ICANN to Incorporate TLDs Already In-use? 262
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?"
The Wild Wild Web is born again... (Score:5, Interesting)
At the technical level, most users see the domain-name world through the eyes of the DNS servers at their ISP, so in order for a new TLD to be valid for that user the ISP must honor it. However, this can be overridden by using a secondary DNS server or modifying the hosts file on the users side, so we may end up seeing a wave of malware trying to monkey with a users DNS settings so that their sponsor's regisitry becomes the first one consulted. Some of the other registrars have already resorted to distributing such software in order for their domains to be valid for anybody.
At the legal level, an "I got here first" principle will be claimed in trademark lawsuits by the business interest behind these rogue TLD operations. That's going to be a bit of an iffy question, if trademark law really applies to an entire TLD, especially when ICANN is the generally accepted certifying body for TLDs.
So in the end, businesses who don't want a domain name to "fall into enemy hands" are going to have to register the same domain twice, because when this dispute is finally settled, one of the two registrations will be null and void, but it'll be hard to tell which.
Seems to me like the domain name system may get pushed over the edge on this one. It was bad enough when US businesses started to buy up top-level domains from countries that were lucky enough to have two-letter TLDs that had cute meanings to US audiences. This would even further create a "wild west" nature for domain names. ICANN's authority is downright questionable at times, and now they're about to have conflicts with pretenders to the throne.
Re:The Wild Wild Web is born again... (Score:3, Insightful)
As usual, the only winners in this will be the lawyers.
Re:The Wild Wild Web is born again... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:The Wild Wild Web is born again... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The Wild Wild Web is born again... (Score:4, Insightful)
www.opennic.glue has address 131.161.247.68
Oh, I guess
Open your eyes, there is more than one namespace in the world. Just because you may be a loyal follower of ICANN doesn't mean that everyone else is.
That plugin just tells that computer to resolve certain TLDs elsewhere.
Sure, the domains for those "alternative" TLDs may be overpriced, but that's their choice if they want to buy them.
ICANN introduced a colliding TLD of
Re:The Wild Wild Web is born again... (Score:5, Insightful)
I won't even get into the whole distributing it as spyware thing... ok, I can't resist a parting shot. Uninstalling it didn't work, and manually cleaning the registry didn't either, it had sabotaged the network stack. Reinstalling win2000 over the top of the old didn't fix loss of network connectivity, and she can't move her important files off of it so I can reinstall properly.
All so they could try and sell their asshat, overpriced TLDs.
I have my own set of TLDs, carefully chosen so that I'm unlikely to ever fall victim to ICANN. Anyone not doing the same thing is a fool.
Re:The Wild Wild Web is born again... (Score:2)
In either case, I agree that it's trash.
Re:The Wild Wild Web is born again... (Score:2)
OpenNIC is just an alternate root that you can switch your name sever to if you don't like ICANN policies. Unfortunately, they can really only add TLDs, not remove them (since doing so would break resolution for all their users), so they can't do what *I* would really like to see -- eliminating the bullshit TLDs that ICANN added.
Re:The Wild Wild Web is born again... (Score:4, Informative)
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... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:The Wild Wild Web is born again... (Score:4, Funny)
"so we may end up seeing a wave of malware trying to monkey with a users DNS settings so that their sponsor's regisitry becomes the first one consulted."
Funny, I thought new.net was malware.
Re:The Wild Wild Web is born again... (Score:4, Insightful)
It should be removed on sight.
If I see it on someone's computer, I strongly advise them to remove it entirely from their computer.
Re:The Wild Wild Web is born again... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:The Wild Wild Web is born again... (Score:2, Redundant)
Re:The Wild Wild Web is born again... (Score:3, Informative)
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:The Wild Wild Web is born again... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The Wild Wild Web is born again... (Score:2)
It's not just the US. There are lots of Danish sites in the
In fact, when I visit the registration site [www.nic.nu], it defaults to Danish. (That's possibly because of my regional settings though)
I'm sure the people of Niue aren't complaining about the extra revenue though
Re:The Wild Wild Web is born again... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:The Wild Wild Web is born again... (Score:4, Insightful)
These quasi registries usually require browser plugins loaded with spyware to work at all, and only a fraction of the public internet population even knows they're even there. When ICANN added the
ICANN cannot be held responsible for what poeple outside the DNS do to create alternative quasi domains. Unless of course the quasi registrars have trademarked them, which I believe new.net may have.
