7 ms·

Why ICANN's gTLD process leaves a lot to be desired

59 points by benwerd 14y ago

cleverjake 14y ago
>By failing to regulate usage, ICANN have left the door open for companies to have a monopoly on certain thematic addresses on the web. ICANN reserves the right to revoke a gTLD due to abuse. That being said, I don't think anyone would have any form of hindrance from not having a .author domain. ever. Saying that amazon controls .author is like saying Lybia controls a suffix. It /really/ /doesnt/ /matter/. New gTLDs are cute, but thats about it.
- ishansharma 14y ago
  Exactly the issue, they are cute but serve no purpose.
  - cleverjake 14y ago
    I disagree wholeheartedly. The purpose of the article was that the author believes that People could be blocked from registering .book or .love due to corporate interests - thereby causing a "clusterfuck" This is just silly. No one will be up in arms over this, at all.
    - Tloewald 14y ago
      Perhaps they won't be up in arms be but maybe they should be. What if American Express owned .com? Ten years from now owning .book might be seriously distorting. I don't know the solution, but I suspect that having generic TLDs is better. This is like giving big companies the naming rights over cities and streets (the latter they already do to very limited extents). If Chicago became "AT&T Chicago" an that's what you had to refer to it as to get mail delivered or travel there...
      - cleverjake 14y ago
        Its a free market. If amazon acts like a clown with .author, authors won't use it. If they abuse their position once it is actually influential, they can be sued and have their right to registrant revoked. simple as that. I don't understand your Chicago argument. No one is forcing anyone to use .author, .book, or anything else. It is one of hundreds (and soon to possibly be thousands) of available TLDs. This just seems like a steaming pile of FUD
        ceol 14y ago
        Sued by whom? I only see another large corporation being able to take on Amazon. Then we're in the same boat as before. These TLDs are supposed to be generic, not country-specific like .ly or .io or .uk. Giving private entities control over them is an all-around bad idea.
        cleverjake 14y ago
        >Sued by whom ICANN. They are the final say over domains, and can revoke any TLD at will. >These TLDs are supposed to be generic, not country-specific like .ly or .io or .uk. Giving private entities control over them is an all-around bad idea. What is 'generic' to you? Either way, you need to satisfy some form of requirement to the organization that owns the root server. Giving amazon control of .whatever is no more dangerous than giving north korea control of .kp.
        ceol 14y ago
        If ICANN has the final say, they don't need to sue them then, do they? > Giving amazon control of .whatever is no more dangerous than giving north korea control of .kp. The TLD denotes some sort of category. Giving North Korea control over .kp is fine because .kp represents North Korea. Giving Amazon.com control over .books is not fine because .books does not represent Amazon.com, nor is Amazon.com representative of the concept of books. If they were giving .books to the American Library Association, I wouldn't have a problem with it. Do you see the difference?
    - Angostura 14y ago
      What if HSBC owned .bank? and these gtlds take off - would Barclays or Citi be happy to have their sites running on an HSBC-owned subdomain.
      - jamesbritt 14y ago
        What if HSBC owned bank.com? Would Barclays or Citi be happy to have their sites running on an HSBC-owned subdomain? No, they'd simply use something else. That's why something like .movie or .book will never become any some of de facto authoritative TLD; there are too many other options for those who feel shut out.
    - seanp2k2 14y ago
      I am up in arms about this.
ishansharma 14y ago
I hate the idea altogether and in my opinion, ICANN is doing this for a quick buck. I have a hard time remembering 22 gTLDs as of now and they are just adding more. Also, this is going to confuse old people. Whole internet is .com for them. Whole process is broken and I just hope this whole scheme fails.
- cleverjake 14y ago
  According to ICANN they are not making money off of it. The money is spent on the reviewal process. They emphasized multiple times during yesterday's announcement they were pricing it at break even, and if a profit were to be made, it would be given to the community for them to choose how to spend it. Their financials are available here as well, if you wanted to follow up in a year or so http://archive.icann.org/en/financials/ http://archive.icann.org/en/financials/
  - riffraff 14y ago
    I am probably being hardheaded, but what takes hundred of thousand of dollars in the review process? (I'd read the link but it seems last updated 4 years ago with data from 8 years ago)
    - vacri 14y ago
      Business lunches and executive retreats?
    - wmf 14y ago
      Look at how many billable hours were involved in .xxx. Even non-controversial TLDs will generate mountains of legal paperwork.
  - ivix 14y ago
    Yes, the money is spent on the review process, which is another way of saying that ICANN spends the money on itself.
    - 14y ago
darrellsilver 14y ago
What would have happened if we had sold .com .net and .org to Tandy, DEC and Iomega?
- ishansharma 14y ago
  .clusterfuck !
- Spooky23 14y ago
  .com addresses would be owned by "the Shack", and you would have to enter your zipcode before visiting a .com site. HP would have announced the retirement of .net after the Compaq merger, and then change their minds. EMC would raise the price of .org domains to $10,000/year, but you wouldn't be able to actually assign IP addresses until the next release.
