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Comment by stillmotion | Hacker News Reader

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.

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

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.

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