In any case, this will be interesting.
Can't wait to see the flash based protest movies depicting the ICANN board as card people. Woo hoo!
Re:The Wild Wild Web is born again... (Score:3, Insightful)
NewNet claim that alot of their domain's users are running like this.
Re:The Wild Wild Web is born again... (Score:2)
No, it's just fine. Here's why. (Score:5, Insightful)
DNS is a hierarchical system, and the tree has One Root. (There Can Be Only One!) That may or may not have been the best architectural design that could have been done (Pike & Thompson's paper "The Hideous Name" argues credibly that it was a Bad Idea), but that's the way it is. There's no particularly good reason that, just because there's One Root, that ICANN or Verisign or the U.S.Department of Commerce or Jon Postel's Ghost should be in charge of it, and there are many good reasons that they shouldn't be, but again, that's the way it is. (The mathematical term is "Proof by Vigorous Assertion", and it's worked fairly well here.) In fact the Cabal of 13 Root Server Operators, or some big fraction of them, could theoretically decide to stop listening to ICANN and do something better, but they haven't, in spite of much provocation, and it's unlikely that they will.
There are two basic competitors to the ICANN namespace root. One is the various "Open Root" "Alternate Root" "Orange Root" etc. folks who've sprung up and declared that they can be root just as well as ICANN's preferred root, and at one point as much as half a percent of the Internet occasionally used them to resolve TLDs. If 99.5% of the net doesn't use you, you're not in charge. Some of them have gotten into legal squabbles with ICANN or its predecessors over names that both sides claimed, and they've lost.
The more interesting case is people like new.net, who are selling shortcut namespace for subsets of the DNS hierarchy, roughly equivalent to example.newTLD.new.net. They work for two reasons - one is that new.net has gotten a bunch of major ISPs to buy in and resolve new.net names from their nameservers, and another is that most DNS resolvers have a default suffix, so if the suffix is "3ld.2ld.tld" and they can't directly resolve "example.foo", they'll try example.foo.3ld.2ld.tld, example.foo.2ld.tld, and example.foo.tld, so you can usually trick them into resolving "example.newTLD" as "example.newTLD.new.net". If enough people (or their ISPs) buy into this, you can get yourself a real market in those names, and otherwise you'll have a bunch of grumpy customers who explain that you can reach their website or email at "example.newTLD.new.net".
New.net's FAQ [new.net] says that if ICANN introduces a TLD name that New.net has been selling, than individual users and ISPs will have to decide who to follow, and that new.net thinks they'll have enough market leverage to dominate. That's a big problem for a new.net user "example.newTLD.new.net" if the ICANN registry sells "example.TLD"; it's a smaller problem for them if ICANN has that TLD but none of the ICANN registries have sold "example.newTLD" yet, so maybe they need to land-rush and buy it from ICANN-space. It's $10-20 for the first year, which is the main risk. They knew the product was limited and somewhat risky when they bought it, and the risks and limitations were disclosed up front.
The more interesting case is what happens if somebody buys "example.newTLD.new.net" first and registers it as a trademark, then somebody else buys "example.newTLD" from ICANN-space, and the first group tries to seize the name, either in an ICANN UDRP arbitration, or else in a trademark lawsuit ignoring the ICANN process. Yes, either approach would be much more expensive than just spending the $10-20 to register the name directly, but sometimes somebody else registers it before you do, either as a bad faith cybersquatting ripoff (like really-distinctive-well-known-name.newTLD), or just because it's a commercially obvious generic name (li
This (Score:5, Interesting)
From YOUCANN (Score:5, Informative)
Re:From YOUCANN (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course, that's YouCANN's side of the story. But the thing is, YouCANN's domains have never been recognized by the "root nameservers" like all ICANN-approved domain names are.
