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The Internet Your Rights Online

Brad Templeton On New Mobile Domains 199

Posted by timothy from the dot-lord dept.
nfocus writes "CircleID has an opinion piece by Brad Templeton, Chairman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, offering an interesting follow up to the previous discussions here on Slashdot: New Net Battle Over ".mobile" Looming. Brad suggests that 'the only way to get a competitive innovative space is to slowly get rid of the generics and allow a competitive space of branded TLDs for resale. .yahoo, .dunn, .yellowpages, .google, .wipo, and a hundred other branded resellers competing on even footing to create value in their brand and win customers with innovative designs, better service, lower prices and all the usual things. I presume .wipo would offer trademark holders powerful protections within their domain. Let them. ...Let them all innovate, let them all compete.' Also in the article 'The domain will not actually be named .mobile, rumours are they are hoping for a coveted one-letter TLD like .m to make it easier to type on a mobile phone.'"
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Brad Templeton On New Mobile Domains More

Brad Templeton On New Mobile Domains

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  • .mob (Score:2, Funny)

    by agentk ( 74906 )
    Call it ".mob"

    I call dibs on "smart.mob". :)

  • Will it allow wildcards? (Score:3, Funny)

    by SMOC ( 703423 ) on Wednesday March 17, 2004 @08:53AM (#8587644)
    As long as any typos i happen to make on my mobile get redirected to the correct domain, I'm happy.

  • How About... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by robbyjo ( 315601 ) on Wednesday March 17, 2004 @08:55AM (#8587648) Homepage

    Not having TLD at all... Like http://slashdot

    That would be cooler because most modern browser may omit the http:// part. Lots of business would covet those!

    • Re:How About... (Score:3, Insightful)

      by cioxx ( 456323 )
      Not having TLD at all... Like http://slashdot

      Fair enough. Slashdot, Symmantec, and few others might have unique names. But this wouldn't work in the real world.

      Do you know how many businesses there are which use generic names? Omega-, Enigma-, Progress-, All-, Liberty-, etc. Don't be surprised to find few instances of identically named companies which operate in the same sector, both in local markets and internationally.

      Bad idea.

      • If that's the case, then... either the strongest wins (mucho dinero), or the first come first served rules. As simple as that. This would happen exactly the same even with the TLD intact.

    • Re:How About... (Score:3, Insightful)

      by quick_dry_3 ( 112334 )
      sweet.. erm, bugger, now I have to rename all my machines on the LAN since people keep on creating Internet hosts with those non-TLD names...

      (or make sure I have my own registered domain name and refer to each machine with full address...screw that)

    • Re:How About... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by kieran ( 20691 ) on Wednesday March 17, 2004 @09:11AM (#8587731)
      That is a TLD, and I don't think the current root name servers would cope well with handling hundreds of thousands of them; nor would the current system for managing TLDs and root servers.

      • Re:How About... (Score:3, Informative)

        by robbyjo ( 315601 )

        Well, having the trend of people adding TLDs like nobody's business, we would come into the same problem albeit a lot slower. Then, someone has to invent some kind of smarter algorithm for this kind of problem. This is an inherent problem needs to be solved. Just watch for the next communication / network conferences... :)

      • Re:How About... (Score:4, Interesting)

        by dsanfte ( 443781 ) on Wednesday March 17, 2004 @09:36AM (#8587830) Journal
        Um, it's a database query, how hard can it be? How about we bring BIND out of the dark ages and give it a relational database with (semi-) fast searching?

        • It's fine now (Score:2, Insightful)

          by phoenix321 ( 734987 )
          Oh I can see this: "too many connections on Port xcyc8749, cannot handle your request"

          All that pressure for nutjobs that can't handle a two or three letter suffix on the domain name. Immense investment, two keystroke savings for things we rarely ever type by hand. What for?

          Never change a running.. ah you know the deal
    • Not having TLD at all... Like http://slashdot

      Sounds a bit like AOL keywords...
    • Hmm.... would that be the same as paying Verisign to be at the top of their lists and then waiting for Site Finder to come back?

    • Re:How About... new protocol (Score:4, Funny)

      by turnstyle ( 588788 ) on Wednesday March 17, 2004 @09:36AM (#8587831) Homepage
      "Not having TLD at all... Like http://slashdot"

      Well then, you may as well make it a new protocol:

      slashdot://

    • echo search org > /etc/resolv.conf

      Or, if you're feeling adventurous...

      echo search gov org net com > /etc/resolv.conf

    • How About...Not having TLD at all... Like http://slashdot

      That was ALREADY broken decades ago - which is why the dot.ist.domain.addressing was invented.

