ICANN Frees .Amazon Domain for Company Delegation | Hacker News Reader

ICANN Frees .Amazon Domain for Company Delegation

ip-watch.org

34 pointsr3bl61 comments

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Mm... these TLDs fee like they’ve been a scam since the start.

You want amazon? You’re a bad guy.

You don’t want amazon? Someone else gets it, phishes your users, you’re a bad guy.

It’s kind of a protection racket...

There’s a whole lot about this whole thing going at with the ICAAN I’m not comfortable with.

I think the best move for Amazon would be to take the domain and just have it redirect to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/amazon

They were, and are. It's not even subtle.

In fact, Donuts allows (allowed?) you to purchase the option to block other people registering `yourname.*` for all their tld's, at a lower price than actually getting the domains yourself.

https://www.101domain.com/donuts_defensive_registration_for_...

Conversations with people responsible for this product revealed the motive to be extortion.

Should major DNS servers just stop resolving TLDs that are not either the original six (com, net, org, edu, gov, mil) or a ccTLD?

Most spam comes from domains registered with these fake TLDs that ICANN has sponsored over the past decade, and apparently being an internationally recognized region isn't enough to stop a company named after the region from taking your quasi-ccTLD (if .eu exists, so can .amazon).

The term "cultural appropriation" is massively overused nowadays, but naming the company this, then years later stealing their TLD (and thus adding an entry to the long list of abuse that fake TLDs have caused) would be an appropriate use IMO.

https://www.inc.com/bill-murphy-jr/follow-the-money-lessons-...

Not kidding, he just named it Amazon because its the biggest river in the world, not even questioning if that was the right thing to do.

.eu is a different case as two-letter TLDs are ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 codes and EU is exceptionally reserved.

> Should major DNS servers just stop resolving TLDs that are not either the original six (com, net, org, edu, gov, mil) or a ccTLD?

While we are at it, should we also deprecate the legacy tlds (.com etc). They should have been mostly moved to under .us when cctlds were introduced

I think it’s fine to have generic .com, .org, .net and so on. These are useful given there are multinational companies, organisations, etc. so there’s no reason to mess with that.

What I think is really inappropriate is that .gov, .edu and .mil are US-only. These should either be opened up to all countries, or phased out.

I think for these particular ones, phasing out would be the best way - i.e, no new registrations, every domain owner gets matching (edu,mil,gov).us domains, and then requiring them to only serve redirects to the new domains and not content after a few months.

The short answer is no, this will never happen. Root nameservers don't get to pick and choose which parts of the Internet get resolved; if they did, they'd quickly be replaced. As for recursive resolvers, none of the main ones would knowingly default to a broken configuration.

I get your rhetorical point, but at this time the floodgates of shitty new gTLD domains have been open too long, there are hundreds of them now. Just a cash cow for ICANN.

>Most spam comes from domains registered with these fake TLDs

Domains don't send spam, servers do.

> Most spam comes from domains registered with these fake TLDs

From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.cm

> In a report published in December 2009 by McAfee, "Mapping the Mal Web - The world's riskiest domain", .cm was reportedly the riskiest domain in the world, with 36.7% of the sites posing a security risk to PCs

From: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-10407530-83.html

> The African nation of Cameroon (.cm) is deemed the most dangerous, and the popular .com domain comes in second place.

I'm inclined to think '.cm' is top because of its visual similarity to '.com' so it can be used to fool easier, rather than any reasons related to the country itself.

I don't agree with the previous comment at all, I'm happy to have more TLDs, but a report from 2009, before creating new ones really opened up, isn't useful.

It would also be useful to know how many domains in the TLD or what the distribution of requests is over all TLDs. Yes, .com should have a large percentage because there are so many domains registered in that TLD, but if 20% of the .amazon domains are spam/malware/phishing then a savvy admin will block by default and just whitelist the small number of exceptions.

A savvy admin should outsource spam management and not spend time on crude techniques that inevitably cause false positives.

Savvy admins do both, because outsourced filtering isn't 100% and can always be tuned better for your businesses actual needs.

I am less concerned about spam management than I am of phishing sites and the like. Email from bogus tlds is of little concern because it will hit the spam bucket just like everything else, but if you do a DNS lookup on one of these joke tlds you can expect a high probability of having the request filtered.

There is also .om for Oman. But I don't see how either of these domains are "risky", at least not anywhere as bad as subdomains of the pattern [actual].com.[impersonator].com

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.om

Other (yesterday's) news:

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/10/25/amazon_domain_kindl...

"Amazon tried to entice Latin American officials with $5m in Kindles, AWS credits for .amazon - Brazil, Peru snub cheap gifts, refuse to unblock dot-word"

I think a better example of this new policy is Google getting "docs.new". What about onedrive or other companies. ICANN should never have started down this path and opened this can of worms.

Other than having a .com because most folks will just add a .com at the end of the name when URLing, what are the other practical use cases for having a TLD anyway?

Here in Russia s/com/ru/, and .su zone had a 5% of active sites in russian for a decade. And .xn--p1ai is the biggest IDN ccTLD by number of second-level domains.

Point is, language/culture/country-based differentiation is still a use case.

I think they should only offer these domains to companies who demonstrate a commitment to protecting the Amazon environmentally. It'd be a crying shame for logging companies to have .amazon domains for example.

what's worth more - amazon the river or amazon the company?

Without question it's the river/rainforest. It's one of the most biodiverse regions in the world, with over 16,000 species in an area of 7,000,000km².

Big enough to have its own TLD

16,000 species that won't last long anymore, not without their own TLD.

How much more is it worth than if it only had 1000 species?

Does it matter in this case?

Can't recall where I saw it but someone created a visual comparison of volume / time (ie, throughput) of the Amazon River vs Amazon.com's delivery of physical goods. The river won by a lot, but they were on the same scale.

Edit: of course, it was xkcd: https://www.xkcd.com/1165/

.9 vs 220,000 isn't really "on the same scale".

Well, a few orders of magnitude, anyway. It was more the notion that they were even conceivably comparable that stuck w/ me.

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