of people that see no purpose of TLDs, but can anyone give one example of their utility? I have found one guy [templetons.com] on the net that agrees with me and the /.er that pointed me out to that page, but otherwise they keep making more of them and making them longer and more silly.

Now, the only useful thing for TLDs is to separate countries. Why? Because countries have different languages and currencies. I get pissed when I do a google search for something and end up at a brittish site. I have nothing against the brits, but its stupid for me to look at buying a $10 trinket from there. Its not too common, but I've ended up at UK .com sites and was not happy. /rant

Why?

[stubob]

Why continue to confuse people with MORE tlds? Since .org, .com, (ok, .edu and .mil are still pretty well maintained) and .net are basically used interchangable anyway, what benefit are we going to receive from being able to go to www.usps.com versus www.usps.post? This seems like it give more opportunities for domain squatting and lawsuits over similar sites. I wonder if the owners of the the previous domains will get first crack at the new ones anyway, rendering the whole thing pointless and just a big money grab for icann. Oh, wait, I think I just made my own point.

Re:seriously.

[Anonymous Coward]

The usual reason given is "who decides what is porn?". That's bogus. Most porn merchants *want* to be clearly labelled as porn. Kids who download stuff from them have no facility to pay them. It's in the porn merchants' interests to be easily filtered out by people who want to do so. As long as it is opt-in, it will be useful. Obviously there will be people operating sites that they don't consider to be porn but others do, but that's always been true, a lot of art galleries are accused of being pornographers by fundies and the like.

.TLD's .for .all!

[killermookie]

.So .are .we .planning .on .adding .as .many .specific .TLDs .as .possible .to .confuse .us .even .more? .How .the .hell .do .travel .agents .get .their .own .freaking .domain?!

Value of non .com/net/org/national TLDs?

[Anonymous Coward]

What is exactly the relative value of these new TLDs, as compared to the most common TLDs? ( .com, .net and .org, coupled with national ones like .nl, .co.uk, .au, etc ) I mean, I think most of us know just how respected any .biz or .info domain is, as most of those domains are used by spammers, scammers and other pond scum. Therefore, if my business' primary adress would be a .biz I'd instantly lose a lot of credibility online, simply because of the TLD. Of course, other TLDs host their fair share of crap as well, but the signal-to-noise-ratio is quite terrible on .biz and .info ...

Re:TLDs are BS

[cryptochrome]

Seriously. They should just go non-tld and be done with it. That way, companies and orgs won't have to register a half dozen sites just to redirect them to one.

Re:seriously.

[CatsupBoy]

Most porn merchants *want* to be clearly labelled as porn What are you talking about? Why would porn sites want to establish an easy means of blocking themselves. the more hits they get the more they get payed in adds, and also there are those ppl not looking for porn that may decide differently when they see girl on guy on sheep on grandma action.

Why don't the Swiss...

[jdunlevy]

... just introduce their own .post.ch ?

Re:TLDs are BS

[Moby Cock]

Maybe american sites should adopt .us and we can get rid of all amibiguity. There will be amazon.com.us, amazon.ca, amazon.co.uk. Then everybody will know where the heck they are looking.

Re:Wow, they did it

[Just Some Guy]

Funny? Where's "+1: Dead accurate"? Seriously, who thought that .post was a peachy idea? "Why, in five years' time, I'll bet we have... a good three or four registrants!" How many postal systems are there in the world? Surely no more than 200 or so. Even at 100% saturation, this will still be a void wasteland.

How many commercial travel operators are going to move away from the well-recognized .com TLD and into a new .travel? That sounds even lamer than .biz, and I've literally never seen one single legit business in that namespace (please don't flood me with counterexamples).

At any rate, you'll see at least as many smartass domain names as legitimate ones in either dumb new TLD. For example:

$ grep -E '*post$' /usr/share/dict/american-english-large
bedpost
c ompost
doorpost
fencepost
gatepost
goalpost
g uidepost
heelpost
impost
lamppost
milepost
ou tpost
post
repost
ripost
rudderpost
signpost
sternpost

I for one welcome our new com.post overlords.

What percentage of people...

[PornMaster]

in Asia use the word Asia?

A TLD in English for people who by and large don't speak English (Yeah, go on and tell me about India, Hong Kong, and Singapore... then look at how many others don't) seems pretty friggin' silly. .eu, on the other hand, would be understood by most people in the EU.

Except maybe the French, who might think it's short for Etats-Unis, of course.

This is bullpucky.

[InThane]

(This is not a troll - I'm absolutely serious about this.)

We should abolish all non-national TLDs. Each company could then register under its own national domain, or if local, under the state, county, or city sub-domain. This would deal nicely with the sovereignty issues that crop up all the time - if you're in the .us domain, U.S. content laws (and only U.S. content laws) apply to you. If you're in .au, only Australian content laws apply to you. If a foriegn state doesn't like what other countries are putting up, they can block access to those domains.