      UUCP Mailnet (and others) used simple site names in a single namespace. Wile you could supply!an!explicit!route!to!somesite!joe, there were add-on tools that would examine the maps and let you mail joe@somesite.

      But with all the sitenames in a common single namespace it was a BITCH to administer. After a short time all the "good" short names were taken.

  • Good idea! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by raistlinjones ( 246692 ) <raistlinjones@yahoo.com> on Wednesday March 17, 2004 @08:55AM (#8587652) Homepage
    This sounds like a good idea. It would be really handy for, say, .wipo to be the "official" site address, and cease the lawsuit problems that have occurred with .com

    And, really, the more competition the better. And extra domains would be nice too.

    Wouldn't it be handy to have a .sex domain?
    • Is .sex like .NET in that for years no nerd knew what it meant?
    • Wouldn't it be handy to have a .sex domain?

      I can't figure out whether you're joking or trolling, but in any case, the "Interesting" mod was definitely not what I would have given the post.

    • Good Idea? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Slowtreme ( 701746 )
      I really don't see how this is a good idea at all. Making up unlimited top levels is a huge pain in the ass. For anyone out there with an original (not common) domain name and matching company name this makes securing legit traffic and users to your own site very difficult. Used to be you could get the .com.net.org wrapped up. This will be a nightmare for comanies that are trying to keep people from spoofing domains. This is stuff that should be managed in house, like yro.slashdot.org mac.slashdot.org etc.

  • More money - Rah! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by matthew.thompson ( 44814 ) <matt&actuality,co,uk> on Wednesday March 17, 2004 @08:57AM (#8587663) Journal
    Is it me or does this just look like an attempt by the mobile service providers and hardware manufacturers to screw more money out of domain owners?

    Why would I want to get a .mob domain over my .com or .uk etc domain? Simple - to ensure that someone else doesn't. There will be a huge land grab and expensive litigation to follow.

    Stop the madness and stop creating new domains without a radical overhaul of the existing ones.

    • Re:More money - Rah! (Score:3, Insightful)

      by *weasel ( 174362 )
      Exactly. 'competition' is no reason to establish additional TLDs. As soon as the small 3rd party registrars cropped up domain prices fell by a two-thirds. That seems to have been the only competition we needed.

      With the price of a domain hovering around the price of a large pizza - I think it's by far cheap enough for us to prioritize clarity and usability over some vague notion of further 'competition'.

  • whocares.m (Score:5, Interesting)

    by thatguywhoiam ( 524290 ) on Wednesday March 17, 2004 @08:59AM (#8587668)
    I find the discussion about '.mobile' somewhat boring, just because I have yet to see a really compelling mobile phone/online experience.

    I am probably not in the know as I'm in Canada, and I really only have those impressions (along with what I've seen in the US) that I've seen up here... but boy does it suck. Rogers, for instance, tries to charge you by the kilobyte - and then ads useless colour banners with big file sizes to their so-called mobile sites... and then they disable the image-blocking feature on the T68i they sell. Nice huh?

    When I can just get some basic info quickly on a mobile phone without hassle - movie times, directions, etc - then I'll be interested. Frankly its a development problem, and a design problem... a new TLD isn't going to help there...

    • I find the discussion about '.mobile' somewhat boring, just because I have yet to see a really compelling mobile phone/online experience.

      All announced next-gen phone chips are coming with WiFi integrated. What happens when your WiFi access point allows cellular users to roam? Then you can do cool things like walk into work and have your work phone routed to your cell phone. Similarly, you can walk into your house and your home phone rings on your cell phone (or verse-visa). Videoconferencing, picture

    • Re:whocares.m (Score:2, Informative)

      by idril ( 762144 )
      I live in the Philippines and we do get a number of good services via our mobile phones: for example, you can check movie showtimes and reserve seats in the movie theater by sending SMS messages from your phone.

      You can also get street directions to restaurants or popular landmarks, but the interface to do those via SMS is a bit clunky.

