ICANN reveals objections to proposed top level domains | Hacker News Reader

ICANN reveals objections to proposed top level domains

pcworld.com

38 pointsmicrowise25 comments

Actual list is available here

https://gacweb.icann.org/display/gacweb/GAC+Early+Warnings

Looking through, the first thing that I noticed is the number of domains rejected by Australia, looking through the PDFs the reasons all seem valid, it's just strange that Australia is the one rejecting them.

As hard as it is for a Kiwi to suggest, it looks like Australia are just being a bit more perceptive and thoughtful than other countries by considering all way ways this crazy gTLD thing is going to go wrong. Personally, I'm glad some country is objecting to allocating .city to some arbitrary commercial entity.

As an Australian, don't worry, you can take it back. Our Communications Minister is dead set on online censorship - he's just had to drop his idea for online filtering in the face of heavy corporate and public opinion against it. The TLD thing is simply a case of 'right outcome, wrong underlying motivation'.

I'm heavily against the new gTLDs because I don't see why private entities should own generic words. '.com' is not a generic word. '.book' is. I don't think the payoff is worth any of the multitude of problems.

Interesting:

-Argentina and Chile object to Patagonia Inc's attempt at .patagonia

-India objects to .bible

-Nigeria objects to Delta Airlines attempt at .delta

-China objects to .shangrila from some hotel chain by the same name

-Australia objects to most everything else including .sucks

> Australia objects to most everything else including .sucks

It's important to note that this isn't because it offends them, but because whoever holds it can basically print cash once brands start realizing they need to register (brand).sucks before anyone else does.

Fair enough. They appear to object with 1 of following 2 reasons:

1) Company X does not appear to specify sufficient mechanisms to allow communities to protect their names and reputations from misuse at the second level, except through defensive registrations.

2) Company X is proposing to exclude any other entities, including potential competitors, from using the TLD.

Restricting common generic strings for the exclusive use of a single entity could have unintended consequences, including a negative impact on competition.

I would instigate a rule that to register a whatever.sucks you have to be unaffiliated with the brand/company in question.

- Greece only objects to .basketball

Australia has a strong competition / consumer protection watchdog - it may be that the advice of the ACCC was sought by the Department of Communications (that submitted the objections).

Gotta say I have to give props to Australia for objecting to most of these. Some relevant reading:

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120613/12491719310/rip-of...

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20121116/02455021073/domain...

Seeing a common theme in the LLC applicants whose generic choices of profession-related words Australia has objected to...

  Delta Mill, LLC
  Snow Sky, LLC
  Koko Moon, LLC
  Atomic Pipe, LLC
  Corn Sunset, LLC
  Dog Bloom, LLC
  Hidden Way, LLC
  Knob Town, LLC
  Spring Frostbite, LLC
  Victor North, LLC
  Blinky Sky, LLC

and so on. Did someone actually get a random name generator and then register all those shell companies?

Three cheers for Australia! I think our experience with the last set of TLDs show us that having more isn't necessarily better. Think of how many domains you'll need to capture to protect your brand (Australia's main objection).

I think the other way around this is to boycott the new TLDs ... if anyone wants to collaborate on a couple browser plug-ins I'd be more than happy to help.

Why would I care about owning all the (brand).(tld) pages? If I own .com, it's enough. If someone is trying to be my brand without my permission, there are already legal ways of dealing with that. If they're just another brand in a different space of the market with the same name, I don't care. Apple the tech company is quite different from Apple the apple company. If someone makes (brand).sucks, that's really no different to (brand)sucks.com.

Can someone cross reference this to the list of gTLD that were initially submitted? To see what ones weren't objected to?

This is the rough list of domains that no one objected to:

https://gist.github.com/4145536

I didn't find a nicely formatted CSV of complaints, all I had was the page itself, which I pasted into a spreadsheet and extracted a list from that (the HTML wasn't consistently formatted either or I would've done something with that) I did find a CSV of domain proposals here: http://newgtlds.icann.org/sites/default/files/reveal/strings...

I did some processing on both to get them to all lower case, removed spaces and translations as best I could, and ran cat (both files) | sort | uniq -c over both of them, at which point, any line that starts with " 1 " is a line that only appears in one file. So, the list I gisted is "mostly" domains that no one complained about, but it may also contain domains that someone complained about that weren't actually proposed, and several steps along the way were error prone so it definitely has other mistakes. The domains with non-latin characters may not have worked properly in particular. I might've spent a little more time on it, but I'm on my way out the door.

IE don't make any business decisions based on this list :)

EDIT: err, wound up back in the door. And noticed I totally screwed up the one I pasted in (forgot the "sort" on the last run I did, duh.) It's better now.

Apparently some Chinese company tried to get the chinese for ".gov" or ".government", and the Republic of China[1] and Hong Kong[2] governments are unhappy, to say the least!

[1] https://gacweb.icann.org/download/attachments/22938690/GOVID...

[2] https://gacweb.icann.org/download/attachments/22938690/GOVID...

I thought it was interesting that Saudi Arabia was opposed to granting certain gTLDs on the grounds that they would likely be used to host content which their culture considers offensive. To me, it seems like if that government could censor all* homosexuality and "substances detrimental to public order and morals" by blocking .gay and .wine, then that would be in its interest.

Interesting to see Donuts co didn't get mentioned once despite applying for 320 gTLDs.

Wishful thinking: Perhaps they got rejected already, so any objections are moot?

That is because Donuts applied for its gTLDs through a number of LLCs with names like "Delta Mill, LLC" and "Snow Sky, LLC". You can find a great many of them objected to.

Ah that makes more sense.

I actually think some TLDs like .book, .app, .movie, could be useful. Often for movies you see they've used domains like reavingzombiesmovie.com, which would be better as reavingzombies.movie, and would let someone else buy reavingzombies.app or .book, for an entirely different product that happens to share a name

All of these TLDs should only be sold to companies who plan to let people buy domains from them

The idea of Amazon owning .book or Apple owning .app just seems bad for the internet as a whole

I can't decide if I think the TLDs should be first-come, first-served like regular domain names are (unless someone cares to correct me? I don't know specifics), or if I'd love there to be precedence blocking people from registering generic words. If you can register banana.com, why not .banana? But then .banana would certainly be squatted for someone holding out for millions against Chiquita, and that's just crappy for everyone.

This whole gLTD thing is stupid and will cause horrible confusion and scamming.

There should be .global or .world and each country should pick a translation or two of "global", and they should all be aliases for each other. Basically just make non-US-specific version .com for all uses.

What about just ".g"? It's a single latin letter, easy to say, and short enough that non-English speakers will be able to deal with it.

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