The problem here is that the ICANN root nameservers derive their authority from, uh,
Re:From YOUCANN (Score:2, Informative)
Re:From YOUCANN (Score:3, Insightful)
Just because you don't believe that you have a choice doesn't mean there aren't any choices.
There are a good deal of nameservers that don't blindly follow ICANN. This doesn't mean we use another nameserver for all
You may not think that colliding other TLDs is a bad idea, but at least realize that they are introducing collisions.
collisions caused, but not by icann (Score:3, Insightful)
Icann had/has the privilege/responsibility of administering the root '.' domain. They had the power to potentially create any toplevel domain that they saw fit to create, and most people recognized the reality of "icann could create a
For youcann or any other "alternative root" to suggest that icann "introduced the collision" is a deception. The whol
Re:From YOUCANN (Score:3)
Lets see, ICANN - recognized authority that pretty much anyone who is anyone utilizes for authoritive DNS. Some upstart goes, hey, I like to sell some folks a new TLD that ICANN doesn't recognize, because it's spiffy and cool, and I can charge extra for it. Who cares if 99% of the folks cannot see it, these chumps won't know. Wait, ICANN is going to use this!?!?! AAAArrrggghh!
The authoritive new TLD completely ignores the squatter as it's squished beneath the wheels of recognized progress. To be honest,
Re:From YOUCANN (Score:2, Insightful)
Frankly I think ICANN has a reason for not making every single TLD they can think of. It's too fucking hard to keep track of. Atleast now you know "okay the site is somthing. oh maybe
No sympathy here (or probably from the rest of /.) (Score:2, Informative)
See Previous discussion here [slashdot.org]
New.net (Score:5, Interesting)
This is going to turn messy (Score:4, Interesting)
Those who hold existing domain names are going to try and get the new ones with their domains. And cybersquatters and others are going to try and do the same thing.
Now, the interesting question would be, if I'm a porn site for petite teens, can I legally have the domain, www.microsoft.xxx?
Re:This is going to turn messy (Score:2)
My problem with this? It's an address, not a business name (though some businesses have been merging the two.) Just because your shop is on "Sun St." and is accessible via "Sun St." doesn't mean you're trying to take over Sun's business by confusing people. At least that's the general idea. Sure, i
Re:This is going to turn messy (Score:2)
Does it still mean that despite my legality I cannot keep the domain name, although both deal in entirely different set of things?
It was my understanding that trademarks and copyrights are valid within the same domain (economic/business area of interest) - isn't that the reason why you have so many products that have the name Unix that have nothing to do with computers or software?
Just because someone has a company with that nam
Re:This is going to turn messy (Score:2)
Um, ICAAN will just make a big mess? (Score:5, Funny)
Um, ICAAN will just ignore the other registrars?
Um, ICAAN will have a meeting in [nice country to visit]?
Um, ICAAN will see if we need another museum TLD?
And so on..?
Re:Um, ICAAN will just make a big mess? (Score:2)
Re:Um, ICAAN will just make a big mess? (Score:2)
DNS server in URLS? (Score:3, Interesting)
"http://ICANN`slashdot.org"
"http://OpenNIC`computers.geek"
With "foo" in
Why bother? (Score:2)
If you want to do that, you could produce the same effect by just adding a new tld (".opennic"), and sticking everything under there -- you have computers.geek and computers.geek.opennic. You can do this *today* if you can deal with putting two levels instead of just a TLD in -- like computers.geek.reg.net or something.
Re:Why bother? (Score:2)
Re:DNS server in URLS? (Score:2)
"http://ICANN`slashdot.org"
"http://OpenNIC`
Why break the heirarchial format of domains?
http://slashdot.org!icann
http://computers.gee
Re:DNS server in URLS? (Score:2)
"http://www.paypal.com!192.168.1.1"
as opposed to
"http://192.168.1.1!