      Various companies here (like Nestle) have also replaced traditional raffle drawings with SMS raffle draws (buy a product, get a scratch card, send the card number to 2333 vi

  • nuff said (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Underholdning ( 758194 ) on Wednesday March 17, 2004 @08:59AM (#8587670) Homepage Journal
    he only way to get a competitive innovative space is to slowly get rid of the generics and allow a competitive space of branded TLDs for resale. .yahoo, .dunn, .yellowpages, .google, .wipo, and a hundred other branded resellers
    Excuse me, but isn't that exactly what the domain names are for? I want yahoo in my country, I go to yahoo.dk. With a yahoo TLD I'd go to dk.yahoo. This just doesn't make sense. Can anyone think of a good application for a liberated TLD marked where everybody and his dog has their own TLD?

    • One assumes that existing ccTLD's will exist: so yahoo would be free to own "finance.yahoo" and "finance.yahoo.uk". I think his use of "get rid of the generics" is wrong: it should really be "open up a free for all".

      Brad's open approach allows everything. In fact, it may even things like "finance.yahoo.". Search engine's could better rank information using the more precise URL's. Inappropriate URL's would be subject to legal action (just like "real world" trademark and passing off laws).

    • Re:nuff said (Score:4, Interesting)

      by JimDabell ( 42870 ) on Wednesday March 17, 2004 @09:23AM (#8587776) Homepage

      I want yahoo in my country, I go to yahoo.dk. With a yahoo TLD I'd go to dk.yahoo. This just doesn't make sense.

      It makes more sense than yahoo.dk. The rightmost components have authority over everything to the left of them. What makes more sense: the dk domain having authority over Yahoo's website tailored to a specific country, or Yahoo having authority over Yahoo's website tailored to a specific country?

  • its 1998 again ! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 17, 2004 @09:01AM (#8587680)

    if you think a domain extension is key to a successful service

  • Top Level Domains (Score:5, Insightful)

    by al.cx ( 732497 ) * <al AT al DOT cx> on Wednesday March 17, 2004 @09:01AM (#8587683)
    When will people understand that the top level domain is supposed to indicate the type of organisation that holds the domain. They are not supposed to be a tool to classify content of servers, that's the job of search engines and directories.

    Allowing companies to create new top level domains will just result in a confused and crowded tld namespace similar to .com situation.
    • When will people understand that the top level domain is supposed to indicate the type of organisation that holds the domain.

      Never. They are all corrupted now, so that original intent is sort of out the window. After all, Slashdot is hardly a nonprofit.

    • So, Mr. Al.Cx, I assume that you are a happy resident of the Christmas Islands?

      I guess not. Your nameserver is in Scotland, and the Christmas Islands are near Australia.

      Then why the @#@##$@%##!@$#^$#&#$% do you have a .cx domain?

      At least bombcar.com is my "somewhat" industrial site (no consulting now), and bombcar.net is for my networking. :)

  • TLD's = more spam? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by RicoX9 ( 558353 ) <ricoNO@SPAMrico.org> on Wednesday March 17, 2004 @09:02AM (#8587687) Homepage
    Seems to me that I could block a large percentage of spam merely by blocking anything with a FROM or REPLY TO of *.biz & *.info. I'm seriously considering it too. More TLD's would just add to the list that needs blocking.

    I have yet to use (or find a useful)* website on one of the new(er) TLD's, and they want to add more?

    *That's not to say there aren't any, I just don't frequent them.

  • Corporate TLDs? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Chardish ( 529780 ) <chardish AT gmail DOT com> on Wednesday March 17, 2004 @09:03AM (#8587690) Homepage
    I don't really see why we need corporate TLDs. www.google.google? It really doesn't make any sense.

    Most of all, I'd like to see a .per domain name reserved exclusively for personal, non-profit websites. .com has lost its original purpose (and .net has lost it, even more so.) Users of .org tend to be of more of a non-profit nature than other domain names, but rarely are they actual organizations. We need a return to strictly descriptive TLDs.

    • I don't really see why we need corporate TLDs. www.google.google? It really doesn't make any sense.

      http://google

      http://microsoft

      bill@microsoft

      It makes more sense than an arbitrary extension that is not useful in the vast majority of cases. Do you really think that users think "oh wait, Microsoft are an international commercial entity, so that will end in .com"?

      Most of all, I'd like to see a .per domain name reserved exclusively for personal, non-profit websites.

      That's what .name is f

      • .name was a really stupid idea. So was .museum. How many damn museums are there out there that need their own ugly six-character TLD? Would have been nice to have a .pro or .sex (for partitioning's sake) and maybe a .biz or .b2b. The only new TLD I really think is useful is the .info one.
      • We need a return to strictly descriptive TLDs.