Haiperlink 14y ago
I love the idea of city TLD. it's nice to have domains like sightseeing.paris or theme TLDs like amazon.shop this is what we already have for .xxx but giving one company the power over TLD like .book or .author is a big problem for me...
- personlurking 14y ago
  Agreed. General concept is great but selling these TLDs to the highest bidder, idiotic. I can't believe this even got past the 'drawing board'. This needs to be protested in the same way GoDaddy was.
- Lexarius 14y ago
  But which Paris? Paris, France? Paris, Texas? Paris Hilton? There are a lot of things named Paris. Who gets to decide? Few cities have unique names, so it's better to be specific. There's already a http://www.paris.fr http://www.paris.fr, and US states have subdomains assigned under .us (and often regional subdomains under those)
Jacqued 14y ago
This is, by all means, a terrible move. I'm all for destroying the squatting "industry" by introducing an unlimited numer of gTLDs if technically feasible. However introducing them only to give some random corporation control over them seems absurd. I fail to see how these companies could end up not being abusive with the TLDs they own. Better an Internet with open market .com that cost 200000 bucks than one with monopolies over many differen TLDs.
- icebraining 14y ago
  Is a monopoly over a TLD really that different from a monopoly over a normal domain? In the end, there's nothing that special about a Top Level, it's just a shorter domain.
simias 14y ago
Off topic, but does anyone know why we use subdomain.domain rather than domain.subdomain? It's always felt backwards to me. I think it would make more sense to use com.ycombinator.news or de.google.www. From general to specific, like IP addresses.
- SeanLuke 14y ago
  I believe UUCP mail did it that way. At any rate, this is an address. There's a convention here. Do I write addresses as "1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington DC, 20006, USA", or "USA, Washington DC, 20006, NW, Pennsylvania Avenue, 1600"?
  - Jacqued 14y ago
    I've always felt like physical mail addresses were written backwards too. As it is, every word is meaningless until you have read what follows. It would make a lot of sense with internet subdomains, too. Although to me, WWW seems far more general than DE, so it would we www.de.google. Which they will probably take when this goes live, so...
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
    - pixelbath 14y ago
      I suppose it's the way your brain maps it internally. To me, it makes sense to have the most granular things first, as those become what's important. To use physical addresses as an example, say I'm delivering a letter (I'm delivering this letter end-to-end by myself in this hypothetical scenario). Once I know the country, I don't need to check that information again. Once I'm down at the city level, that then becomes useless information, and so on. I'll grant that prepending "www" on every site doesn't make a great deal of sense, but when the "World Wide Web" came into existence as such, it made slightly more sense on the surface.
  - jgrahamc 14y ago
    Sort of... UUCP worked by specifying the route the message had to take by a chain of machines that were connected to each other. So you'd have something like mainvax!bigserver!otherserver!theirvax!john
Harkins 14y ago
A few years ago when this was announced I seriously considered setting up shop to host these gTLDs. (I rebuilt the .pro registry, so I have the domain knowledge.) Then I realized I'd have huge risk from ICANN, if they dragged their feet I'd run out of cash. Glad I walked away, the extra couple years this took would've killed me. Later I realized that, while the tech is easy for me, the sales cycle would be a long, painful slog. Every time I see a story about new gTLDs I feel like a dodged a bullet, as enticing as it is to want to build this product. :p If other folks are considering this business, buy a beer for someone who's had to work with ICANN. This is one of those many businesses where the tech looks atraightforward but the everything else will crush a techie.
- mjwalshe 14y ago
  Thats one of the things that helped kill poptel who built the .coop domain :-(
brianbreslin 14y ago
so the author is upset that he might not be able to register http://benwerd.book http://benwerd.book when he can just as easily get http://benwerdbook.com http://benwerdbook.com only 3 characters longer? People are failing to realize that if google weights these gTLDs then some could be screwed. imagine if .book is penalized over .author or .read ?
- benwerd 14y ago
  Which in turn would open a can of worms, because Google themselves have applied for their own gTLDs. I'm worried about the long-term implications, not my immediate realities, fwiw.
- narad 14y ago
  That's a good point. Even then, I wonder why would Google choose a gTLD over any other TLD. For Google, content only matters. It doesn't matter what your address is. If your meal (content) is good, then spidey is happy to munch it and send it's recommendations (traffic).
  - namityadav 14y ago
    I don't think that's true. Google gives more value to .gov and .edu domains, for example.
    - Navarr 14y ago
      While that's true, it's probably because gov and edu domains are strictly regulated. I could imagine google giving higher priority to .book addresses, provided that (a) the user was searching for a book and (b) .book addresses required that the registrant prove that they're the author/owner of a book/book series. In that case, it'd make sense to. I think Google thinks that way with domain names as well.
x1 14y ago
