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Respectfully, I disagree with the absolutist view that policing and banning is /never/ a good idea. Phishing is rightfully unlawful, and its wholly appropriate

Respectfully, I disagree with the absolutist view that policing and banning is /never/ a good idea. Phishing is rightfully unlawful, and its wholly appropriate for the mechanisms of society to fight against it. There is a balance to be made for sure, but in the case of both domain and app names, I'd argue that the harms from fishing outweigh the freedom of expression conferred by being able to register "Αpple.com". While the names of things do carry some expression, things have names primarily so you can tell them apart. Its a well settled moral principal that we should have rules to preserve the utility of names as monikers, and that its entirely possible to construct rules for that purpose that have a negligible effect on freedom of expression. If you disagree, then show me the developed country that decided it didn't need a trademark law. Your hypothetical German expat in India is welcome to try to convince the Indian authorities that the ability to register können.in outweighs the value in preventing amazön.in from being registered. Maybe there are more Germans in India than I know, or maybe phishing causes less economic harm in India than it does in the US. App store names are harder, because you don't have TLDs giving you a hint to what language(s) most of your users speak. But you can still disallow mixing of Latin, Green and Cyrillic alphabets; you can still say that if you are going to use the crazy accents used in Vietnamese, that you can't also use umlauts; you can still whitelist unicode characters as needed, so that you don't have a dozen different spaces and dashes for no reason; you can still use other signals to give language hints. And as it turns out, most people running app stores have a large pile of money they can use to curate and maintain good automated rules, and hire people to manually audit names when the automated heuristics think its fishy but not fishy enough to automatically disallow, or in response to complaints.

mcny 9y ago
The explosion of TLD s shows they don't care about us. I cannot in good faith put trust in them. I don't know what a solution is but this is not it.
- fermienrico 9y ago
  Explosion of TLD was such a lucrative move, they couldn’t resist! See, this is another problem. Once you have a phishing blacklist, some entity with big enough pockets will just start influencing the DNS system. It would be a slippery slope going straight to dystopia.
fermienrico 9y ago
Thanks for a detailed response but I still think it’s a bad idea on principle as you’re bestowing authority to some organization that needs to be funded, organized, maintained and skilled to keep track of these rules. Soon, it will become a giant mess and regulation will impede regular companies/people that would question “Who put these rules together? Our domain doesn’t happen to be fishy”. Furthermore, how important of a name does it have to be for adding it to these automated rules? How do you quantify that? Even in an ideal perfect world, I wouldn’t want to sacrifice internet freedom for phishing attempts. DNS is a huge part of the internet whereas phishing costs are neglible. Every time someone brings an idea about regulating the internet, I just get a repulsive feeling. Stop trying to fuck with the internet. The EFF is not enough. Isn’t Google Chrome and other browsers already doing this? Phishy websites get tagged and there is a big red screen that shows up - most importantly - allowing users to bypass it if needed. There are times when legit but old websites get banned by these Phishing blockers. I think the solution needs to be more “local” than something on a grand global scale.

mcny 9y ago

The explosion of TLD s shows they don't care about us. I cannot in good faith put trust in them. I don't know what a solution is but this is not it.

fermienrico 9y ago
Explosion of TLD was such a lucrative move, they couldn’t resist! See, this is another problem. Once you have a phishing blacklist, some entity with big enough pockets will just start influencing the DNS system. It would be a slippery slope going straight to dystopia.

fermienrico 9y ago

Thanks for a detailed response but I still think it’s a bad idea on principle as you’re bestowing authority to some organization that needs to be funded, organized, maintained and skilled to keep track of these rules. Soon, it will become a giant mess and regulation will impede regular companies/people that would question “Who put these rules together? Our domain doesn’t happen to be fishy”. Furthermore, how important of a name does it have to be for adding it to these automated rules? How do you quantify that? Even in an ideal perfect world, I wouldn’t want to sacrifice internet freedom for phishing attempts. DNS is a huge part of the internet whereas phishing costs are neglible. Every time someone brings an idea about regulating the internet, I just get a repulsive feeling. Stop trying to fuck with the internet. The EFF is not enough. Isn’t Google Chrome and other browsers already doing this? Phishy websites get tagged and there is a big red screen that shows up - most importantly - allowing users to bypass it if needed. There are times when legit but old websites get banned by these Phishing blockers. I think the solution needs to be more “local” than something on a grand global scale.