      And isn't the canonical counterexample of that slashdot.org? When it started and only had a hundred subscribers, it might have even been losing money for CmdrTaco. Once it got bigger, ads started generating more and more money and then OSDN stepped in. Should slashdot at that point be forced out of their .org name?

      It's a mushy complicated world... maybe we need fewer hard categorizations, not more. What if I want to be a mostly hetero guy with slight ga

      • What if I want to be a mostly hetero guy with slight gay inclinations, married to someone who thinks it's fine to occasionally dip into brief outside relationships?

        Uh... I thought that .aero and .coop were dubious, but you want a new top-level domain for this?

  • This is.. (Score:2, Insightful)

    by 0xbeefcake ( 672592 )
    Allowing arbitrary 'branded' TLDs would solve nothing, it's more likely to cause confusion amongst net users and organisations alike.

  • How does this differ from .com? Hmm? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Colin Smith ( 2679 ) on Wednesday March 17, 2004 @09:04AM (#8587700)
    All you've done is shifted .com up one level so it's chaos at the top level. Fubaring oooh lots of nameservers.

    Commercial organisations have shown themselves to be capable only of managing flat namespaces, they appear simply unable to manage heirarchical naming systems in a coherent manner. Whatever you give them becomes flat.

    Hmm, where's my DNS rant?

    Ooh here it is:
    http://www.archeus.plus.com/colin/dns/

    Hmm, my stylesheet needs a little work and the email address is old so don't bother trying to mail me.

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Wednesday March 17, 2004 @09:05AM (#8587701)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Well... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by dingo ( 91227 )
    I think his comment is a little off base.

    He says Rather, generics must be shared. Ownership rights can accrue to them only in specific contexts that are not generic. Because the word "Apple" has no generic meaning when it comes to computers, we allow a company to get rights in that name when applied to computers. A different company has those rights when it applies to records.

    But with domain names it is impossible to say "take me to www.apple.com for records" so we either allow someone to use a generic n
  • So what is new here? If I am not mistaking here, this would be a step back to hosts.txt. Most sites these days have a second-level domain A record like http://slashdot.org/ . If the TLD is going away, all sites will be in the same zone and we could just as well distribute one big hosts.txt every friday.

    stupid idea, but at least it would give control back to ICANN/IANA unless ... Arrrrggggghhhhhhhh!

    Let us make a new internet without companies, whiners, spammers and haX0rz.

  • TLD competition for reputation (Score:5, Interesting)

    by G4from128k ( 686170 ) on Wednesday March 17, 2004 @09:15AM (#8587743)
    Currenty, TLDs tell you nothing about the reputability of the domain owner -- anyone can get a domain at any TLD. Competition between TLDs could be a good thing in this regard. Some TLDs might become very selective of members -- creating TLDs with high reputations. This is in contrast to some domains, like .biz, that appear to be the lairs for so many spammer ecommerce sites (as far as I have seen).

    It would be nice to be able to trust organizations that have a particular TLD -- knowing that the could not get and retain that TLD unless they adhered to a strict ethical code and had the organizational resources to support whatever products/services/info they were providing.

    • DNS cannot support this (Score:4, Interesting)

      by 0x0d0a ( 568518 ) on Wednesday March 17, 2004 @09:43AM (#8587859) Journal
      DNS is an easily spoofed protocol (and mapping *anything* to an IP address to do authentication is also a bad idea). Using it as an authentication system is an extremely bad idea from a security standpoint. Use certs with SSL if you want server-side authorization.

      This sort of thing can be provided by many other mechanisms, but "the existence of a DNS record in a TLD" is *not* what you want.

      Oh, and it also isn't hierarchical, which is a fundamental element of DNS.

    • Re:TLD competition for reputation (Score:4, Insightful)

      by eraserewind ( 446891 ) on Wednesday March 17, 2004 @10:50AM (#8588319)
      Some TLDs might become very selective of members
      You want commercially competing companies to be "selective" of who they sell to? You'll excuse me if I am a little sceptical.

      What would actually happen is that there would be numerous TLDs with "cool" names selling sub-domains to just anyone, and it would be impossible for anyone to remember what any of them really meant. Much like the situation now, just more chaotic.