I don't really feel this... I guess this might be a horrible thing to say but "I don't really care". It costs 100k to get a tld. So if Amazon takes .author then what about .writer? Or what about biographer, columnist, composer, creator, essayist, ghost, ghostwriter, ink slinger, journalist, originator, playwright, poet, producer, prose writer, reporter, scribbler, scribe, scripter, word slinger, wordsmith, work-for-hire, writer? Is amazon going to take all of them? So what if they do? Does that suddenly invalidate FirstNameLastname.com/net/me/us/co.uk or FirstNameLastnameAuthor.com/net/us/co.uk? I'm worried about the opposite trend. That is to say Amazon (or any other company) REQUIRING people to buy a certain tld before allowing them to use certain services (want to sell in the apple store you must buy a .apple tld, want to publish a book you must buy a .book tld)
- mikejarema 14y ago
  Interesting last point there. Ties into what I'm thinking will happen with certain gTLDs, namely that the gTLD will set rules and structure around how that gTLD can be used. For example, .tel, domains in that namespace all have the same structure by design. I don't believe a .tel registrant can change their DNS in order to do otherwise. This is a good thing to an extent - DNS for most people is a huge hurdle preventing them from establishing their own online presence, now more so due to IPv6. If new gTLD provide tools to get .author's or .lawyer's presence up and running in an effective and fair way, great. But overall I am discouraged by this possibility as its a nail in the coffin of the open internet. It's akin to the review process in mobile AppStores, really stating what you can and can't do within the confines of a gTLD. Not something I'm looking forward to becoming comfortable with on the web.
shykes 14y ago
This might finish killing DNS as a human interface. Thanks to Chrome's universal address bar people are already getting used to not caring about the domain - with a clusterfuck of tlds which makes the right address basically impossible to guess, why would they bother trying?
- seanp2k2 14y ago
  This + IPv6 addressing will be great. People who still think "www" is /required/ would be forgiven for just giving up. This is a huge loss for UX on the Internet.
- Navarr 14y ago
  They probably wouldn't bother trying to guess. And I honestly don't see that as a bad thing. I rarely guess domain names. If I don't know the address, I search it. I expect most normal people search it even if they do know the address.
  - seanp2k2 14y ago
    What, then, is the point of a domain name at all? You can get Google to index your IP. Save cash, protect yourself somewhat from USA or some other police state pulling your domain...there are myriad benefits.
    - Navarr 14y ago
      The point of a domain name is an easy to remember address. Not a guessing game. Not an easy to guess address. I'm not even sure how you came to that conclusion based on what I said. Multiple domain names (like book et al) will hopefully be easier to remember. Things like "harrypotter.book" or "looking-for.love" won't be easy to forget if you see them once. Domains shouldn't be a guessing game anyway.
    - shykes 14y ago
      Even when people stop using DNS to find what they're looking for, they'll still use it for a long time to confirm that they're in the right place. Numeric IPs definitely don't pass the smell test. In fact some browsers might even display phishing warnings.
crazydoggers 14y ago
I wish people would inform themselves before blogging on topics they don't understand. ICANN has a dispute policy in place for this. Any community group can dispute a gTLD application that is targeted at them. So ".authors" can get together and prevent Amazon from getting the gTLD. See: http://newgtlds.icann.org/en/program-status/objection-dispute-resolution http://newgtlds.icann.org/en/program-status/objection-disput...
- benwerd 14y ago
  That absolutely doesn't contradict the point of the post. Yes, a group of authors could argue against .authors. But the process remains opaque, and the point is that the onus is on an authors group to make that objection, rather than ICANN making either a more open/market-like or more fair domain allocation process to begin with.
  - crazydoggers 14y ago
    What process would you recommend? The process was pretty open market. Anyone was able to apply for a gTLD. Running a registry is not cheap or simple. If the price for application was lower, every Tom Dick and Harry would have been applying, and then they'd have to wade through thousands of applications per tld. So who do you propose is allocated and gets to runs the ".author" tld?
    - justincormack 14y ago
      There does not seem to be any requirement to say how the registrar will work, ie if it is private, public or restricted to certain categories. I don't mind public tlds and some restrictions (like .book is for books but open for registration to anyone). And fully private ones if they are company names like .Samsung are perhaps OK by me if the words are not generuc. But we don't know what .book or .love will be yet.
marcuspovey 14y ago
I'd like to see the death / an alternative to DNS for resolving names to IP. Its become a little too political + an easy target for snooping/censorship (yes, techy people can get around blocks but that's not the point). In terms of web, most people search rather than go to an address, and if they know an address at all it's google.com. Domains are now more for machines than people, so perhaps a different way of resolving / finding information would be better - something peer to peer, distributed and self repairing. I speculated a little about this when the whole SOPA thing kicked off: http://www.marcus-povey.co.uk/2012/01/10/dns-is-a-symptom-of-broken-search-sopa/ http://www.marcus-povey.co.uk/2012/01/10/dns-is-a-symptom-of...

