.confusion: ICANN opens up Pandora's Box of new TLDs | Hacker News Reader

.confusion: ICANN opens up Pandora's Box of new TLDs

arstechnica.com

15 pointsnickb17 comments

Even though this decision is way too controversial, I welcome it because (1) it's more democratic and (2) the old situation with limited TLDs can't be justified.

One problem with the existing domain name system is that it failed to provide strict delegation of names the way digital certification does, for example, or the way the IP address delegation works. So why bother having a limited set of TLD's at all?

In fact, USENET's hierarchy has always been more open in this regard and needless to say, it worked.

I just hope they'll preserve .local and I don't care about the rest. We'll surely remember the good names (reddit.com, slashdot.org, etc) the way we remember good USENET groups, and will leave the rest to the search engines.

Search engines are very good at finding things, it seems less important than ever what your site's name actually is.

The proliferation of extensions is also annoying: I don't like remembering that "abc.net" is completely different than "abc.com". I think it would make (slightly) more sense if acquiring "abc.<anything>" at least meant you couldn't ever register "abc.<anything-else>", as then the only purpose of the extension is to identify who manages your domain.

Personally, if I see an organization with a "special" new TLD, I won't be impressed. I'll only consider them foolish for dropping half a million bucks, and assume that they mismanage their money in other ways (i.e. bad investment, steer clear).

Who's to say that your personal criticism couldn't be compared to the same criticism many companies began receiving in the 90's when they moved the sale of their products to the internet? Remember that the internet is still so young, and it's important to keep an open mind to each step of change.

Indeed, the last thing freed from Pandora's box was Hope.

I actually like this, as the .com has been running out of any good names in a long time. And getting any decent name, requires paying lots of money, to the domain squatters. Even 2-5k is too much for a small startup, or for a small personal project.

Also, they seem that they are closing the "domain tasting" party. Basically you can only return back for a full refund few domains, then you can't get a refund back.

So, those "domain tasters" that horde thousands of domains a day, and keep the legitimate users to find a good one, will have to find a new job.

So... How much happier were you when .info, .biz, or .name opened up? Why would the new TLDs be any more desirable? And, if they are, what stops squatters from snatching them up as they have done with the current set of domains?

As far as I can see, any change in the availability of "good names" is temporary. The long-term effects of new TLDs are (1) more money for ICANN, (2) more confusion on the part of the users as to whether a given piece of text is a domain name, and (3) more phishing sites.

I find the controversy around this a little odd. URLs are practically arbitrary strings. All they're doing is generalizing the last bit.

There is some benefit to having non-arbitrary strings for URLs.

For one thing, if you see the text "interslice.com" on a business card or in an advertisement, you have some reassurance that it is a website. If you just have the text "interslice", the reader needs additional prompting to know it is a website.

Likewise, if you see someone's e-mail address listed as "bob@us.interslice.c", you can tell just by looking at it that there's probably something wrong with it -- maybe you can even diagnose and fix the problem yourself. But you can't do this for arbitrary strings, which carry no such redundancy.

I agree. Let's get off this Luddite train.

So I could buy www.paypal and set up www.paypal/com? Nice. This is a great idea, ICANN.

While I agree, it seems if this goes through, ICANN will be checking every application, you could never get it.

I hate this idea,it is causing more of a problem than its trying to fix!

At my calculations (likely wrong), if the maximum domain somebody would want to make (20chars), you could make 280million domains per TLD (mostly nonsense). So .com can have 280mil, .fr can have 280mil, etc. Wouldn't opening up the TLD system make things worse? (assuming not all TLD buyers allow people to freely register domains at a reasonable price)

At the current time, ICANN can open a new TLD every once in a while and allow all the domains to be taken. And they can do this thousands of times at least until things get silly with 5 letter+ TLDs.

I really hope this doesn't happen!

no you can't. Paypal is trademarked, and belong to a company, so you will never be able to buy it. If you do, you will probably going to get sued, if the name is such that users can confuse it with the current company. Unless it is something like paypalsucks, which is totally legal.

Trademarks are not unique. They are unique within a given industry. And they may not be owned by the same party across different nations. This is already a problem with companies with the same name in different industries vying for the same URL.

So we'll finally see apple.com vs. apple.recording-industry-sharks and both will be happy.

Most phishers are not concerned with being sued.

Most phishers probably aren't going to have $50-100k spare either.

I think there has been a great misunderstanding with this scheme due to how its been reported by the likes of BBC News - applicants will have to submit business plans and demonstrate a technical capacity to maintain DNS servers - I bet they will have some pretty strict requirements by the time it's finalised, and I'm sure they will heavily scrutinise all applications.

It's not like any old Joe can just set up their own TLD overnight.

Yes, phishers probably aren't going to get TLDs due to cost (at least in the short term). But most companies that legitimately get TLDs will likely exercise as much oversight over subdomains as current .com registrars do -- that is, practically none at all.

While you won't be able to get the paypal TLD, I'd be surprised if paypal.shop is appreciably harder to get than paypalshop.com

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