This is all IMO, of course.

why not...

[FnordPerfect]

imho, .film would have been a more reasonable addition.

For each and every blockbuster movie a website pops up that is called something like foobar-themovie.com, foobar.com, foobar-film.com, etc.
Would be nice to have all the official websites collected under one TLD.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:seriously.

[Fiveeight]

No-one will use the xxx domain, because two weeks after it appears, "family" groups will start hassling ISPs to block, filter and generally suppress it. At the moment they can avoid it by saying it's impractical to block stuff by address, but when it's just a matter of dropping a TLD from their DNS...

Re:TLDs are BS

[hackstraw]

Maybe american sites should adopt .us and we can get rid of all amibiguity. There will be amazon.com.us, amazon.ca, amazon.co.uk. Then everybody will know where the heck they are looking.

I agree. I believe that all domains, even those in the US, should end in .us.

Seconded

[jfengel]

If you were registering a new domain foo, and foo.com were taken, what exactly do you get for yourself by registering it as foo.biz? Or foo.us? You risk having your mail sent over to foo.com anyway, because that's what people know.

I have no idea what the Belgium post office thinks it can accomplish with the .post TLD. If they think they can get people's minds to believe "Oh, that's a postal facility, I'll check under .post first", well, maybe they're right, but I wouldn't bet on it.

I concur that geographic names have some use; it would perhaps have been better never to have introduced .com and for most of those current .coms to be .us. The language differences are useful; I expect amazon.de to speak German and to mail cheaply to addresses in Germany. The .com TLD should perhaps be reserved for the truly multinational site that directs you to your country/language specific sites. So perhaps it really should be amazon.us instead, but it's too late now.

At this point whenever I see companies with irregular TLDs, I think of them as second-rate. Often those TLDs are cheaper, and so the companies seem shady or fly-by-night (especially if they're trying to save a measly five bucks on makealotofcashlegally.biz). If you have a name and you can't get .com, get a new name.

Actually, I myself use a personal .net address which I've owned since the days when .net had a meaning, but if I had it all to do over again I'd grab a .com instead. I wonder how much mail I've lost to people sending it to the .com equivalent. If it were a business I'd change the name, but it's just me.

TLDs only exist to make money for registrars

[poopie]

We don't need more TLDs. Having hundreds of TLDs is just dumb. Exactly how many do we have now? It's got to be about 200 TLDs already. ... and short is good when we talk about DNS names. 2 or 3 character TLDs make sense. Why should we use any 4+ character TLDs?

We're just creating more "names" to sell. The only people who really benefit are the registrars

Re:seriously.

[Carewolf]

The problem is no sane porn vendor is going to move from a generally accesable .com domain to an easily censored like .xxx

You know, free market and all..

Re:Wow, they did it

[Pxtl]

fuck it. Nobody follows the rules anyways. Just stop making new, stupid TLDs except one: .x .x is simple - use for "everything else". Require that any unrecognized TLDs in a URL that people enter automatically use .x as their TLD. So typing in google gets you google.x and so on. Then stop making new TLDs.

Honestly, people don't follow the rules for .net, why do you expect any other public TLD to bother? Hell, most educational institutions outside of the USA don't have .edus either. .i .don't .really .care .about .tlds .any .more

Specialty TLDs aren't a bad thing

[bacchusrx]

Well, the point is that it won't be as simple to register a .post as it has been to register a .com.

This is already the case with several gTLDs, such as .coop [nic.coop] and .pro [nic.pro] (namespaces for co-operatives and "professionals", respectively).

For instance, in order to qualify for a .coop, registrants have to submit to a lengthy verification process to ensure that they are, in fact, eligible co-operatives or co-operative service organizations. Similar restrictions exist for .pro and .museum [about.museum].

Unlike .biz, for instance, these new specialty TLDs probably won't lead to a rush of companies registering yet another foomatic.* for their DNS warchests, as happens with .com/.net/.org, if for no other reason than most of those companies (including, thankfully, professional domain squatters) are generally ineligible for registration in the specialty TLDs anyway.

(Actually, maybe such a mad rush didn't happen for .biz, either, but that's less due to the fact that anyone could register in it -- which has lead to squatting in .biz -- and more due to the fact that it's retarded. IMHO. ;))

More importantly, specialty TLDs provide an opportunity for eligible individuals and organizations to actually use their own name. An accounting firm by the name of McDonald & McDonald, for instance, might actually get to use mcdonalds.pro ;)

Done right, these new TLDs are part of the solution to the artificial scarcity of the .com/net/org namespace. I don't see how they add to the problem.

