11 ms·

ICANN is wrong

157 points by falling 14y ago

dsr_ 14y ago
If it's a company's trademark, fine -- let them buy the corresponding TLD. No harm done. Bzzzt, wrong. Trademarks are industry-specific: that's why Apple Records can exist alongside Apple Computer. If there's no likelihood of confusion, there's no conflict. And of course, trademarks are not fully international. Winer is right about ICANN being wrong. There's just so much else that ICANN is wrong about.
- grabeh 14y ago
  You are right to extent, however, even in the absence of a lack of confusion, an action can be brought where a third party in using a similar/identical mark to the original takes unfair advantage or causes detriment to the original mark. In fact, Apple Inc and Apple Records engaged in a long-standing legal spat over the usage of the Apple mark before finally reaching a settlement in 2007. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Corps_v_Apple_Computer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Corps_v_Apple_Computer
- incongruity 14y ago
  While all of your points are correct, I think you missed the point. That line of argument is expressly what the author was trying to avoid. The author acknowledged there were issues with it but stepped beyond them because there's a larger point that he was trying to make. (One I think has its own issues, but that's for another post.)
- duskwuff 14y ago
  As an excellent example of this: Consider "Monster". Both Monster Worldwide (e.g, Monster Jobs) and Monster Inc (e.g, Monster Cable) applied for the .monster TLD, and there's at least one other significant claimant to that brand who didn't apply for the TLD (Hansen Natural / Monster Beverage Company, makers of Monster Energy). Hilariously, both Monster Worldwide and Monster Inc claimed in their applications that granting them the TLD would reduce user confusion: Monster Worldwide (application #477): > The proposed .monster gTLD has the following user experience goals: [...] Reduce the risk of Internet users being misled, believing and⁄or acting on erroneous, information about Monster Worldwide, its business partners and⁄or its products and services presented online by unauthorized 3rd parties Monster Inc (application #271): > Therefore, .monster gTLD will: [...] represent authenticity and assurance that the domain names are directly associated with Monster thus promoting user confidence...
  - grabeh 14y ago
    In terms of reducing the risk that users would mistakenly use a site where a third party was intentionally looking to pass themselves off as the particular variant of Monster, it is a good argument. When a consumer is aware that the only legitimate Monster sites are those with the .monster suffix, this would reduce the risk of them using fraudulent sites. If on the other hand a user looking to find the jobs variant stumbling upon .monster domains controlled by the energy variant, there is no risk of user confusion in this regard. In summary, the confusion they allude to is third parties using the mark or a variant thereof in a deliberate attempt to mislead, as opposed to confusion between established brands.
  - davewiner 14y ago
    Or .acme or .ajax.
- davewiner 14y ago
  "Not so sure about Amazon buying .amazon, because it also is the name of a rainforest in South America, and .apple could be a problem for growers and lovers of the fruit." Seems like I covered the Apple case.
  - dfc 14y ago
    But you did not cover the critical issue; you have not distinguished between www.sex and www.sex.com: "the problem. And it extends to words and concepts that weren't created by anyone living today. Sex, love, laughter, babies, books, songs, cars, poetry, etc. These things shouldn't be TLDs, they're too important, too basic to life. Not the kinds of things any company, for crying out loud, should be able to claim to own." Why is it such a tragedy if poetry is a TLD but poetry.com is no problem? Why is unthinkable that a company could own .poetry but no problem if the same company owns poetry.com?
    - davewiner 14y ago
      Okay I'll cover it here (although I did elsewhere in this thread). Maybe those domains shouldn't have been issued, but they were. And that's why you want to deal with these things before you get an installed base, not after.
      - dfc 14y ago
        You did not cover it...What is the harm of having a .poetry TLD? Or what are the personal+societal costs of the private/exclusive registration of poetry.com? But you are right we should deal with these things before there is a large user base. So let's sort it out now and come up with a solid framework for what alphanumeric strings are acceptable. What are the rules? Which alpha-numeric strings are too important to let a company own? My name is Doug, can I register .doogie? Can I register .poetree? Is .oybt acceptable, even if it is rot13(blog)?
        davewiner 14y ago
        Doug, just leave the whole thing alone and worry about solving real problems not invented ones.