59 points by benwerd 14y ago

>By failing to regulate usage, ICANN have left the door open for companies to have a monopoly on certain thematic addresses on the web. ICANN reserves the right to revoke a gTLD due to abuse. That being said, I don't think anyone would have any form of hindrance from not having a .author domain. ever. Saying that amazon controls .author is like saying Lybia controls a suffix. It /really/ /doesnt/ /matter/. New gTLDs are cute, but thats about it.

ishansharma 14y ago
Exactly the issue, they are cute but serve no purpose.
- cleverjake 14y ago
  I disagree wholeheartedly. The purpose of the article was that the author believes that People could be blocked from registering .book or .love due to corporate interests - thereby causing a "clusterfuck" This is just silly. No one will be up in arms over this, at all.
  - Tloewald 14y ago
    Perhaps they won't be up in arms be but maybe they should be. What if American Express owned .com? Ten years from now owning .book might be seriously distorting. I don't know the solution, but I suspect that having generic TLDs is better. This is like giving big companies the naming rights over cities and streets (the latter they already do to very limited extents). If Chicago became "AT&T Chicago" an that's what you had to refer to it as to get mail delivered or travel there...
    - cleverjake 14y ago
      Its a free market. If amazon acts like a clown with .author, authors won't use it. If they abuse their position once it is actually influential, they can be sued and have their right to registrant revoked. simple as that. I don't understand your Chicago argument. No one is forcing anyone to use .author, .book, or anything else. It is one of hundreds (and soon to possibly be thousands) of available TLDs. This just seems like a steaming pile of FUD
      - ceol 14y ago
        Sued by whom? I only see another large corporation being able to take on Amazon. Then we're in the same boat as before. These TLDs are supposed to be generic, not country-specific like .ly or .io or .uk. Giving private entities control over them is an all-around bad idea.
        cleverjake 14y ago
        >Sued by whom ICANN. They are the final say over domains, and can revoke any TLD at will. >These TLDs are supposed to be generic, not country-specific like .ly or .io or .uk. Giving private entities control over them is an all-around bad idea. What is 'generic' to you? Either way, you need to satisfy some form of requirement to the organization that owns the root server. Giving amazon control of .whatever is no more dangerous than giving north korea control of .kp.
        ceol 14y ago
        If ICANN has the final say, they don't need to sue them then, do they? > Giving amazon control of .whatever is no more dangerous than giving north korea control of .kp. The TLD denotes some sort of category. Giving North Korea control over .kp is fine because .kp represents North Korea. Giving Amazon.com control over .books is not fine because .books does not represent Amazon.com, nor is Amazon.com representative of the concept of books. If they were giving .books to the American Library Association, I wouldn't have a problem with it. Do you see the difference?
  - Angostura 14y ago
    What if HSBC owned .bank? and these gtlds take off - would Barclays or Citi be happy to have their sites running on an HSBC-owned subdomain.
    - jamesbritt 14y ago
      What if HSBC owned bank.com? Would Barclays or Citi be happy to have their sites running on an HSBC-owned subdomain? No, they'd simply use something else. That's why something like .movie or .book will never become any some of de facto authoritative TLD; there are too many other options for those who feel shut out.
  - seanp2k2 14y ago
    I am up in arms about this.