      The first thing for the whole naming mess would be for browsers to automatically display the whois information nicely formatted on the screen for whatever website you were visiting. Then people could begin to guess whose site they were visiting. Whois should be enhanced, and linked with site certificates and so on. That would benefit the end user experience. There should be a standardised HTML element for processing transactions, and browsers should display relevant information for where that was going, who they were, etc... There should be standardised ways to query national companies register, national trademark listing, and so on, so that browesrs could automatically display this stuff, instead of people having to (and typically not) track it down themselves. Those things would be advantages. More TLDs would be just one big nothing.
    • Currenty, TLDs tell you nothing about the reputability of the domain owner -- anyone can get a domain at any TLD.

      Well, except for .gov or .edu.

      The registrars for those actually GIVE a crap, unlike the ones who let .com, .org, and .net go to shit because it meant they could make thrice as much money.

  • Proposed fix (Score:3, Insightful)

    by 0x0d0a ( 568518 ) on Wednesday March 17, 2004 @09:16AM (#8587744) Journal
    Okay, *I* don't like people polluting the TLD namespace. *He* wants more names.

    How about this -- there be a .l (for "L"ame) TLD added, and anything this guy wants to add as a tld can go under there, making him happy, since he gets all his wacky TLDs and the registrars can have their "you just bought blargh.com! Do you also want to buy blarg.wipo.l?" messages. If people get crabby about having to type two extra letters "It's not a *real* TLD!" they can add .l to their search domains and bump up ndots in resolv.conf. Furthermore, the conventional generics can be aliased into the .l domain (.com.l) if people *really* don't want to do another lookup.

    Christ, I can't believe there are people attacking the DNS structure again. We have to put up with Verisign and their wildcards, the registrars and their ".aero" TLD, and now more crap.
    • If you need a good reason to back change, it is that the current TLD system is heavily tilted towards English-speakers and a web culture in which linguistic meaning can be monotonically mapped to an alphabetic representation. But there are many languages which don't map unambiguously to a single style of romanization and several (such as Chinese) where the same alphabetic representation can imply many meanings.

      This raises a few questions: isn't allowing users in non-English languages access to computing te
      • where the same alphabetic representation can imply many meanings.

        Okay. First of all, we are talking about the TLD structure and the TLD structure alone, not DNS as a whole. None of the TLDs have English meaning. "org" or "br" doesn't directly mean anything in Chinese. I do not understand what the benefit to Chinese speakers would be in modifying this. This may be an interesting argument above the level of TLDs, but it does not have merit WRT to the ISO and ICANN generic TLDs.

        isn't allowing users i
  • Wouldn't Microsoft want it then?

  • Marketing (Score:4, Insightful)

    by BiggerIsBetter ( 682164 ) on Wednesday March 17, 2004 @09:17AM (#8587753)
    This has nothing to do with lower prices or competitive services. It's called marketing people, and it *will not* be stopped by common sense or logical thinking. Although I agree that the monopolized status quo is not ideal, the EFF just lost a bunch of credibilty by release that bollocks. What I find particularly disappointing is the emphasis on providers, companies, and resale. Clearly this wasn't designed to help the average Joe manage his own domain at a realistic price... Why should the domain name infrastructure be a market anyway? How about having it simply maintained by a non-profit orginisation and provide services to folks that need them, instead of selling vast tracts of it to the megacorps that can afford it.
    • I see the Internet as the one great leveler in the world today. American Society has been totally bought out by large corporation and other groups of people with special agendas, the economy is measured by the well being of big businesses and not the family that can barely make a payment on their debt, etc... The current Internet DNS system is the ONLY place where a large corp., a small business, and a private individual bascially have the same footing. www.smith.com can be a large manufacturing venture,

  • .idiot (Score:4, Funny)

    by DamienMcKenna ( 181101 ) <{moc.annek-cm} {ta} {neimad}> on Wednesday March 17, 2004 @09:18AM (#8587756)
    I want a special TLD called ".idiot", with a special discount for politicians of all sorts and anyone involved in ICANN getting a free account.

    <sigh>

    • Re:.idiot (Score:2, Funny)

      by hoist2k ( 601872 )
      I'm psyched for .con sites - the perfect place to steal credit card info! Imagine: amazon.con, ebay.con, paypal.con The list goes on!

  • TLD Gated Communties? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by G4from128k ( 686170 ) on Wednesday March 17, 2004 @09:20AM (#8587763)
    The downside of opening up the TLD system is the potential for gated communities that fragment the internet. Some TLDs might decide to only accept conections from particular other TLDs. They might do this to weed out spam, viruses, or objectionable material from other countries.