- hammock 14y ago
  It bothers me that no one thinks about this TLD issue on a higher level. More choice is always better. There is no question that, in the long run, giving people more choice over where they can be on the internet is a net positive. But people tend to think of the Internet as this monolithic end-all be-all. As if there's no way to work around a domain squatter. For pete's sake, create a new internet if you have to! You guys are gosh darned entrepreneurs. You aren't supposed to be the ones complaining about NBC-Comcast or Microsoft or fill-in-the-blank's monopolistic practices and begging the monopoly (or the government) to change the way things are done. You are supposed to be the one creating the alternative, the disrupting the business model, rebuilding and renewing the digital infrastructure. Don't limit yourself to small thinking and the status quo.
- counsellr 14y ago
  Glad to see this is the #1 comment. Many do not understand this point. Unlike domain names, which are ambiguous, trademarks have a couple of dimensions that allow ambiguity to be greatly reduced: class and geographical scope. I have actually developed a solution for the domain name ambiguity problem. It respects all trademark owners, not just the ones who pay ICANN the most. (Aside from squatters, registrars and registries, ICANN takes a small percentage of every defensive registration for every trademark in existence. Now ICANN has upped the ante to well over $200K.) Of course, it is a simple solution and I doubt anyone is interested. The way things are structured, with ICANN encouraging (by ignoring) conflict and promoting a "winner take all" approach to naming, is beneficial to those who are gaming the system. And it is quite easy to exploit ambiguity, "winner take all", and to game this system. The root really isn't as important as people are led to believe. It's the large registries that are more important, such as .com. If a user wants to access names in a fringe tld registry, whatever it may be, he can tune his DNS to allow that. If the content on sites in that tld is that good, he'll make the effort to adjust his DNS settings. It is not prohibitively difficuly by any means. ICANN wants to play the registry game, after years of watching domaining and repurposed cctld's making millions for others. The root is all they have. So, like a registry, they want to open the root zone to domainers, which will also force the hand of trademark holders who need to register defensively. ICANN knows exactly how this all works, and this is a calculated move to enrich insiders. The person at ICANN who was supposedly running the program just resigned. A replacement was just announced. I'm always surprised when people defend ICANN and their root. The root is not so important. If you have your system tuned to access the .com/.net servers, you can access the majority of the internet. Add .org and the cctld's and you have almost 99%. The root zone is not very dynamic. You can run your own copy. It rarely changes. But the root is all ICANN has with respect to naming (IANA is the real jewel of their crown, though the US Dept of Commerce may take that away if ICANN is not careful). ICANN wants to play the domain name game. If this whole new gtld proposal does not make you see the level of double dealing going on at ICANN, I'm not sure what will. ICANN's role is overstated. The addresses of the tld servers we all use rarely change. Any user could manage their own copy of the root. The root really just serves to prime DNS caches. It is not something that should get queried very often.
sajid 14y ago
Each reason the author gives against the new TLDs also applies to domain names. For example, he writes: "Not so sure about Amazon buying .amazon, because it also is the name of a rainforest in South America, and .apple could be a problem for growers and lovers of the fruit." But the same reasoning applies for domain names: "Not so sure about Amazon buying amazon.com, because it also is the name of a rainforest in South America, and apple.com could be a problem for growers and lovers of the fruit."
- __alexs 14y ago
  The Amazon rainforest is not a commercial entity. Associating the rainforest with .com makes no sense.
  - joshschreuder 14y ago
    There are plenty of non-commercial entities with .com addresses.
- sneak 14y ago
  No, because there are hundreds of other places one can register 'amazon' as a second-level domain.