ishansharma 14y ago

I hate the idea altogether and in my opinion, ICANN is doing this for a quick buck. I have a hard time remembering 22 gTLDs as of now and they are just adding more. Also, this is going to confuse old people. Whole internet is .com for them. Whole process is broken and I just hope this whole scheme fails.

cleverjake 14y ago
According to ICANN they are not making money off of it. The money is spent on the reviewal process. They emphasized multiple times during yesterday's announcement they were pricing it at break even, and if a profit were to be made, it would be given to the community for them to choose how to spend it. Their financials are available here as well, if you wanted to follow up in a year or so http://archive.icann.org/en/financials/ http://archive.icann.org/en/financials/
- riffraff 14y ago
  I am probably being hardheaded, but what takes hundred of thousand of dollars in the review process? (I'd read the link but it seems last updated 4 years ago with data from 8 years ago)
  - vacri 14y ago
    Business lunches and executive retreats?
  - wmf 14y ago
    Look at how many billable hours were involved in .xxx. Even non-controversial TLDs will generate mountains of legal paperwork.
- ivix 14y ago
  Yes, the money is spent on the review process, which is another way of saying that ICANN spends the money on itself.
  - 14y ago

darrellsilver 14y ago

What would have happened if we had sold .com .net and .org to Tandy, DEC and Iomega?

ishansharma 14y ago
.clusterfuck !
Spooky23 14y ago
.com addresses would be owned by "the Shack", and you would have to enter your zipcode before visiting a .com site. HP would have announced the retirement of .net after the Compaq merger, and then change their minds. EMC would raise the price of .org domains to $10,000/year, but you wouldn't be able to actually assign IP addresses until the next release.

Haiperlink 14y ago

I love the idea of city TLD. it's nice to have domains like sightseeing.paris or theme TLDs like amazon.shop this is what we already have for .xxx but giving one company the power over TLD like .book or .author is a big problem for me...

personlurking 14y ago
Agreed. General concept is great but selling these TLDs to the highest bidder, idiotic. I can't believe this even got past the 'drawing board'. This needs to be protested in the same way GoDaddy was.
Lexarius 14y ago
But which Paris? Paris, France? Paris, Texas? Paris Hilton? There are a lot of things named Paris. Who gets to decide? Few cities have unique names, so it's better to be specific. There's already a http://www.paris.fr http://www.paris.fr, and US states have subdomains assigned under .us (and often regional subdomains under those)

Jacqued 14y ago

This is, by all means, a terrible move. I'm all for destroying the squatting "industry" by introducing an unlimited numer of gTLDs if technically feasible. However introducing them only to give some random corporation control over them seems absurd. I fail to see how these companies could end up not being abusive with the TLDs they own. Better an Internet with open market .com that cost 200000 bucks than one with monopolies over many differen TLDs.

icebraining 14y ago
Is a monopoly over a TLD really that different from a monopoly over a normal domain? In the end, there's nothing that special about a Top Level, it's just a shorter domain.

simias 14y ago

Off topic, but does anyone know why we use subdomain.domain rather than domain.subdomain? It's always felt backwards to me. I think it would make more sense to use com.ycombinator.news or de.google.www. From general to specific, like IP addresses.

