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Two New TLD's Near Approval 329

Posted by CmdrTaco from the still-waiting-for-dot-rob dept.
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."
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Two New TLD's Near Approval More

Two New TLD's Near Approval

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  • Wow, they did it (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 28, 2004 @04:02PM (#10656982)
    They come up with TLDs as useless as .museum. Bravo!
    • Really. http://goatse.post just doesn't have that "ring" to it.

    • Re:Wow, they did it (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Just Some Guy ( 3352 ) <kirk+slashdot@strauser.com> on Thursday October 28, 2004 @04:16PM (#10657155) Homepage Journal
      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.

    • Re:Wow, they did it (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Pxtl ( 151020 ) on Thursday October 28, 2004 @04:51PM (#10657546) Homepage
      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
      • .x is for eXtreme websites

      • Re:Wow, they did it (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Thing 1 ( 178996 )
        What I don't understand is why TLDs are so important. I mean, it's just a mapping from a string of alphanumeric characters, to a series of 4 (or 6) bytes.

        When I heard of .info and .biz, in fact way back when I first heard of .cc, I wondered why the extension was "fixed" and why they didn't just open it up to any random string being able to be mapped?

        The answer, as far as I understand it, is the almighty dollar. They'll make a ton more money slowly releasing new TLDs than they would if they let anyone

        • 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.

  • seriously. (Score:2, Insightful)

    by JeanBaptiste ( 537955 )
    Why isn't there a .porn?

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

    • Re:seriously. (Score:5, Informative)

      by mopslik ( 688435 ) on Thursday October 28, 2004 @04:04PM (#10657009)
      It's there, only they use ".xxx"

    • Re:seriously. (Score:3, Informative)

      by KidHash ( 766864 )
      RTFA They're considering .xxx

    • Re:seriously. (Score:4, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 28, 2004 @04:05PM (#10657019)


      Why isn't there a .porn?

      What do you think .asian is going to be? What about .teens?

    • Re:seriously. (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I call first.post

    • Only on /. (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 28, 2004 @04:11PM (#10657103)

      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...

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

        Yes, I must be new here...

        Get an account, people rarely comment to the Anonymous Coward.

        I personally believe that there should be a delay between when an article is posted and when ppl can start flooding posts. What I see is that there are about 10 or so threads at the top of each post. garcia is usually the first or second :) and there are semi-related threads under those threads from the people that posted

    • Re:seriously. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Fiveeight ( 610936 ) on Thursday October 28, 2004 @04:20PM (#10657206)
      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...

    • None will use it for several reasons:

      Brand name recognition: Face it, the internet really made porn a viable business for anyone. WHile the major cost used to be publishing a magazine or video, it's all cheap as hell nowadays considering you can get quite a nice setup on the internet for 1000 USD a year. These companies ae solely online and their brand often includes their TLD. For businesses with a good foothold in offline publishing, such as Playboy or Hustler, it wouldn't really matter, because their

  • Nonsense (Score:2, Interesting)

    by vasqzr ( 619165 )
    .asia and .eu aren't going as far as .post?

    Do post offices need their own TLD?

    Come on!

    You can tell who's the driving force behind todays Internet standards

  • Right. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jbarr ( 2233 ) on Thursday October 28, 2004 @04:03PM (#10657000) Homepage
    ".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?
    • Well the problem is .COM .ORG .NET often are pritty confusing. Lets take a comerical ISP like AOL. Well they are comerical so .COM works for them, but they are an ISP so .NET works for them too. There are also a lot of governemt agencies with .org to their name where it should be .GOV. What we need is to redo all the DNS name and force them to chose one or the other.
      • Well they are comerical [sic] so .COM works for them, but they are an ISP so .NET works for them too.

        So, they should use .com for the commercial part of their business and .net for the network part of their business.

        There are also a lot of governemt agencies with .org to their name where it should be .GOV.

        Could you give an example of a US government agency that uses .org insteead of .gov?

    • Wrong (Score:4, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 28, 2004 @04:42PM (#10657435)
      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.

    • 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
    • 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 instanc

  • .post?? (Score:2, Funny)

    by Gothmolly ( 148874 )
    I'll register the first.post domain.