  - icebraining 14y ago
    But only .com and .net have no real meaning attached to them. It doesn't really make much sense to register amazon.es or amazon.biz for the Amazon rainforest, now does it?
    - TazeTSchnitzel 14y ago
      Eh? .com is for companies. amazon.org or amazon.info might work.
      - icebraining 14y ago
        .com was for companies originally. It's been a long time since that was true.
Gring 14y ago
Of course ICANN is wrong. There just in it for the money. Their TLD-creation is like a money press, why stop?
grabeh 14y ago
My original thought when hearing about the prospect of new gTLDs was that a central body would look to claim a descriptive term such as 'blog' and make it available to anyone who wanted to host a blog under set criteria, and provided that centralised body committed to providing access to anyone under reasonable terms. This would act as a guarantee of origin of the site and would be helpful to consumers. I don't therefore see an issue with the registration of new descriptive gTLDs but only if access is provided in line with the above. The issue with Amazon/Google's land grab is that we cannot guarantee the basis on which access will be made available which could in turn lead to segregation, particularly if google were to control a gTLD and also provide greater prominence to it in search results. At the present moment in time, it is the lack of certainty in the process which is troubling. Of course, if I read ICANN's handbook more fully things might become much clearer.
- wmf 14y ago
  It's worse than that; Google said that if they get .blog it will only be available to Blogger users.
drivebyacct2 14y ago
Previous discussion from this author/blog on this topic: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4119060 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4119060
obituary_latte 14y ago
I haven't seen anyone talk about it, but there is another important implication of all these new TLD's: security. This will give malware purveyors a whole new plethora of vectors to exploit insofar as social engineering goes. Imagine regular user 'A' is surfing, looking for a cool new pair of shoes. They know that kewlShoes is their fav shoe company evar. Some entity has paid the huge fee to acquire the .shoes TLD in order to sub-let domains at whatever nominal fee they decide. User 'A' browses to kewl.shoes instead of kewlshoes.kshoes and unwittingly becomes the latest drive-by-download victim happily handing over their credentials to who-knows-who. I know this is broad and speculative, but think it is worth consideration. Has there been other discussion about this out there that I haven't seen?
- icebraining 14y ago
  That already happened with second-level domains, it's not a new vector.
  - obituary_latte 14y ago
    OK, sorry. But it greatly increases the surface area, no? Would you say it really isn't an issue?
    - icebraining 14y ago
      I think the vector itself is an issue; but I don't think this will make it significantly worse. For any domain, there's already hundreds or thousands of possible similar domains across the existing TLDs - adding a few more TLDs won't make much of a difference. I also doubt that the future owner of .shoes - whoever that may be - will be stupid enough to devalue his own TLD by selling second-level domains like candy. There's probably more money to be made by banking on its exclusivity.
      - obituary_latte 14y ago
        True, there are tons of similar TLD's out there already. But this ins't a "few more TLDs". This is ~2,000 new TLD's. Indeed, 'shoes' was a bad example. But many of these new TLD's have been applied for by entities who plan on sub-letting the TLD to others.
sp332 14y ago
Sex, love, laughter, babies, books, songs, cars, poetry, etc..., they're too important, too basic to life. Not the kinds of things any company, for crying out loud, should be able to claim to own. No one claims that Verisign owns commerce just because they manage the .com domain. Or that Google would own all blogs if they get to sell .blog domains.
- jessedhillon 14y ago
  These are entirely different things: .com is managed for the benefit of all commercial entities (and Verisign). Google's intended use of .blog would only be to assign domains to Blogger properties.
  - sp332 14y ago
    Do you think so? I think they would make far more money by selling subdomains.
    - duskwuff 14y ago
      From Google's application for the .blog TLD (application #527): > The purpose of the proposed gTLD, .blog, is to provide a dedicated Internet space where Google can continue to innovate on its Blogger offerings. The mission of the proposed gTLD is to provide a dedicated domain space in which users can publish blogs. All registered domains in the .blog gTLD will automatically be delegated to Google DNS servers, which will in turn provide authoritative DNS responses pointing to the Google Blogger service. So, yes -- it's just for Blogger.
