ICANN to Incorporate TLDs Already In-use?

An anonymous reader asks: "I recently found an article at cnn.com about ICANN considering new top level domains. Some of the proposed TLDs have already been introduced by YOUCANN such as .xxx and have been available to the public at select registrars such as new.net for quite some time. If ICANN incorporates already existing TLDs how will this impact those who have already registered for domain on these TLDs? What implications does this have and how will the ramifications impact how businesses view and utilize the web?"

From YOUCANN

[mroch]

From http://www.youcann.org/

Recently, ICANN announced it would add some additional TLDs to their root. However, they neglected to mention that they will deliberately duplicate existing TLDs and cause collisions in the name space. It is important to understand what that means.

If the DoC enters a duplicate .BIZ (or any other duplicate) into their root, thousands of domain names will also be duplicated as more are registered every day. There will be chaos, and registrants will be litigating for years, trying to determine who has the rights to the domains. That is called fracturing the net. You will never be sure which website you will see when you key in an address with the extension .BIZ and if you send email, you will not be certain who will receive it.

The other possibility is that one TLD will have to be excluded from the inclusive name space, disenfranchising thousands of domain name holders. In either case, it is the public which loses.

Re:What the hell?

[LostCluster]

What the hell is this even talking about?

ICANN is taking applications for registratars to oversee newly created TLDs again. However, a "parallel universe" of "unofficial registrars" already exists consisting of registration services that use various tricks to get their TLDs to be recognized by some subset of the browsing universe. The question is, if ICANN certifies a TLD that already exists "unofficially" to a different registrar, what will happen to the already existing namespace?...

It seems to be two overlapping namespaces headed for a train wreck... leading to questions over how much authority ICANN really has, and what will become of the pretenders to ICANN's throne. We're likely going to end up with multiple domain sellers claiming the root title over the same namespace, and that'll make a mockery of the whole DNS system.

No sympathy here (or probably from the rest of /.)

[PedanticSpellingTrol]

It seems pretty simple to me: New.net are malware propagating scumbags and anything that lays the smackdown on them is ok by me. Sure, Verisign has pulled some crazy shit in the past but at least they don't alter your TCP/IP stack.

See Previous discussion here [slashdot.org]

Re:The Wild Wild Web is born again...

[eric76]

Simply put, if ICANN adopts a TLD that duplicates a TLD that "unofficially" is being registered by another registration system, then we'll have a fracturing in the standards just like in the way that it's almost impossible to tell who the heavyweight boxing champion is.

They've already done it.

.biz was already in use when ICANN adopted it.

OpenNIC [opennic.org], for one, does not recognize ICANN's use of the .biz domain.

New.Net is spyware!

[Anonymous Coward]

New.Net must die. Their "special DNS software" has sneaked into and completely screwed up thousands of windows systems. Having this crapware sneak onto your system is one thing, but having it corrupt your TCP/IP stack so you can't fix the problem -- manually, or with AdAware or SpyBot Search&Destroy -- is quite another.

I would have pointed you to this link [cexx.org] at cexx.org for info on how scummy new.net is, but if you visit it you'll see that new.net's scumball lawyers forced them to take it down! Instead, see this link for new.net info & removal instructions [spyany.com].

In summary: FSCK NEW.NET!

Alternative Roots

[amigoro]

A very interesting article on alternative roots. [dan.info]

Extracts:

A new top-level domain doesn't really exist on the Internet until it is added to the root servers, so that any system anywhere on the net that is seeking that domain can find out from the root where the specific DNS servers for that domain lie.....

the operators of the root servers have a great deal of political power over the domain name system. Presently, these servers are operated by Verisign, but their policies are determined by ICANN, the organization set up to administer Internet naming and numbering schemes. Since ICANN has attracted a great deal of criticism (much of it highly deserved) for its biases towards large impersonal bureaucracies and against individual Internet users, various people have come up with the idea of "fighting back" against ICANN by setting up alternate roots.....