SeanLuke 14y ago
I believe UUCP mail did it that way. At any rate, this is an address. There's a convention here. Do I write addresses as "1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington DC, 20006, USA", or "USA, Washington DC, 20006, NW, Pennsylvania Avenue, 1600"?
- Jacqued 14y ago
  I've always felt like physical mail addresses were written backwards too. As it is, every word is meaningless until you have read what follows. It would make a lot of sense with internet subdomains, too. Although to me, WWW seems far more general than DE, so it would we www.de.google. Which they will probably take when this goes live, so...
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - pixelbath 14y ago
    I suppose it's the way your brain maps it internally. To me, it makes sense to have the most granular things first, as those become what's important. To use physical addresses as an example, say I'm delivering a letter (I'm delivering this letter end-to-end by myself in this hypothetical scenario). Once I know the country, I don't need to check that information again. Once I'm down at the city level, that then becomes useless information, and so on. I'll grant that prepending "www" on every site doesn't make a great deal of sense, but when the "World Wide Web" came into existence as such, it made slightly more sense on the surface.
- jgrahamc 14y ago
  Sort of... UUCP worked by specifying the route the message had to take by a chain of machines that were connected to each other. So you'd have something like mainvax!bigserver!otherserver!theirvax!john

Harkins 14y ago

A few years ago when this was announced I seriously considered setting up shop to host these gTLDs. (I rebuilt the .pro registry, so I have the domain knowledge.) Then I realized I'd have huge risk from ICANN, if they dragged their feet I'd run out of cash. Glad I walked away, the extra couple years this took would've killed me. Later I realized that, while the tech is easy for me, the sales cycle would be a long, painful slog. Every time I see a story about new gTLDs I feel like a dodged a bullet, as enticing as it is to want to build this product. :p If other folks are considering this business, buy a beer for someone who's had to work with ICANN. This is one of those many businesses where the tech looks atraightforward but the everything else will crush a techie.

mjwalshe 14y ago
Thats one of the things that helped kill poptel who built the .coop domain :-(

brianbreslin 14y ago

so the author is upset that he might not be able to register http://benwerd.book http://benwerd.book when he can just as easily get http://benwerdbook.com http://benwerdbook.com only 3 characters longer? People are failing to realize that if google weights these gTLDs then some could be screwed. imagine if .book is penalized over .author or .read ?

benwerd 14y ago
Which in turn would open a can of worms, because Google themselves have applied for their own gTLDs. I'm worried about the long-term implications, not my immediate realities, fwiw.
narad 14y ago
That's a good point. Even then, I wonder why would Google choose a gTLD over any other TLD. For Google, content only matters. It doesn't matter what your address is. If your meal (content) is good, then spidey is happy to munch it and send it's recommendations (traffic).
- namityadav 14y ago
  I don't think that's true. Google gives more value to .gov and .edu domains, for example.
  - Navarr 14y ago
    While that's true, it's probably because gov and edu domains are strictly regulated. I could imagine google giving higher priority to .book addresses, provided that (a) the user was searching for a book and (b) .book addresses required that the registrant prove that they're the author/owner of a book/book series. In that case, it'd make sense to. I think Google thinks that way with domain names as well.

x1 14y ago

I don't really feel this... I guess this might be a horrible thing to say but "I don't really care". It costs 100k to get a tld. So if Amazon takes .author then what about .writer? Or what about biographer, columnist, composer, creator, essayist, ghost, ghostwriter, ink slinger, journalist, originator, playwright, poet, producer, prose writer, reporter, scribbler, scribe, scripter, word slinger, wordsmith, work-for-hire, writer? Is amazon going to take all of them? So what if they do? Does that suddenly invalidate FirstNameLastname.com/net/me/us/co.uk or FirstNameLastnameAuthor.com/net/us/co.uk? I'm worried about the opposite trend. That is to say Amazon (or any other company) REQUIRING people to buy a certain tld before allowing them to use certain services (want to sell in the apple store you must buy a .apple tld, want to publish a book you must buy a .book tld)