    - jessedhillon 14y ago
      In addition to being uninformed about the basic facts here, I think you are overestimating the market for $7 - $50/yr blog hosting and underestimating the brand value of an exclusive Blogger TLD.
      - sp332 14y ago
        I didn't mean hosting, I just mean selling the subdomain. Like Verisign sells *.com subdomains.
larrys 14y ago
"How does Google get the right to capture all the goodwill generated in the word blog? They are not the exclusive owner of it, as they are with the name Google. However they claim the right to become that owner, by paying $185K to ICANN. Nowhere in their proposal is an offer to pay money to the people who created the idea that they would take over. And what if the creators aren't willing to sell it to them? permalink" Dave - you own scripting.com. What gives you the right to control that? How is that any different? I can't use me.scripting.com without your approval. You didn't agree to letting anyone do that when you bought the domain for $x per year in fees. You didn't invent the word "scripting" you were just the one to get the domain back in 1995, right? What gives anyone the right to own any domain name "news.com" or "boat.com" etc? That said I am not a fan of the new TLD's but that's a separate issue.
- davewiner 14y ago
  It's not entirely different, but those were the rules everyone was playing by then. So in that sense it's very different. We haven't agreed to these new rules yet. I don't think we should. Hopefully that's not too subtle.
  - larrys 14y ago
    "We haven't agreed to these new rules yet." Who's "we" sucka? (Sorry - see 2:17 in on the following had to crack a rare joke): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoXDzsuqXFg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoXDzsuqXFg "the rules everyone was playing by then" The rules are clearly laid out now. The difference is that you need to be able to pay real money to play now. Some of that is greed and some is practical. You need to limit the applicants to organizations with the financial wherewithal to be able to provide the stability needed (that said they do have some kind of program for less financially worth non-profits). "I don't think we should." To late for this now. The time to do that was many years ago when comments were invited and there were meetings etc. By the way there are many parts to the ICANN process that are exclusionary. To get to one of their meetings you have to be able to afford to get in an airplane and fly to an exotic (and sometimes) unsafe location. Nothing fair about that. But that is the way things are (in Washington as well).
marshray 14y ago
I am considering configuring all DNS resolvers I am responsible for (i.e., those at my house) to block these new ICANN gTLDs. Who's with me?
- marshray 14y ago
  For the record, this received 2 upvotes :-)
kalleboo 14y ago
One thing I've not seen addressed about these new proposals are how cross-domain cookie wildcards are going to be handled. Right now all the major browsers have large tables they've manually compiled to make sure you can't register a cookie on say, .ac.uk, or .pp.se to track people across domains. Who is going to manage the security of these new TLDs?
naturalethic 14y ago
Why are TLD's needed at all? Why can't I just name my host any arbitrary set of characters?
- davewiner 14y ago
  This is by far the most interesting comment in this thread. I think it's a fair question. Maybe at one point there was a need to have different namespaces, but what need there is now for it, hard to say.
  - pyre 14y ago
    Of the top of my head: * Domains + sub-domains allows for wildcard SSL cert registrations (e.g. a cert that covers .example.com). There's also cookie registration. * How do I differentiate between my_blog_host, my_blog_host_2 and really.my_blog_host? Are they all owned by the same person? Is really.my_blog_host associated with my_blog_host?
  - quesera 14y ago
    I would like to read a proposal for arbitrary names in a federated, peer to peer, global, and consistent naming system. For anything really, but let's start with domain names, since we're on the topic.