Setting up an alternate root turns out to be a very simple matter. The Internet has always been sort of a "do-it-yourself" thing, not centrally controlled or administered like a proprietary online service.....

a naming or addressing system only makes sense if everybody uses it consistently. If every telephone company had a different idea of how the country and area codes ought to be allocated, so that if your long distance service was with AT&T, "1-212" would reach New York City, but with Sprint the same prefix would reach Los Angeles, then telephone numbers would be in a state of chaos....

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Re:New.Net is spyware!

[Anonymous Coward]

This isn't a troll you slackjawed moderators.

Even Microsoft has a support page [microsoft.com] about New.Net's spyware hosing windows.

Re:Alternative Roots

[nelsonen]

Please get your terminology correct.

Verisgn does NOT control the "root servers". They do operate 2 of the 13 "root servers" under contract. See http://www.root-servers.org/. Verisgn has no direct control over the content of the root servers.

Verisign does operate the .com and .net registries (again under a different contract), which are NOT a root servers. .com is generally referred to as a "global top level domain" (gTLD).

The root servers control where to find the servers for the top level domains (gTLD and ccTLDs).

The new.net domains aren't even really TLDs

[Qzukk]

They're defined as subdomains of .new.net. So that site you just registered is really "www.mygoatpr0n.xxx.new.net"

Take a look at their FAQ [new.net]. To get this to work in linux, you add new.net to your hosts' file's search path, which makes it so if something fails to resolve, it tries again with .new.net added to the end.

ICANN's move doesn't spell trouble for new.net immediately, but the namespace will start to break down when a real www.mygoatpr0n.xxx appears (causing the .new.net version to never be attempted).

Re:From YOUCANN

[MechaStreisand]

The fact that all the nameservers use the ICANN root servers is why ICANN has an inherent authority. The entire inter-net has agreed to use that namespace. They have to, in order for everything to work together. The morons who decided that they wanted to make their own little world with their own fake TLDs have no one but themselves to blame for the mess that is going to happen when the real inter-net decides to add some new names.

ORSC/youcann out of date.

[bitspotter]

I've been experimenting with alternative roots over the past couple of months.

The OpenNIC [unrated.net] root zone file [unrated.net] seems pretty stable, and resolves ICANN domains along with opennic's own .geek, .oss, .parody, .indy, .null, and .opennic . AlterNIC and Pacific Root alternate roots seem to be long gone - I haven't been able to find any current information on these alternate roots, and I have yet to come across a root zone file that allows resolution of any of their names (anybody know?).

I tried the ORSC [open-rsc.org] root zone file [vrx.net], which is FAR more extensive, but it seems to be out of date - I couldn't even resolve some ICANN domains with it!

It seems that the YouCANN and ORSC web sites are possibly horribly out of date - can anyone verify that these projects are even active?

Now for a little editorial criticism: I don't see any indication in the article that ICANN is considering "incorporating" alternative TLDs as much as it's considering bulldozing over them, like it has for .biz . The submitter's take that ICANN roots may soon start resolving these independent root operators is either woefully mistaken or badly misleading.

Re:New.Net is spyware! -- Use the archive.

[David M. Andersen]

Dude. That's why we have archive.org. When stuff is DMCAed or C&Ded, one can usually still get the stuff.

http://web.archive.org/web/20030410191057/http://w ww.cexx.org/newnet.htm [archive.org]

OpenNIC does recognize ICANN .biz

[Anonymous Coward]

They recognize it. Pacific Root gave up on their .biz when they realized the hopelessness of competing against a sanctioned .biz

Re:In comparison...

[arrow]

> Global DNS needs the same thing, maybe only 1 such TLD, or several. Reserved for private use.

Per RFC 2606 there are 4 TLDs reserved for private use:

.test is recommended for use in testing of current or new DNS related code.

.example is recommended for use in documentation or as examples.

.invalid is intended for use in online construction of domain names that are sure to be invalid and which it is obvious at a glance are invalid.