  • so some slashdotter will register (Score:5, Funny)

    by commodoresloat ( 172735 ) on Thursday October 28, 2004 @04:04PM (#10657005)
    first.post

  • They forgot one... (Score:4, Funny)

    by gik ( 256327 ) on Thursday October 28, 2004 @04:05PM (#10657020) Homepage
    .ENOUGHALREADY

  • TLDs are BS (Score:5, Insightful)

    by hackstraw ( 262471 ) * on Thursday October 28, 2004 @04:06PM (#10657032)
    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

    • Re:TLDs are BS (Score:5, Insightful)

      by cryptochrome ( 303529 ) on Thursday October 28, 2004 @04:10PM (#10657097) Journal
      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:TLDs are BS (Score:3, Interesting)

        by gregmac ( 629064 )
        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.

        It's nice to be able to print "mybusiness.com" on something and have people know it's a website. "http://www.mybusiness.com" CAN look ok, but for a lot of things, design-wise, it's nicer to drop the 'technical' stuff.

        It's also easier to tell people things.. the "dot com" tells them it's a website. As an example, "Look us up, mybusiness dot com" vs "Look us u

    • Re:TLDs are BS (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Moby Cock ( 771358 ) on Thursday October 28, 2004 @04:16PM (#10657152) Homepage
      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:TLDs are BS (Score:3, Insightful)

        by hackstraw ( 262471 ) *
        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.
        • I believe that all domains, even those in the US, should end in .us.

          What would be the point in that? Are you suggesting that domains in Canada and France (for example) should end with .us? I hope you mean that only sites in the US should be using .us
          • me: I believe that all domains, even those in the US, should end in .us.

            Moby Cock: What would be the point in that? Are you suggesting that domains in Canada and France (for example) should end with .us? I hope you mean that only sites in the US should be using .us

            Oops. Thats what I meant.
    • How many "normal" people know more than the .com domain?

      Indeed. You think everybody and their mom is online, but still, every day, more folks are getting "the internet" without knowing a thing about it. Once you show them how the address bar works, they try everything ".com" by default. The only saving grace is search engines, namely Google.

      I'm waiting for the big shakedown when TLDs die off, and the search engines all merge (face it, who uses anything besides Google anymore? Even their image search has

    • Seconded (Score:5, Insightful)

      by jfengel ( 409917 ) on Thursday October 28, 2004 @04:22PM (#10657235) Homepage Journal
      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.

      • Re:Seconded (Score:3, Funny)

        by jsebrech ( 525647 )
        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.

        The belgian post office's website is known simply as www.post.be. But now that they can scoop up www.be.post, I'm sure their site will be much, much easier to find.

        This .post domain is only reinforcing the idea in my mind that icann should be spelt ican

      • Re:Seconded (Score:3, Interesting)

        by hackstraw ( 262471 ) *
        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?

        The .biz thing is funny. SpamAssassin has a rule to give points towards a mail being spam if it meantions a .biz domain.

        I havn't seen a false positive yet.

    • Same with the US Marines. Are they a .mil or a .com

      They are actually a bit of both. The marines themselves are a purely military organization that fall under the navy. However, because of name recognition, they also registered marines.com for easy access. I don't know how .mil sites are distributed or regulated, considering it's an internal US army issue, but I know of several military units and bases with their own sites, but without .com presence on the internet. Why? Because the units themselves

    • Re:TLDs are BS (Score:4, Interesting)

      by alext ( 29323 ) on Thursday October 28, 2004 @05:03PM (#10657647)
      Naturally we sympathise with your unfortunate experience in obtaining some foreign web sites in your Google searches. I understand that the rest of the world occasionally experiences US web sites being returned in their results, if that's any consolation.

      Regarding TLDs, I think the distinction you may be groping for is that between a naming authority and a subject area.

      Countries are quite good at being authorities, but non-governmental authorities are possible too. ICANN comes to mind, and it's possible to imagine the UN, ISO etc. in this role, as well as new amateur and commercial groups yet to be identified.

      The bottom line is that the world will never agree which site http://www.kitchenappliances should resolve to, let alone www.truth or www.beauty.

      The solution is not more divisions by subject but more groups making the subjective divisions.