CPops 14y ago
I don't know how the internet could easily transition out of this mess, but I think it would probably be good to eventually get rid of as many TLDs other than .com as possible. Does it add any real value to users to have to try and remember and differentiate between .com, .org, .net, .info, .me, .ly, .tv, all the others I'm forgetting about, and now .shoes and .pants and whatever else companies come up with? It just creates more and more opportunities for phishing attacks to have essentially unlimited TLDs created where it makes it harder for anybody to easily figure out what is the actual home of any company. Also, I'm not worried about Amazon or Google or Facebook or Microsoft, but for smaller businesses, they're going to be faced with costly and unnecessary legal battles and challenges over all kinds of trademarks. It's such a waste of effort. It's bad enough when there were just a handful of TLDs that were relevant, but now that we have essentially unlimited domain names all sorts of additional costly conflicts will emerge. If these new TLDs have to exist, one potential way to minimize confusion and minimize disputes would be for all .com owners to automatically be assigned that respective TLD, so you always automatically know that "icloud.apple" is owned by Apple.com and that "books.amazon" is owned by Amazon.com and if you went and bought "xyz12345.com" you would also automatically own the xyz12345 TLD so these disputes would mostly be already settled. But that's not going to happen because there would be no extra money in that.
- Karunamon 14y ago
  Problem with that (aside from the lack of capitalistic motive) would be management (IIRC, ICANN isn't directly managing the new TLD's, that job goes to the companies who actually end up with them), as well as what happens when someone who illegitimately owns a .com name were to get the associated TLD.
snowwrestler 14y ago
With a few exceptions, TLDs are not canonical in any real sense anymore. That ship sailed years ago when .org and .net were opened up to general registrations. And it continues to sail today: is bit.ly really based in Libya? No of course not. So who cares if Amazon.com the company secures .amazon the domain. In practical usage it's not that different from what they've done snapping up amazon domain names for years.
zobzu 14y ago
Its all about "getting more money" anyway. Capitalism issue. Things always get corrupted into that. Not that any other system we have had so far was better.
koide 14y ago
I've said it on the previous Dave Winer's article about it. I really don't get what's the big deal as long as the all the previous TLDs continue to exist and operate just like they have been operating. Some enterprises will have the new fancy TLDs, good for them. The rest of us will have to keep going as we have been going (we might even get access some of the new TLDs.) I really doubt that, for example, having my.book will be a significant competitive advantage versus having mybook.com What am I missing? (Yes, greedy ICANN is evil, but what else?)
- klez 14y ago
  So why do people still buy myname.com when myname.wordpress.com is ok?
  - koide 14y ago
    myname.wordpress.com is not ok when compared with myname.com, but my.babe compared with mybabe.com or myba.be is ok
ciex 14y ago
Isn't the real issue here that it's just unnatural to use fixed combinations of letters to refer to websites? There is a reason that natural language is so hard to process for computers: It's inherently context-dependent and never has meaning per se. The domain name system on the other hand tries to impose a fixed naming system on us that is absolutely incomprehensible to anyone without technical knowledge. The only solution to this mess I can see is a non-profit HTTPS server certificate verification authority in combination with a complete revamp of the user experience for browsing web ressources. I should be able to just search for the page I want to visit instead of having to remember its exact name.
- icebraining 14y ago
  We already have those, they're called search engines. If you want a non-profit one you can use YaCy: http://yacy.net/ http://yacy.net/
akshayagarwal 14y ago
The internet can be made a much better & safer place if the new registries enforce proper regulations. Of course, there will be exceptions but there are many major players in this race who will work towards this objective. If you look at it in another way, it opens up a whole new world of opportunities not just for ICANN or the registry but for us, developers! Lets say I made a super awesome Iphone App and want a website for it, how much is the probability of me finding a relevant .com domain name for it? On the other hand, I have higher chances of getting a very relevant name with a .app extension & if this extension is popular amongst app users (which the .app registry would definitely ensure) then I have just multiplied chances of my app being discovered easily! Now some would argue that apps are to be found in app markets but then this was just a simple example, the possibilities are endless. I believe we are in a historic moment of the evolution of internet, something which would make the internet better, easier & safer for all of us.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
TheMagicHorsey 14y ago
The author is blowing the problem out of proportion. If Google uses the .blog TLD abusively or in a way that is irrelevant, users will go to another .TLD. There is no limit to the number of places users can go. The value in the mindshare of a word like "blog" is overblown, and it isn't the same as the monopoly power granted by an exclusive patent. If .blog domains suck, then we won't go there. Nobody will host blogs there. Nobody will care. It won't be a hip place. On the other hand, if someone makes a .TLD called something arbitrary (say .ddffdd) and everyone likes it, then guess what, it won't matter squat what is on .blog, everyone will go to .ddffdd. That's all. Lets not act like the landing page URL is such a big deal. It is if you built up a trademark and if everyone is used to going to .blog for every single blog. But nobody is used to that. And nobody cares. And even if they are used to that habits can very quickly change. There were lots of so called "monopoly" destinations a decade ago and not even one of them is still standing today. Its a whole new ballgame on the Internet. And every ten years its going to be a whole new ballgame again. Dude is seriously getting emo about a non issue.