Re:DNS server in URLS? (Score:2)
It's a great idea, until we start bickering about who is responsible for the .icann, .opennic, etc TLD's and we start over again.
Unless, ICANN plays ball, and starts giving out TLD's for alternative orgs this isn't going to be easy to make work. Aren't we supposed to have a say about stuff like this at ICANN?
Perhaps opennic should just start doing this. People would still have to al
New.Net is spyware! (Score:5, Informative)
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!
Re:New.Net is spyware! (Score:2, Informative)
Even Microsoft has a support page [microsoft.com] about New.Net's spyware hosing windows.
Re:New.Net is spyware! -- Use the archive. (Score:3, Informative)
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]
Just a guess (Score:3, Interesting)
So, to answer your question, I think ICANN would happily launch these TLDs without any consideration at all that they already exist. And yes, this will create a definite conflict with those other registries, technically speaking, since two identical domains can't exist for everyone on the Internet.
Look, this was bound to happen sooner or later, and it's going to come down to a showdown. Do we want a showdown with ICANN and the possibility of overthrowing it as the Internet's governing body? If so, this is the time to get serious about it, since anyone who is running alternative TLDs will either have to get organized and fight or get stomped into the ground. I hate to put it that way, but that's where this is going if ICANN decides to implement these new TLDs unilaterally without any regard to what's already out there.
I know what it will make *me* think (Score:3, Interesting)
Alternative Roots (Score:5, Informative)
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:Alternative Roots (Score:5, Informative)
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
The root servers control where to find the servers for the top level domains (gTLD and ccTLDs).
Down with TLDs! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Down with TLDs! (Score:3, Funny)
"Hey, run a 6ab7:26bf:800b:eaf0:127e:baff:9091:6542 on him"
Actually... might be kind of fun trying to watch TV "celebs" try to rattle this off at the end of a show.
Re:Down with TLDs! (Score:5, Funny)
And with IPv6 it will be even easier:
Is someone using this product name? Let's 3ffe:abcd:1234:9876::d8ef:3364 it.
name based hosting (Score:2, Insightful)
Or were you just trying to be funny?
Re:Down with TLDs! (Score:2)
Of course we can not use IPs as people need to be able to change IPs. The ideal system would have been resolving numerical IDs to IPs.
Has anyone ever come up with any radially different way identifying locations? I mean something tht does not involve taking an addr
Re:Down with TLDs! (Score:2)
In theory, I suppose, the use of different TLDs should provide the opportunity for institutions and people to use the same website name but with different TLD (.org, .edu, .mil, .com, and the various country codes). How well do
Re:Down with TLDs! (Score:3, Funny)
There's an idea! But that's a lot to remember, so maybe we could print them out in a large book with lines like "Google Corp website: 24.175.19.234". With the changes in ip addresses, we'll most likely have to appoint some organization to update the book and send out new ones. We could call it the Internet Corporation of Assigned Numbers. (ICAN) That would solve all the ICANN problems!
Decentralisation (Score:2)
A (the only??) long term solution is to have a completely decentralised Internet. A corollary of a decentralised Internet is no IP addresses, no domain names, no coordinating body to make bad decisions.
How to do this? Beats me. It's an active research topic. The closest I have seen is freenet [sourceforge.net], but it still has a long way (a
Re:Decentralisation (Score:2)
Re:Decentralisation (Score:2)
Re:Decentralisation (Score:2)
In a word: whatever.
In comparison... (Score:3, Insightful)
How about if I propose a alternate TLD to an alternate root which conflicts with the ISO code for a country thats forming?
The problem with catering to alternate roots, or alternate registries of any sort for that matter, is your encuraging people to break the standard.
Re:In comparison... (Score:2)
Global DNS needs the same thing, maybe only 1 such TLD, or several. Reserved for private use.