  • Why? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by stubob ( 204064 ) on Thursday October 28, 2004 @04:07PM (#10657041) Homepage
    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.
  • What about .scam and .spam?
  • If anything and everything can be a TLD, why have them at all? Sure, domain names are cheap in the com/net/org space, but only now that they've deforested the entire namespace. Oops, did I say deforest? I meant *clear-cut*. Hmm, even that's not strong enough, strip-mined maybe?

    You know, we don't have to put up with this crap, don't you? We could just build our own internet, and avoid commercializing it...

  • .TLD's .for .all! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by killermookie ( 708026 ) on Thursday October 28, 2004 @04:09PM (#10657078) Homepage
    .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?!
    • sounds quite nice.

      Think about it..

      microsoft.hell
      bush2004.hell
    • You listed .as twice. I'm beginning to think your list of suggested new TLDs was just typed off the top of your head, with no thought to appropriateness or practicality.

      What would you file under .domain? and .TLD is meta-confusing!

      Your stupid suggestions aside, I propose a new .spam domain, and all spammers would have to use it. Then I could block it all! Muahahaha!

  • Value of non .com/net/org/national TLDs? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 28, 2004 @04:10PM (#10657088)

    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 ...

    • Considering the viability of companies such as hotels.com and expedia.com, I would say that .travel has a serious hand to play in the online travel wars and I believe that it will be huge when they do come out. So much so that it may be as credible as the .com space, when it comes to travel; not to mention, that everyone is looking to get a good domain in the travel industry. I do have some experience in this arena, as I was a partner in an online travel related company called Orlando.com. We latter sold to

  • ala /. (Score:3, Funny)

    by dirvish ( 574948 ) <(dirvish) (at) (foundnews.com)> on Thursday October 28, 2004 @04:14PM (#10657135) Homepage Journal
    What about .slash or .dot?

  • Why don't the Swiss... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by jdunlevy ( 187745 ) on Thursday October 28, 2004 @04:15PM (#10657148) Homepage
    ... just introduce their own .post.ch ?

  • .mov TLD for movies (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ddkilzer ( 79953 ) on Thursday October 28, 2004 @04:16PM (#10657165)
    Why doesn't the movie industry get ".mov" approved for movie web sites? Some of the domainnames they're using for movies these days are just stupid.

  • What percentage of people... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by PornMaster ( 749461 ) on Thursday October 28, 2004 @04:17PM (#10657177) Homepage
    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. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by InThane ( 2300 ) on Thursday October 28, 2004 @04:19PM (#10657187) Homepage Journal
    (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.
    • That makes no sense. It'd streamline the process, practically eliminate litigation, and will eventually put lawyers out of work. As a lawyer I'm strongly against your approach.

    • So what do you do about multinationals?
      • Abolish them?

        Or they get the TLD for the country in which they were originally founded.

        Or they get the TLD for the country in which their headquarters reside.

        Or they get TLDs for the countries in which they are incorporated.

        So many acceptable solutions!

      • Re:Yeah (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Ralph Yarro ( 704772 ) on Thursday October 28, 2004 @05:00PM (#10657624) Homepage
        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.

        • They already do that (Score:3, Interesting)

          by Apotsy ( 84148 )
          Hell, if you go to a lot of multinational companies' websites, the first thing they do is find out what country you are in. Canon [canon.com], JVC [jvc.com], Sony [sony.com] all have prominent links on their front pages for various nation-specific versions of their home pages, all hosted on nation-specific servers. Eliminating top level domains would just elminiate that step, as people would just type in the correct country as part of the domain.

          Everyone is too used to doing it the old way, though, so I doubt it would ever happen.

  • why not... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by FnordPerfect ( 240722 ) on Thursday October 28, 2004 @04:19PM (#10657194) Homepage
    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.

  • And what does this have to do with ICANN's job? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by karl.auerbach ( 157250 ) on Thursday October 28, 2004 @04:24PM (#10657252) Homepage
    ICANN's job is to do "technical coordination" in order to promote the "stability" of the internet.

    One has to have a really crazed imagination or warped sense of humor to believe that ICANN's criteria for selecting new Top Level Domains has anything whatsoever to do with technology or the ability of the net to deliver packets or respond quickly and accurately to DNS queries.

    ICANN has become little more than a mouthpiece for certain well healed industrial segments; the public interest, as well as the public itself, has been ejected from ICANN's policymaking and policies.