febeling 14y ago
The current default is that a company can own its name under all important TLDs. That is feasible because there are only so many generic ones (.com,.net,.org, maybe .info and .name) and a few of countries you want to do business with. So you could cultivate the expectation that you need and once will have your brand name (in its variations) under all of these. That will no longer be possible. Also, it will not possible to just assume that the TLD is the new domain name, with every middle-sized company snatching up their brand name as TLD. So when that expectation is no longer there, there will be no problems at all. Some of these TLDs will work similar to the existing generic TLDs, with the possibility for third parties to buy regular domains. Others will operate more like private tropical islands, used as some kind of status symbol. The whole thing has one likely positive consequence, though. It might weaken the idea that you could somehow own a name or word. Some arbitrary slightly deep-pocketed entity grabs a name that most legitimately interested people cannot afford. That happens often enough, and nobody gives much about that name plaque any longer. Plus, old-fashioned brand operators will have a tough time buying up all "their" domains under the newly formed TLDs until they eventually give up and realize they cannot control "their" name in every conceivable abstract namespace. Everyone wins.
brownbat 14y ago
Funny, I've heard all these same complaints about second-level domains. It's a human-readable addressing scheme. At some point, words will be used. The more memorable, the more usable. All those words that were "too important" to be used as TLDs should be allowed as TLDs precisely because they are important. TLDs should be open to any string of characters, unicode if possible, and registrars should have universal single price registration fees for any site on any domain. If in that nightmare world .llama should be bought by a fad in comfortable footwear, depriving some Llama rancher's association of their god-given rights to address space, we will just have to hope Mother Earth will somehow learn to heal. Instead of imagining future conflicts, we should look at TLD behavior right now. Look at the rise of super short TLDs flooding profits to random countries. It might make you realize that appending the meaningless ".com" at the end of everything is a giant waste of time, since people will pay so handsomely to avoid this, all proceeds to random lottery winners like Tuvalu. (Nothing against Tuvalu, who undoubtedly needs the money for boats to leave their poor drowning island.) If you look into what consumers want, instead of the complaints of a few random interest groups, it'd be clear we should somehow be able to go to "google" instead of "google.com" or "wiki" instead of "wikipedia.org" or "bit" instead of "bit.ly." Chinese users should be able to spell Baidu in their natural language, without resorting to a half-assed toneless Westernization. ICANN's biggest mistake is not going far enough. They should chuck the whole TLD system and start from scratch, driven by the revealed preferences of those who actually browse the internet.