    Some countries, like the US, could legislate that all pron and violent materials be relegated to particular TLDs that let parents easily filter out this material. Other countries might have similar rules or use content-category TLDs for censorship purposes.

  • But will they be of any use? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by mcbridematt ( 544099 ) on Wednesday March 17, 2004 @09:22AM (#8587772) Homepage Journal
    But will every new TLD have significant value? I can see .biz as one of the newer TLD's with a bad reputation. .biz looked like a good idea on the surface, away from the over-populated .com space, but it's been ridden with spammers.

    These new TLD's are just going to add more ammo to spammers. They have legit uses, especially for those companies unfortunate enough to have their name taken in the .com space, but for spammers, it's just the case on the victums end of "oh, this guy trying to sell me something has this really k3wl .biz address".

    If we create TLD's for just anything, how do we police the damn things? I bet any spammer could come along wanting one of these, and bang, they just made themselves their own abuse contact :(

  • Hell in a handbasket (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Overzeetop ( 214511 ) on Wednesday March 17, 2004 @09:23AM (#8587778) Journal
    Come on, folks. There should be a moratorium on new TLDs until they can fix the ones they have. My domain is a good example (we'll call it Fubar):

    Fubar.com - owned by namespace, a company who rents email addresses for an outrageous sum. Clearly they should lose their domain, as there is a .name domain specifically for this purpose now. You should have (for the US) a registered corporation (INC/PC/LLC/etc.) registered with a FEIN which justifies the .com being given to you.

    Fubar.net - owned by a the Fubar lawfirm. Clearly NOT a network provider of any sort. You should be have a FEIN and corporate papers (they're cheap) indicating that your business is set of for the purpose of providing network services.

    Fubar.org - owned by me, Mr. Fubar. Used for personal wmail space and for my political campaign organization. Yes, I ran for elected office last year. I lost. I may run again...eventually. I have also considered hosting the Fubar family genealogy from the .org site. I'm probably borderline here, as you should have your organization set up as a (name your favorite federal paragraph) non-profit/charitable organization or corporate not-for-profit to qualify.

    Of course, I'd like Fubar.com for my business, Fubar Engineering, Inc, but I've setteled for FubarEngineering.com. It's a bit cumbersome, especially since I spell Fubar with nine letters.

    My point is - until the clean up the process, they shouln't go complicating it any more than it already is. A free-for-all at the top would be disasterous. Not to mention the fact that, like .biz and .ws, it just makes the .com TLD more valuable to squatters. Oh, that too.

  • You know, "competition increases quality".

    I already hate TV. What am I supposed to do if the internet gets as trashy as TV ? Go to the library and read Plato, Sokrates and Aristoteles ?

    Rainer

  • Will they use it? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Ephemeriis ( 315124 ) on Wednesday March 17, 2004 @09:38AM (#8587837)
    You know, I've seen press about these new TLD's several times before... There was .bis (or was it .biz?) for businesses...and .tv for television...and something like .info for informational sites.... I don't know how many of these actually went live or not, but I've never seen them in use. All I typically see is .com and .edu these days...and precious few .org or .net - people really don't seem terribly interested in having a variety of TLDs.

    yrs,
    Ephemeriis

  • microsoft (Score:2, Interesting)

    by DarthTaco ( 687646 )
    If microsoft wanted to, they could probably set up an "alternet" where code in IE would check a microsoft dns first and then go on to whatever your isp dns is. Then they could run around with .microsoft or .ms or whatever.

  • New TLDs (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Zog The Undeniable ( 632031 ) on Wednesday March 17, 2004 @09:46AM (#8587877)
    'The only way to get a competitive innovative space is to slowly get rid of the generics and allow a competitive space of branded TLDs for resale. .yahoo, .dunn, .yellowpages, .google, .wipo, and a hundred other branded resellers'

    With respect, Brad, that's a terrible idea. To prevent cyber-squatting, companies are going to have to buy all the TLDs relating to their name or their line of business. This is going to cost hundreds of dollars each year for no real benefit.

    And WTF is .dunn? In Britain Dunn & Co. is a rather dull gentleman's outfitter. Suits you, Sir ;-)

  • This is a stupid use of DNS! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Fastolfe ( 1470 ) on Wednesday March 17, 2004 @10:01AM (#8587958)
    DNS is completely inappropriate for use as a "marketing space" to begin with. This is why we have all of these idiotic lawsuits (and squatting) under the existing TLDs: the domains themselves have been *given* intellectual property status when they do not deserve it. Who deserves apple.com? Apple Supermarkets or Apple Computers? Why?