Re:Yeah

[Ralph Yarro]

So what do you do about multinationals?

You don't do anything about them.

If, say, IBM wants to have a .us website then they have to operate that website in accordance with US laws. If they also want to have a .fr and a .uk web site then they'll have to operate those in accordance with French and British laws. And so on.

Just like at the moment IBM's American subsidiaries have to be operated in accordance with American laws and its French and British subsidiaries have to be operated in accordance with French and British laws.

Re:This is bullpucky.

[mobby_6kl]

Sorry, but I find this stupid. This won't solve anything. What if a company or organization wants to do business with people in more countires? Do you suggest Microsoft should register 100+ domains? Oh I see they have a lot of money so yes they should, so what about Wikipedia? Sourceforge?

Laws can now be applied based on where the site is hosted, base them on domain names and you can have [insert something evil] hosted right in the US, but with .cn domain!

The internet is supposed to be free, if a foriegn state doesn't like what other countries are putting up, they can go fuck themselves.

For the same reason...

[Kjella]

...you have extremely popular social rags, nobody reads them, but everybody knows what's written in them. Add 2+2. I suspect the ratio of puritans to "covert" porn surfers is such that

a) Porn sites would lose customers because some people would "publicly" have to use a clean ISP but would really like to have smut.
b) Porn-incompatible ISPs would lose customers (but oh no not because the competition offers porn, no uh they just had the better offer, that's just coincidental).

And, if nothing else, I suspect these domains would become another "register the .net .org .com .biz etc. etc. so noone else can take them" domain.

Kjella

Re:seriously.

[Fiveeight]

It's sad that I can't tell if you're joking, or running for office.

This is getting stupid

[linuxbitch]

Someone really needs to regulate ICANN as they're getting more and more stupid with their decisions. I thought they were a responsible organisation, I looked up to them when they pulled their weight with Verisign. Now, they're almost as bad.

Even before ICANN started added redundant TLDs the TLD system wasn't right. Why should the US government have .gov when every other country has to stick their own TLD after their own government address (gov.uk, gov.ac, etc.), why should America be the King of the Internet?

In a perfect world the only TLDs that should exist are the country codes for country specific websites, then .com, .org and .net for sites with worldwide interest. Everything else is COMPLETLY and UTTERLY REDUNDANT.

why do we need top level domains at all?

[Khashishi]

couldn't it just be www.google or http://slashdot?

Which doesn't really solve the DNS naming issue...

[Kjella]

...as names are non-unique. The intent of TLDs is to expand the namespace (as opposed to no TLDs, like just "ibm" instead of "ibm.com"). Take apple. How many would want to register a hash involving apple? Apple computers? Apple music? Apple (fruit) producers/suppliers/distributors? TLDs are an attempt to make these coexist peacefully, as people would understand apple.computers, apple.music and apple.farm are different businesses.

Your suggestion is just begging for a service like the linkfarms for google. Register hashes on countless variations of combinations of words to send people to the wrong site. Instead of a few, you now have near endless combinations to worry about. The problem is not the hierarchy, it never was. Sure it's imperfect, but it is marginal.

The real problme is that there are too many companies, organizations, societys, individuals and whatnot that want to have a short domain, and there's only that many to go around. In order for your solution to work, all must really have one unique "entity name", and then you're back to a non-TLD solution. Otherwise, squatters will register "entity name" + other keywords.

Kjella

Re:.mov TLD for movies

[Anppa]

Well, it already executes .com, so what's new?

No, .biz sucks harder

[spike2131]

That sounds even lamer than .biz .travel is bad, but no way its lamer than .biz. Travel at least is a word, and could go well with some website names, like, say, Hawaiian.travel.... .biz, on the other hand, has no excuse. Its not even a word, just some crap some idiot made up trying to sound hip in the late '90s.

I do agree with your observation, though - I too have never seen a legit business in the .biz namespace.

Selling thin air

[Jesus IS the Devil]

The only thing these guys are selling is thin air. There are already about 100+ tlds out there (random guess). Why we need more is beyond me.

But of course, these guys are charging people up the a$$ for merely managing dns servers. Don't fall for the hype. Your domain will NOT BE WORTH ANYTHING unless you have a .com/net/org!!!!

Plus, imagine trying to build a business on a non-dot-com domain. Your traffic will just leak to the dot-com version, giving your competitor free advertising.

This is getting really lame. In 1998 when CORE was gonna release all those tlds (which never came about) it was sort of interesting. Now it's just the same old same old.

Trust me folks. DOT COM is where the action's at.

More bad neighborhoods

[Animats]

You'd think they'd learn. Remember ".biz"? Makes South Central LA look like a good neighborhood. Most "businesses" in .biz seem to be somewhere between marginal and illegal.