.localhost TLD has traditionally been statically defined in host DNS implementations as having an A record pointing to the loop back IP address and is reserved for such use. Any other use would conflict with widely deployed code which assumes this use.

Re:The Wild Wild Web is born again...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, so you're one of the reasons why my .us registration doesn't work everywhere. Gee, thanks.

Hint: 'dig us in ns'.

None at all

[mysticalreaper]

What implications does this have and how will the ramifications impact how businesses view and utilize the web?

None. This isn't going to have an effect on businesses. Well, about 99.99% of them, anyway.

See, DNS, by design, has a single namespace. That is, blah.foo.bar is unique. There is only one blah.foo.bar, only one right answer. In real life, you can have two people named John Doe, in DNS, you can't.

However, there's no technical reason why you must use the ICANN view of DNS. You can use another DNS root, like AlterNIC or UCANN (or a few others), and what you'll get is a *different* namespace. So now blah.foo.bar points somewhere else. But still to only one place.

So you can use the ICANN root (like 99.99% of the world does) or you can use another root. But you cannot use them at the same time. Therefore, if ICANN chooses to make a .xxx, it won't conflict with UCANN's .xxx, because you can only use one at a time.

This is why AlterNET and UCANN have always been seen as crackpots, to an extent. They whine and bitch about these things that have no relevance. ICANN is perfectly within reason to define their namespace as they see fit. And so is UCANN and anyone who wants to. UCANN could set up their own .com, and if people are using the UCANN servers, they'd see that .com, not the ICANN .com.

Additional info: An astute reader will notice that things are not quite as simple as "one or the other" as i stated above. You see, what happens is that UCANN will use ICANN's .com, .net, .org, and the other ICANN tld's. Then UCANN adds their own .tld's, ones that ICANN has not assigned. This way, they get the ICANN tld's, plus their own additional tld's. Sometimes, though, ICANN goes and assignes one of these extra tld's, ( like .biz) themselves, and you get a namespace collision. DNS cannot use two versions of .biz. You get one or the other. Since 99.99% of the world uses the ICANN root, 99.99% of the world sees the ICANN version of the new .tld. Then UCANN whines because now their .tld will be pushed out of the way. It irony is, of course, that this same 99.99% of people who have always been using the ICANN root couldn't see the UCANN version .tld at any time before ICANN set it up. The only people this affects are the people using an alternate root, but they've always seen things differently.

So, for most people, including serious businesses, nothing changes.

Re:The Wild Wild Web is born again...

[TheSpoom]

I deal with this a lot. Evil piece of software this is. Luckily, it can be dealt with... get a little app called HijackThis [mjc1.com] (put it on a floppy if internet access is broken), run it, hit Scan, check anything labelled "Broken Internet Access by LSP Provider" or "Broken Internet Access by NewDotNet", and hit Fix Checked, then reboot, and you should have access back.

BTW, you can use this to remove a lot of other spyware that might be installed in IE as well :^)

Re:The Wild Wild Web is born again...

[CritterNYC]

They've already done it. .biz was already in use when ICANN adopted it.

Yup, and biztld bitched about it [biztld.net] when they did it. Despite the fact that only "over 1000" suckers bought into it between 1996 and 2000.

Re:DNS server in URLS?

[boto]

"http://ICANN`slashdot.org"
"http://OpenNIC`com puters.geek"


*sigh*

That is what domain names are supposed to be: namespace. You are just moving the namespace problem to another place: the beginning of the url, instead of the end of the URL.

We would have the very same problem here: who would control the "group" names you propose?

Re:New.net

[Anonymous Coward]

new.net does a drive-by install - usually with Kazaa.

Most of the time users have no idea it's even there or what it does, much less visit some funky URL.

It's particularly nasty on Win9x/ME - on a small ISP helpdesk I've seen it completely trash the TCP/IP stack (bye-bye DNS resolution!!) It's "uninstall" routine has a habit of not working properly as well.