Chacham's Journal: Rant: illegitimate TLDs, and destroying .gov

This doesn't have to make sense. It is my reaction. Analyzing reactions can be a good thing.

When i see "news.com.com" it irks me some. It's somewhat incorrect. But, there's probably a good reason for it.

However, when i see .biz, or the other illegitimate TLDs, i cringe. That just isn't how it's supposed to be! Will they ever really catch on? In a sense, i hope not. Probably more because of who came up with it, then what it is.

Then again it also bothers me to see "archives.gov", it is supposed to be thomas.loc.gov. It's the thomas section of the library of congress that has them. And "time.gov" is also wrong, it's tycho.usno.navy.mil. That is where it should be, since that is the department that handles it.

Perhaps it wouldn't bother me as much if there was a "www.gov". Set up for all the links to the more complicated URLs. .... Well, look at that, just checked, there *is* a www.gov.

I think it's about time to reboot the Internet.

i'm probably wrong

[subgeek]

the way i understood it is that .biz was created to help reduce the number of sites on .com. it is a little amusing to me that so many things are .com. if it's on everything, it shouldn't even be needed.

in my opinion, if a company wants to register more than one domain for the same site, go ahead and let them.

news.com.com is different. that's just silly.

Truly Illigitimate vs Uncommon

[GoRK]

There is another problem that is unrelated to the one you speak of. "BIZ" "INFO" and "SHOP" etc. while kind of stupid sounding and abnormal are approved by the Powers That Be and at least are real TLD's. I wouldn't call them Illigitimate even though they may be the stepchildren of the "big three" tld's.

In my dealings with spyware, I have had to deal with many problematic software which adds a whole host of "new" tld's by interfacing with the computers name resolver. Such extensions are usually stuff like .sex and .xxx; however there are a host of other less despicable tld's to choose from like .c0m, .mp3, etc. What's worse is that some of this software hijacks the names of normal hosts like 'www.google.com' and redirects them to their own junk. These truly illigitimate domains are the real problem and the fact that they offer (hijacking) registrations into some of the lesser used real TLD's is causing a lot of confusion to people who want to register names in the new TLD's, not to mention making the entire TLD less attractive to use since there are a lot of hijacked resolvers out there...

At one point in the history of the net there was a service called AlterNIC that came out with a bunch of new DNS services and a lot of even the very large ISP's got on board to support AlterNIC resolution. This service was started shortly after Network Solutions began charging $100 for domain registrations (previously they were free). I really belive that if AlterNIC had succeeded, we'd have had far fewer problems with domain squatting, misleading domains, etc. than we have had in the past and continue to have today.

Also, an interesting aside is how some countries have already been running their own alternative TLD registry to support domains in a native character set (Or UTF-8/Unicode) which was previously (and to a large degree still is) unsupported by the regular root servers.

~GoRK