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."

Nonsense

[vasqzr]

.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

.mov TLD for movies

[ddkilzer]

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.

Re:Only on /. way OT, but...

[hackstraw]

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 early, got modded early, yet didn't think about what they wrote and usually didn't read the article (they didn't have time).

And then there are many small threads below the "hot" ones.

Maybe we need a checkbox when submitting a post "Yes, I RTFA" or "No, I didn't RTFA", and a comment modifyer for those (not) reading the articles, and a mod -1 didn't RTFA because the content is obviously there.

Just my thoughts.

And what does this have to do with ICANN's job?

[karl.auerbach]

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.

Re:Wow, they did it

[Kenshin]

Well, in thast case, we need:

insightful.post
interesting.post
funny.post
t roll.post
flamebait.post

and so on.

Re:seriously.

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually it is named after Whitehouse, a British smut mag produced by somebody popularly known as The Slug (forget his real name), which is in turn, insultingly/humorously named after the late but still well-known (over here) moral crusader Mary Whitehouse [bbc.co.uk].

Yes, the truth can be complex...

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

[FecesFlingingRhesus]

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 hotels.com / HRN for a good sum of money. All in all, our success was mainly based on the fact that Google scores the sole name Orlando in the domain name relatively high on the list when searching for Orlando. We where litterly making millions without spending a cent on advertising; if you where to combine that with the .travel extension which I believe Google would probably categorize high for travel related goods, you may very well be able to surpass the .com names. In all I would love to own a name like Orlando.travel as I think it is just as viable as Orlando.com if not more so. Not to mention hotels.travel but you would surly be doing battle with HRN / hotels.com as they are litigation hounds.

Re:Seconded

[hackstraw]

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.

TLDs Considered Harmful

[RAMMS+EIN]

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...

Re:Right.

[DJCF]

Not sure how this is managed by the DNS Servers, or if this is managed by the top-level Networks or what but... In the UK there is a .me.uk which fulfils an identical function. I think .me.uk sounds slightly err strange, and would deffinately prefer .per, or .per.uk . From http://www.me.uk/, The .me.uk domain was introduced to fill a gap in the UK domain space for individuals to have an identity on the internet. With .co.uk for commercial, and .org.uk for non profit organtsations, there was not real place for individuals to have their own identity. Individuals can now get their own .me.uk domain, e.g. you could have fredbloggs.me.uk and so have email [e-mail] and web space at www.fredblogs.me.uk and so on. The domains are available on a first come first served basis. If you are lucky, you may be able to get your surname, e.g. smith.me.uk which would allow your whole family to have subdomains and email address at no extra cost - e.g. www.john.smith.me.uk and [e-mail] .

Re:TLDs are BS

[alext]

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.

Re:This is bullpucky.

[Ralph Yarro]

What if a company or organization wants to do business with people in more countires? Do you suggest Microsoft should register 100+ domains?

They can if they want but they don't have to. There's no reason why a .us domain, for example, shouldn't be browsable from pretty much everywhere just like it is at present.

For most organizations dealing in multiple countries, the cost of a website per country is insignificant compared to the other regulatory (and likely marketing) costs per country. For others such as wikipedia, if that would be dificult then pick one country and register a domain there. What's the problem?

The internet is supposed to be free

Who supposes it to be free? If by 'free' they mean unregulated or beyond the reach of giovernments then their supposition is wrong.

Re:TLDs are BS

[gregmac]

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 up, AOL keyword mybusiness". (or "web address")

Re:Wow, they did it

[hobbesmaster]

One thing, .edu is reserved for post secondary education institutions so your local school district can't get a .edu TLD.

They already do that

[Apotsy]

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.

More silliness

[SillyWilly]

In the UK it's currently possible to register .co.uk and .me.uk, there are others (.ltd.uk and .biz.uk etc) but those are the main two. We then have random crap like police.uk nhs.uk. Why not just open up the top level and let me register something.uk????

List of TLDs...

[Animaether]

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 :)

Re:Wow, they did it

[Thing 1]

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 take whatever string they wanted as their domain name. Like, "mcdonalds" could be a domain, mapping to 164.109.145.147; or "me.and.my.shadow" could map to 99.99.99.99; etc.

I know I probably just violated some RFCs up above, but why such a big honking deal?