How about me? I proposed not 1, but 6 alternate TLDs. After no short amount of argument and debate, we chose those that were the least likely to be snatched out from under us. We respect the standards, and I for one am philosophically opposed to intentionally creating n
Re:In comparison... (Score:3, Informative)
Per RFC 2606 there are 4 TLDs reserved for private use:
Who the hell wrote the post? (Score:5, Insightful)
Many of the legitimate registrars on the Internet are pretty scummy, and ICANN is coming close to the bottom of the barrel, but they can't touch New.net for pure scam-artist nastiness. Anything that's bad for New.net, their "buisiness plan" and their damn spyware is good for the Internet at large. I would love to see them forced to shut down because there are actual, legitimate TLDs that conflict with their offerings. Unfortunately, they'd probably just update their "client software" to check their DNS servers before anything actually legitimate (like, say, the customer's ISP or a root-level nameserver). Anything bad for New.net is good for the Internet at large. They are nothing but scam artists selling something they don't own (new domain names), and deserve everything ICANN in all its fascist idiocy can throw at them. There aren't many people or companies in the world I would wish that upon, but New.net has made the list in spades.
The new.net domains aren't even really TLDs (Score:4, Informative)
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
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
We give ICANN it's power by using it (Score:3, Interesting)
They're not in use. (Score:2)
Real alternate roots have been done. (Score:4, Interesting)
Ancient history. Back when it really looked like Network Solutions was going to end up owning the root lock, stock, and root-servers.net it was important. Now, it hardly matters. The real root of the Internet is
This awful kludge new.net is doing doesn't deserve the time it takes to laught about.
ORSC/youcann out of date. (Score:4, Informative)
The OpenNIC [unrated.net] root zone file [unrated.net] seems pretty stable, and resolves ICANN domains along with opennic's own
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
More TLDs is a waste anyway (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh, a few get used for silly pages (chicken.coop?) but the vast majority get used for spam.
I have yet to see a
Finally! (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Finally! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Finally! (Score:2)
Wheee....a ready made playground for pedophiles to troll for victims.
How would you enforce the content limitation?
Re:Finally! (Score:2)
That's why the last time this came up the result was ".kids.us" - even within the US it will be hard enough to find a consensus of what is acceptable contents for children.
Re:Finally! (Score:2)
1. Why would they?
2. Force a site hosted in Korea how, exactly?
3. Define 'porn site'. Does that include your beach vacation photolog, that happens to include a topless woman in the background of one of your shots?
Not quite there (Score:3, Insightful)
End-user trademark disputes? (Score:3, Insightful)
The "alternate roots" kids may eventually grow up. (Score:2)
The same thing will happen if ICANN chooses to introduce
These people never had a chance of influencing ICANN - if ICANN had let itself be influenced by them at all, ICANN would have been in so much trouble, its current problems would look peaceful.
ICANN decides what's added to ICANN's root.
Live with it.
None at all (Score:5, Informative)
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
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
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
So, for most people, including serious businesses, nothing changes.
hmm this just gave me an idea (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:hmm this just gave me an idea (Score:2)
Not seeing the problem (Score:4, Insightful)
If a person sets up a site on, say, "mysite.ext" - the 'ext' TLD being one managed by an 'unofficial' namespace registrar, then who gets to see that site when browsing to, say, "http://www.mysite.ext/" ?
I probably don't - my ISP, both at home and here at my vacation address, appears to use whatever trickles down from the root (official) nameservers.
So wouldn't that person have to persuade others from using the 'unofficial' namespace registrar's settings/software/whatever to be able to visit their site in this manner in the first place ?
So now we have a situation where there may be "mysite.xxx" already for those who use the 'unofficial' namespace registrar, and in a way another "mysite.xxx" for those who use whatever trickled down from the root (official) namespace registrar.
So the person who wanted to see the 'unofficial' "mysite.xxx", having to change their settings to do so, will still see the site they are used to.
And those who never wanted to see the 'unofficial' "mysite.xxx" to begin with, will be able to see the 'official' "mysite.xxx" without fear of seeing the 'unofficial' one.