    ICANN is fighting to keep its job from going to the ITU. ICANN's arguments are pretty weak when one considers that ICANN is not doing the job that it was constructed to do but is instead simply the willing handmaiden of small, short-sighted, self-interested groups.
  • More power to .tldspeek!!

    .ve.re .bizi .no.ws .il .post .mo.re .la.tr

    MUHWAAHAAHAA!! l33tspeak, meet the power of .tldspeek.

  • I remember the slashdot article a while back they were considering other equally useless and trivial TLDs like .museum. Yeah, like we have thousands of museum websites on the Internet just dying for that TLD.

    Hey! Let's have .diner! I mean, there are thousands of diners needing their own TLD! Sure, you can't order coffee & a slice of pie on the Internet, but wow woudln't that be useful!

    At least with .biz that's useful in universally blocking it(spammers).
  • With all the trademark battles going on over the use and misuse of names on the internet, I think having more descriptive domain classifications as part of the TLD system is a pretty fair answer. ...now if only they could come up with a way to enforce proper TLD usage and qualification. And as another poster wrote, there should be a .adult or .porn or something quite obvious like that and FORCE pornogaphers to use those TLDs exclusively. It would aid greatly in filtering out content I don't want to see...

  • TLDs Considered Harmful (Score:3, Interesting)

    by RAMMS+EIN ( 578166 ) on Thursday October 28, 2004 @04:51PM (#10657540) Homepage Journal
    I am personally not much of a fan of TLDs. In my experience, they just lead to confusion. Most domains are registered under .tld, so that's where people will look, even if they should technically be somewhere else. This is also how domains are registered (compare georgewbush.com [georgewbush.com] and georgewbush.org [georgewbush.org]). Outside the US it's even worse - sites often have the country TLD, but sometimes a gTLD. To avoid confusion, some sites are accessible through multiple TLDs.

    So, if TLDs are not being respected, why have them at all? Some have tried me that it organizes the namespace hierarchically, thus distributing the load. I don't think it helps a lot, if most people go for the .com anyway. The only people who benefit are those who profit from more domain registrations.

    My proposal? Change the system so that top level domains can be directly registered. E.g. Google would get just Google, with no .com or anything. While we're at it, we might as well get rid of the ass-backwards naming, e.g. google/www/search rather than www.google.com/search. Companies that actually use the TLDs to select sites in different countries could still do so; instead of google.de and google.co.uk they would get google/de and google/uk.

    And one more pet peeve of mine: we could add support for IP-IP encapsulation [faqs.org]. That way, if your server is hosted between a NAT box, you can just instruct clients to route the packet to your internal IP via the NAT box. Of course, the client and the NAT box would have to support it as well...

  • Mr. Huge Ego (Score:3, Funny)

    by spartan ( 30665 ) <joe@NETBSDsamolian.com minus bsd> on Thursday October 28, 2004 @07:24PM (#10658791)
    So now Steve Jobs needs his own TLD?

  • .geek (Score:3, Funny)

    by jedkiwi ( 825683 ) on Thursday October 28, 2004 @08:03PM (#10659078)
    Wake me up when there is a .geek domain.

  • .med (Score:4, Informative)

    by ewg ( 158266 ) on Thursday October 28, 2004 @08:04PM (#10659082)
    I nominate .med, for hosptials and other non-profit medical institutions.

  • List of TLDs... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Animaether ( 411575 ) on Thursday October 28, 2004 @08:34PM (#10659247) Journal
    Is there a comprehensive list of :
    - Currently active TLDs (be it cc, g, s or otherwise)
    - Deprecated TLDs
    - Proposed TLDs
    ?

    I've got one myself ( http://www.pointzero.nl/dump/domains.xml - don't complain about non-validation, it's only for quick data-reading ), which I already see I need to edit some ( thanks, wikipedia ) - but can't quite seem to find any other comprehensive list in existance to bring it up to current affairs.

    Oh, and any blatant errors in the xml's data ? Feel free to point them out :)

  • Selling thin air (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Jesus IS the Devil ( 317662 ) on Thursday October 28, 2004 @10:11PM (#10659736)
    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 (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Animats ( 122034 ) on Friday October 29, 2004 @01:54AM (#10660794) Homepage
    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.

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