mikejarema 14y ago
Interesting last point there. Ties into what I'm thinking will happen with certain gTLDs, namely that the gTLD will set rules and structure around how that gTLD can be used. For example, .tel, domains in that namespace all have the same structure by design. I don't believe a .tel registrant can change their DNS in order to do otherwise. This is a good thing to an extent - DNS for most people is a huge hurdle preventing them from establishing their own online presence, now more so due to IPv6. If new gTLD provide tools to get .author's or .lawyer's presence up and running in an effective and fair way, great. But overall I am discouraged by this possibility as its a nail in the coffin of the open internet. It's akin to the review process in mobile AppStores, really stating what you can and can't do within the confines of a gTLD. Not something I'm looking forward to becoming comfortable with on the web.

shykes 14y ago

This might finish killing DNS as a human interface. Thanks to Chrome's universal address bar people are already getting used to not caring about the domain - with a clusterfuck of tlds which makes the right address basically impossible to guess, why would they bother trying?

seanp2k2 14y ago
This + IPv6 addressing will be great. People who still think "www" is /required/ would be forgiven for just giving up. This is a huge loss for UX on the Internet.
Navarr 14y ago
They probably wouldn't bother trying to guess. And I honestly don't see that as a bad thing. I rarely guess domain names. If I don't know the address, I search it. I expect most normal people search it even if they do know the address.
- seanp2k2 14y ago
  What, then, is the point of a domain name at all? You can get Google to index your IP. Save cash, protect yourself somewhat from USA or some other police state pulling your domain...there are myriad benefits.
  - Navarr 14y ago
    The point of a domain name is an easy to remember address. Not a guessing game. Not an easy to guess address. I'm not even sure how you came to that conclusion based on what I said. Multiple domain names (like book et al) will hopefully be easier to remember. Things like "harrypotter.book" or "looking-for.love" won't be easy to forget if you see them once. Domains shouldn't be a guessing game anyway.
  - shykes 14y ago
    Even when people stop using DNS to find what they're looking for, they'll still use it for a long time to confirm that they're in the right place. Numeric IPs definitely don't pass the smell test. In fact some browsers might even display phishing warnings.

crazydoggers 14y ago

I wish people would inform themselves before blogging on topics they don't understand. ICANN has a dispute policy in place for this. Any community group can dispute a gTLD application that is targeted at them. So ".authors" can get together and prevent Amazon from getting the gTLD. See: http://newgtlds.icann.org/en/program-status/objection-dispute-resolution http://newgtlds.icann.org/en/program-status/objection-disput...

benwerd 14y ago
That absolutely doesn't contradict the point of the post. Yes, a group of authors could argue against .authors. But the process remains opaque, and the point is that the onus is on an authors group to make that objection, rather than ICANN making either a more open/market-like or more fair domain allocation process to begin with.
- crazydoggers 14y ago
  What process would you recommend? The process was pretty open market. Anyone was able to apply for a gTLD. Running a registry is not cheap or simple. If the price for application was lower, every Tom Dick and Harry would have been applying, and then they'd have to wade through thousands of applications per tld. So who do you propose is allocated and gets to runs the ".author" tld?
  - justincormack 14y ago
    There does not seem to be any requirement to say how the registrar will work, ie if it is private, public or restricted to certain categories. I don't mind public tlds and some restrictions (like .book is for books but open for registration to anyone). And fully private ones if they are company names like .Samsung are perhaps OK by me if the words are not generuc. But we don't know what .book or .love will be yet.

marcuspovey 14y ago

I'd like to see the death / an alternative to DNS for resolving names to IP. Its become a little too political + an easy target for snooping/censorship (yes, techy people can get around blocks but that's not the point). In terms of web, most people search rather than go to an address, and if they know an address at all it's google.com. Domains are now more for machines than people, so perhaps a different way of resolving / finding information would be better - something peer to peer, distributed and self repairing. I speculated a little about this when the whole SOPA thing kicked off: http://www.marcus-povey.co.uk/2012/01/10/dns-is-a-symptom-of-broken-search-sopa/ http://www.marcus-povey.co.uk/2012/01/10/dns-is-a-symptom-of...