The only problem I see, therefore, is the group of people setup to see the 'unofficial' namespaces will be, in a way, unable to see the 'official' ones. But wasn't that basically the risk they took when they went for this solution ?
For what it's worth, I'd imagine that you can always set something up to poll multiple namespaces - or a specific namespace - when consulting a particular URL, and either ask the user which site they want to see if it's new, or take whatever site was stored to file earlier.
Like an extension of the 'hosts' file, if you will.
So should I..... (Score:2, Funny)
Who gives ICANN the right to ... (Score:2)
Who gives ICANN the right to dictate what TLDs will be usable for our DNS lookups? Some US government agency? Hell NO! We do! Well, at least those of us who run DNS servers do. We do this by means of our vote in the form of the root hints file used in the DNS caching/recursion server. If we point our DNS servers at ICANN sponsered servers, we are effectively designating ICANN to decide for us who runs what TLD, and what TLDs even work.
We could, instead, point our DNS servers at alternative roots. Or
Prospecting Without a Mandate (Score:2)
anyone actually going out and buying new.net domains are akin to those who buy plots of land on the moon anyone who already spent money on a .xxx were simply asking for it.
You don't see companies going out and providing alternate telephone number space ... DNS should be a utility, and there's no need for third parties to come along and try to subvert that. Yes, sometimes ICANN's decisions suck, but I'd rather have ICANN than new.net in charge :P
Reminds me of Area Code snafu (Score:4, Interesting)
This reminds me of a situation at a former workplace.
This workplace (a major U.S. corporation) has its own telephone network. Dialing local phone calls from the PBX was done by dialing 9-NXX-XXXX. Long distance was 8-NPA-NXX-XXXX, but calling a different facility in the corporation is 8-NXX-XXXX, where NXX in the latter case was a 3-digit code assigned by the company (ours was 639+extension, but to call from the normal phone network was 518-454+extension).
Anyway, the corporate network took advantage of the fact that the area codes always have 0 or 1 in the middle digit, and used this to tell the two apart.
In 1995 or so, NANPA started issuing area codes with non-0-or-1 middle digits. This hosed everything up. As I no longer work for that particular corporation, I don't know what they did about this, but while I was working there (c. 1996), a few of the exchanges became valid area codes, and had to be changed.
Strikes me as the same basic problem.
Simmilar scenarios: "Buy your own star name" (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What the hell? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:What the hell? (Score:4, Interesting)
Other groups have decided they want their own TLDs, so they set up their own name servers (which resolve host names into actual computer IP addresses) with the addition of databases for, e.g., *.web, *.sex, etc. This is unnofficial but technically extremely easy.
ICANN is thinking of asserting its given power over all registries and creating its own official databases for the currently unofficial TLDs. This can cause conflicts with people who have taken domain names with unofficial registries. The fault in my opinion lies with the unofficial registries for advertising an incompatible solution (to use these new names, you need to change your Internet connection settings), but the people who have registered will be in trouble if ICANN starts resolving these new domains and returning "no such domain" for ones that are unofficially registered (and of course vice versa).
Re:Huh (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Huh (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Huh (Score:2, Interesting)
They want themselves making new TLDs and taking registration payments for it.
They see a business opportunity and capitalize. No matter if it's a very risky business if the ones with the true rights decide to assert it (as is now happening).
YouCANN - ICANN (Score:2, Funny)
The purpose of YouCANN is simple. It goes like this:
YouCANN: You CANN use .xxx as a TDL.
ICANN: I CANN? Great, thanks!
Re:Help! (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Astroturf? (Score:2)
Speaking of which, here is how to remove that piece of crap should you have the misfortune to have it on your computer:
http://www.spyany.com/program/article_ad_rm_New
Re:A possible solution? (Score:2, Insightful)
Not domain squatting, TLD squatting. Worse. (Score:4, Interesting)
New.net and YOUCANN are TLD squatting.
One is spyware. Both are moronic and not taken seriously by anyone outside of spammers and people in serious denial.
(Disclaimer: I am not the OP.)