    New TLDs isn't the answer, it's just going to flatten the namespace and give an order of magnitude more traffic to the root servers. Who's going to pay for that? You want to charge new TLD owners $500 a year to register? Who's going to manage that namespace? Is ICANN going to become a registrar, or are we going to start having independent registrars managing the root namespace? Nothing about this looks like a good idea. It might be technically feasible, but it's stretching DNS further than it was intended to go.

    A proper solution needs to involve a *proper* directory service. DNS is not a search engine. I shouldn't have to know or guess that apple.com is Apple Computers. Today's search engines search on content and only the quality of their algorithm, the user's ability to research and a bit of luck allow it to point you to authoritative places.

    It seems like an X.500 or LDAP directory service does exactly what you'd need here (and conveniently integrates with X.509-style SSL certificates), but it isn't the only solution either. Give users the ability to do a real-world name lookup through a proper directory service, and DNS domains lose their IP value entirely and can end up doing what they were originally intended to do: provide a hierarchial namespace for hosts and services. SSL can be used to start validating this real-world identity instead of just connecting the session with a DNS hostname (which is also part of the problem).

    I could query this new directory for "Apple", get back a few matches including the obvious one I wanted, Apple Computers, get a mapping to their DNS domain apple.com, do an SRV lookup against apple.com for an HTTP service, and boom, I have Apple Computer's home page. I don't have to guess the DNS domain and my browser doesn't need to correct my invalid URL.
  • why are we changing the internet to make money?

    • Re:stupid question (Score:4, Funny)

      by YrWrstNtmr ( 564987 ) on Wednesday March 17, 2004 @11:19AM (#8588557)
      You're not thinking like a marketing/sales assclown. Making more money is the goal. The unfortunate side effect of breaking the TLD conventions is secondary.

      Assclown #1:"Hey, I have this new idea to make more money."
      Assclown #2:"Will it affect us personally?"
      AC#1: "Probably not, but I'm not sure. We DO get more money out of it, though."
      AC#2:"Ok, lets do it. The engineering guys can figure out the hard parts."

      High 5's and martini's all around.

  • Back to the old days. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Spudley ( 171066 ) on Wednesday March 17, 2004 @10:12AM (#8588009) Homepage Journal
    In the early days of the web, everyone had homepages with their chosen host that went something like http://www.hostname.com/users/mysite/ or for the lucky ones http://mysite.hostname.com/

    Then we all realised that the only way for our sites to be taken seriously was to buy a domain name for them, so we changed to http://mysite.com/

    Now this proposal comes along with .yahoo, .google, .whateverelse, and suddenly we'll be back to those old days. Domains on some of the new TLDs will be given away, and those ones will get exactly the same reputation as the current Geocities/Tripod type sites.

    Others will be sold for extortionate prices, and there will hardly be any of them sold (like .tv). Most of the others will be snapped up by porn/spam/fraud operators, and once they get associated with them, no-one else will touch them with a bargepole (.biz anyone?).

    If we're really lucky, there might be a handful of companies that get themselves a unique-sounding domain out of it, but I don't see how that's going to be worth all the wasted time and effort that this whole saga will cause.

    The only reall effect of this will be to devalue the domain levels. And the only people who will benefit will be the registrars for the new TLDs.
  • If you pay for proprietary TLDs then it's no different than just dropping them entirely, but then we couldn't differentiate .org .edu type domains. I think the registrars just want more money. This whole .m thing reminds me of when some company paid Tuvalu (sp?) a boatload of money and was planning to sell .tv domains to broadcasters. Didn't work - not even a little bit.
  • Ugh, I am so disgusted by the new TLDs that we have
    had thrust on us the past couple of years, and now they want to create more? the rationality for .coop and .biz was bad, but .yahoo? no way! TLDs are meant to have legal meanings. If you look back at when
    they were created, there were different usage policies for arpanet (.arpa) and milnet (.mil), and nato (.nato, now gone) in the military world. Commercial entities and non-commercial, extra-military organizations were also appropriately marked by their dom
  • The man who brought you copyright-controlled Usenet comes up with a plan to MAKE MONEY FAST selling the part of the URL you know you shouldn't even have to type.
  • Personally, I think they should make it longer - something like .mobilephone perhaps. With any luck, evolution will kick in as hundreds of idiots run themselves off the roads trying to text while driving. It's bad enough with people trying to drink coffee and hold a phone while driving - make it easier to send text messages and some idiots will. You know it'll happen...
  • I don't like a mobile TLD because companies have to register it so others won't take it and confuse their customers. It's also much cheaper for the company foo.com to make mob.foo.com instead of registering foo.mob. With the nice side effect that no cybersquatter can grab mob.foo.com.
  • I run a DNS server for my little LAN. Internally, machines are added to a ".lan" domain, because they are NAT'd anyway. Can't be accessed from outside, so they don't get the external domain name. Traffic inbound goes to the correct machines.