- FixThisPOS 14y ago
  AMEN. ICANN's failure to abolish TLDs entirely simply confirms what we already know: It's a scam organization, dedicated to doing essentially nothing except setting up as many of these rip-offs as possible. First there was the $60K rip-off for registrar applicants (even when they were rejected), and now this even more offensive money-grab.
zhoutong 14y ago
IMHO, the biggest problem of gTLD is the inequality created on the Internet. Google.com's registry cost is less than $8/year, just like any random .com domain. Everyone has the fair chance to get a domain and start a business online. But when the gTLDs are available for grabs, the big companies will definitely get their trademarks as TLDs, even when they have no intention to open that to the public. gTLD scheme is not new - .COM is managed by Verisign, the same way as the potential .google being managed by Google. What's new is the removal of the requirement of opening for public registration, and much less regulation and evaluation of eligibility. When the big companies have their special branding schemes, small businesses lose out. Suppose that the new gTLD scheme is a huge success (which IMO not likely), .google, .apple and .amazon are official tags for big companies, and .COM will be the small business paradise. This divide is definitely harmful for internet development.
andyjohnson0 14y ago
I wonder what the chances are of these new gTLDs being as successful as, say, .biz or .mobi? In other words, not at all successful. One reason to be optimistic about the failure of gTLDs is recognition. I think people understand that something ending in .com or .net or a ccTDL is an 'internet address', but how do you indicate this with a gTLD like 'book' or 'blog' where there is no visual hint to indicate that it is a domain?
BadLogInMyAss 14y ago
Misguided argument. TLD limitations should've been abolished altogether. A domain name should be able to end in any string, and registered by any registrar. ICANN't has turned this idea into a massive scam and rip-off, squandering the opportunity to take TLDs to their logical conclusion and end this fake, asinine domain-name "shortage."

157 points by falling 14y ago

dsr_ 14y ago

If it's a company's trademark, fine -- let them buy the corresponding TLD. No harm done. Bzzzt, wrong. Trademarks are industry-specific: that's why Apple Records can exist alongside Apple Computer. If there's no likelihood of confusion, there's no conflict. And of course, trademarks are not fully international. Winer is right about ICANN being wrong. There's just so much else that ICANN is wrong about.

grabeh 14y ago
You are right to extent, however, even in the absence of a lack of confusion, an action can be brought where a third party in using a similar/identical mark to the original takes unfair advantage or causes detriment to the original mark. In fact, Apple Inc and Apple Records engaged in a long-standing legal spat over the usage of the Apple mark before finally reaching a settlement in 2007. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Corps_v_Apple_Computer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Corps_v_Apple_Computer
incongruity 14y ago
While all of your points are correct, I think you missed the point. That line of argument is expressly what the author was trying to avoid. The author acknowledged there were issues with it but stepped beyond them because there's a larger point that he was trying to make. (One I think has its own issues, but that's for another post.)
duskwuff 14y ago
As an excellent example of this: Consider "Monster". Both Monster Worldwide (e.g, Monster Jobs) and Monster Inc (e.g, Monster Cable) applied for the .monster TLD, and there's at least one other significant claimant to that brand who didn't apply for the TLD (Hansen Natural / Monster Beverage Company, makers of Monster Energy). Hilariously, both Monster Worldwide and Monster Inc claimed in their applications that granting them the TLD would reduce user confusion: Monster Worldwide (application #477): > The proposed .monster gTLD has the following user experience goals: [...] Reduce the risk of Internet users being misled, believing and⁄or acting on erroneous, information about Monster Worldwide, its business partners and⁄or its products and services presented online by unauthorized 3rd parties Monster Inc (application #271): > Therefore, .monster gTLD will: [...] represent authenticity and assurance that the domain names are directly associated with Monster thus promoting user confidence...
- grabeh 14y ago
  In terms of reducing the risk that users would mistakenly use a site where a third party was intentionally looking to pass themselves off as the particular variant of Monster, it is a good argument. When a consumer is aware that the only legitimate Monster sites are those with the .monster suffix, this would reduce the risk of them using fraudulent sites. If on the other hand a user looking to find the jobs variant stumbling upon .monster domains controlled by the energy variant, there is no risk of user confusion in this regard. In summary, the confusion they allude to is third parties using the mark or a variant thereof in a deliberate attempt to mislead, as opposed to confusion between established brands.
