RSSICANN moves toward completely opening top-level domains
By Tim Conneally | Published June 27, 2008, 12:12 PM
One of the biggest news items this week, according to The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), could result in the biggest expansion to the Internet in forty years.
ICANN unanimously voted in favor of introducing new top-level domains, which will include internationalized forms, including in non-Roman alphabets. This could open the door for top level domains to be longer, more descriptive or ultra-specific: such as .free, .paris, or .spaß.
The forty-year-old development the group referred to in its comparison of historical significance, is no doubt the FCC's move to allow non-Western Electric (AT&T) equipment to connect to the telephone network, opening up the possibility for electronically-coupled modems.
This week's vote approved a policy proposal to expand the amount of top-level domains from the current 21 to a practically limitless amount.
Following the plan's finalization later this year, the application process for new names is expected by the second quarter of 2009. Since trademarks will not be automatically reserved, experts have already predicted that these highly-personalized domains could cost upwards of $100,000 to prevent squatters from hijacking names such as .google, .amd, or .bmw. An objection-based protection system will be in place to discourage trademark heists.
A similar objection-based system will be in place for "offensive names." However, an international arbitration body, not ICANN, will handle the process.
This is one area where an influx of names may cause a certain degree of trouble. For example, the .NU domain is popular in Sweden where the domain name translates to "now." To non-Swedish speakers, that domain is less meaningful. A linguistic phenomenon sometimes referred to as "word warp" could take place, where one word, spelled exactly the same in two languages, means something completely different in each. The domain ".pet" would seem ideal for animal lovers in the English speaking world, meanwhile, to certain French-speaking areas, this is the equivalent of ".fart."
This is actually just a humorous example of the thousands of potential pitfalls that come along with this proposed deregulation. Entitlement to city names has not yet been established, so fighting over .paris and .hollywood is practically guaranteed. There are over 17 cities in the United States named Decatur, who gets ".decatur"?
Furthermore, by allowing any name to be registered as a TLD, companies with a long list of products would face a veritable avalanche of new names they would need to purchase, or engage in litigation to protect.
A previously held belief that too many top level domains could cause technical problems, was dismissed by the group. "There is not currently any evidence to support establishing a limit to how many TLDs can be inserted in the root, based on technical stability concerns," ICANN determined at its meetings this week.
So it is technically manageable, but is it legally and economically feasible? With an entire economy based on the value of ".com," and many companies' secondary TLDs (google.info, google.net) just mirroring their .com site, opening top level domains could be tantamount to opening Pandora's box.
Absolutely hopeless lot the ICANN. The web is now going to be more of a mess!
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|Absolute disaster. WTF is going on? Fire all these ICANN idiots now.
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|Agreed.
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|I think this is going to make the internet harder to navigate. Mistanenly entering .com instead of .org can take you to places you don't want to be. Limitless top-level domains will multiply the confusion.
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|I know I'm not being original with this but...
ICANN haz .cheezburgar
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|So far, I have noticed no reference to IPv6 in your discussion.
Yet the ICANN article, in one paragraph, alluded to moving from "21 TLDs to a practically limitless amount."
With implementation of IPv6 (which has been pending for some years now), the number of TLDs would become moot since every device/computer or company would become individually addressable.
So I am wondering if this move by ICANN might not be a preliminary step toward IPv6 ?
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|Names are easier to remember than numbers. Thus why we have DNS.
IPv6 will make no difference to domain names.
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|The competition for domain names that rank high in search results and the TLD's associated with them has been brutal over the last 5 years. Opening up the TLD's will allow newcomers to grab popular keywords that have been unavailable for years. The question is, who will get preference in rankings with news.com vs. news.news, etc. This will most certainly expose the way human written algorithems favor the different TLD's.
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|I don't see an explosion of value-added websites. If someone has an idea there are already millions of available domain names just by creating a new 'word' (e.g. Twitter). People and companies are creating websites today at the exact pace they would be creating them if the floodgates had already opened.
All this ruling will do is expand the market for squatters and copyright infringement lawsuits. Companies will be forced to waste money to buy up all of the potential domain names for their trademarked names. They will also line lawyer's pockets as they move to shut down bogus sites and phishing operations that grab any unnoticed space using the company's name.
While I am confident that The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) had a robust debate and made certain that they had considered these issues, there is really no need to expand the root domains beyond supporting non-Roman alphabets. Even in those cases, they should allow current trademark holders to buy their own names across each new domain at a fair price.
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|This is great! Now Dillan Edwards Brokerage can get http://www.clownpen!s.fart
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|One of the funniest SNL skits ever!
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|Nobody owns the com, net, org (etc) TLD's, so why should one be able to create a TLD of their own and still own it? I think they should just open up a process to allow creation of new and OPEN TLD's so people can create domains underneath them that can then be used for any purpose and aren't owned by anyone. So, you could have ".decatur" TLD and then Georgia can HAVE "georgia.decatur" and Illinois can have "illinois.decatur", or whatever, as long as nobody literally OWNS the actual TLD itself. The structure we have now works great where nobody can claim ownership of the TLD. It's probably not a good idea.
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|Makes Microsoft's $100 million Powerset acquisition make a lot more sense. Bet the code monkeys at Google are burning rubber...
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|worst idea since greedo shooting first
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|So what about private TLD's people use on internal networks? Things like .local or .private. I've seen a lot of companies that use those. What happens if someone claims .local? Also, I would think potential phishing attacks could be orchestrated by seizing private TLD's. If my company has a server called intranet.mycompany.local and someone decided to register .mycompany.local, they could potentially put a server on the internet called intranet.mycompany.local, and depending on what DNS servers a user was using, they might resolve the IP for the impostor server/TLD. Are there any plans to reserve certain TLD's for private use?
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|There are already several reserved TLDs... .example, .invalid, .localhost and .test. I can only imagine this list would grow.
http://en.wikipedia.org/...el_domain#Reserved_TLDs
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|Setting aside the technical and legal aspects which would most certainly be overcome over time, I think this is an excellent idea economically. This will reopen the door of putting more money into the web with not only millions of new domain names, but also billions of dollars spent in IT hardware, IT innovation, web development and more.
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