    In the past, I had a guarantee that ".lan" would not be a valid TLD. It can't be a country code, and it's not a standard TLD.

    So... now the assurance is going to go away. The price of progress, I guess. I do hope that some TLDs remain reserved for internal use (same as
  • This business of adding TLDs is stupid. Look at the results of the last addition. .BIZ is where spammers live. Few sites in .INFO are worth attention. Almost nobody uses ".MUSEUM".

    The number of domain registrations is dropping steadily as the worthless registrations from the speculation boom expire. Pressure for new TLDs comes from registrars, especially Network Solutions, who see their once-loated revenue declining. All they want is to force real companies and trademark holders to re-register in each

    • I have never been to a legitimate site based on a .biz domain.

      In that regard, it's actually useful- if a site is in .biz, that's like having your company's contact email as a hotmail account. The name even sounds goddamn sleazy.
  • Yes, I may be wrong, but I prefer generic '.com' or geographical '.**'. I don't want my web site to be .google/.ISP/.Earthlink/.WhateverMarketoidsThinkO f . Because I am not a part of those organizations and, hopefully, won't be. And I bet as soon this madness with a gazillion of zones happens, there will be no easy way to get domain in other company's zone. Each time hosting changes it will be "Sorry, Sir, but we only support our domains. We can offer you a discount on YourSire.Schmuk...".
    Unless, of course
  • Because that's the logical endpoint of refusing to contain the potential explosion of TLDs: every company in the world has its own TLD. The namespace goes back to flat.

    We need *more* structure, not less. If we're gonna rip up the current model, let's build a real global X.500 directory and put hosts and their organizations in it, so we have some chance of sorting through the mess.

    Why do I get the feeling that this is driven by a bunch of guys each of whom never was able to grok any hierarchy which does
  • If yahoo and google and the likes what to do this today, they can. At the third tier level. What wrong with yournamehere.yahoo.com or yournamehere.google.com.

  • Create free handle system instead (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Someone should create a free software version of the CNRI's handle system instead. And set up a non-profit ethically oriented organization to back it, rather than allowing a perfectly sensible idea to be hijacked by Esther Dyson and her oligarch cronies at the International DOI Foundation.

    If you're not familiar, the idea is to assign objects persistent identifiers. URL's can also name things, but persistence is hard to guarantee, because the things they refer to may very well move around. E.G. - a resea

  • I call dibs on registering the domain "butt.wipo".
  • This was a blog entry about how another generic TLD is a bad idea, pointing to essays that explain things in much more detail that people wouldn't read.

    Branded TLDs would be for brands in the directory business. It would be silly, of course, to give TLDs to ordinary companies for use for their own business, that would just repeat the .com problems at a higher level.

    The example of .yahoo is used because Yahoo is in the directory and naming business already. But it's a poor choice I guess because it confu
    • IMO, the whole TLD thing needs to go right out the window unless it gets enforced meaning.

      Country code domains should be given to government departments, corporations incorporated there, and citizens (full names.) The US government, incidentally, should have to drop .gov and become .gov.us to match up with this.

      Beyond that, ALL TLDs should be available, with any valid characters you like put in. I should be able to have .fack or .keke or .whatever. All of these special TLDs are crap because anyone who has
  • and everything will be OK. It's not like somebody's going to hijack that domain and pretend to be a registrar for the nation of Tobango (or whoever .to was delegated to originally).

    Most slashdotters should understand why I want to.us, but a .su domain would also be cool just for the novelty of it... because in Soviet Russia, domain name registers YOU!

    Oh my. I just combined two worn-out jokes in one post.

    I'm going to stop now.

  • Darn! (Score:2)

    by El ( 94934 )
    The domain will not actually be named .mobile, rumours are they are hoping for a coveted one-letter TLD like .m to make it easier to type on a mobile phone. There goes my chance to have an email address of batman@bat.mobile!!!

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