- davewiner 14y ago
  Or .acme or .ajax.
davewiner 14y ago
"Not so sure about Amazon buying .amazon, because it also is the name of a rainforest in South America, and .apple could be a problem for growers and lovers of the fruit." Seems like I covered the Apple case.
- dfc 14y ago
  But you did not cover the critical issue; you have not distinguished between www.sex and www.sex.com: "the problem. And it extends to words and concepts that weren't created by anyone living today. Sex, love, laughter, babies, books, songs, cars, poetry, etc. These things shouldn't be TLDs, they're too important, too basic to life. Not the kinds of things any company, for crying out loud, should be able to claim to own." Why is it such a tragedy if poetry is a TLD but poetry.com is no problem? Why is unthinkable that a company could own .poetry but no problem if the same company owns poetry.com?
  - davewiner 14y ago
    Okay I'll cover it here (although I did elsewhere in this thread). Maybe those domains shouldn't have been issued, but they were. And that's why you want to deal with these things before you get an installed base, not after.
    - dfc 14y ago
      You did not cover it...What is the harm of having a .poetry TLD? Or what are the personal+societal costs of the private/exclusive registration of poetry.com? But you are right we should deal with these things before there is a large user base. So let's sort it out now and come up with a solid framework for what alphanumeric strings are acceptable. What are the rules? Which alpha-numeric strings are too important to let a company own? My name is Doug, can I register .doogie? Can I register .poetree? Is .oybt acceptable, even if it is rot13(blog)?
      - davewiner 14y ago
        Doug, just leave the whole thing alone and worry about solving real problems not invented ones.
hammock 14y ago
It bothers me that no one thinks about this TLD issue on a higher level. More choice is always better. There is no question that, in the long run, giving people more choice over where they can be on the internet is a net positive. But people tend to think of the Internet as this monolithic end-all be-all. As if there's no way to work around a domain squatter. For pete's sake, create a new internet if you have to! You guys are gosh darned entrepreneurs. You aren't supposed to be the ones complaining about NBC-Comcast or Microsoft or fill-in-the-blank's monopolistic practices and begging the monopoly (or the government) to change the way things are done. You are supposed to be the one creating the alternative, the disrupting the business model, rebuilding and renewing the digital infrastructure. Don't limit yourself to small thinking and the status quo.
counsellr 14y ago
Glad to see this is the #1 comment. Many do not understand this point. Unlike domain names, which are ambiguous, trademarks have a couple of dimensions that allow ambiguity to be greatly reduced: class and geographical scope. I have actually developed a solution for the domain name ambiguity problem. It respects all trademark owners, not just the ones who pay ICANN the most. (Aside from squatters, registrars and registries, ICANN takes a small percentage of every defensive registration for every trademark in existence. Now ICANN has upped the ante to well over $200K.) Of course, it is a simple solution and I doubt anyone is interested. The way things are structured, with ICANN encouraging (by ignoring) conflict and promoting a "winner take all" approach to naming, is beneficial to those who are gaming the system. And it is quite easy to exploit ambiguity, "winner take all", and to game this system. The root really isn't as important as people are led to believe. It's the large registries that are more important, such as .com. If a user wants to access names in a fringe tld registry, whatever it may be, he can tune his DNS to allow that. If the content on sites in that tld is that good, he'll make the effort to adjust his DNS settings. It is not prohibitively difficuly by any means. ICANN wants to play the registry game, after years of watching domaining and repurposed cctld's making millions for others. The root is all they have. So, like a registry, they want to open the root zone to domainers, which will also force the hand of trademark holders who need to register defensively. ICANN knows exactly how this all works, and this is a calculated move to enrich insiders. The person at ICANN who was supposedly running the program just resigned. A replacement was just announced. I'm always surprised when people defend ICANN and their root. The root is not so important. If you have your system tuned to access the .com/.net servers, you can access the majority of the internet. Add .org and the cctld's and you have almost 99%. The root zone is not very dynamic. You can run your own copy. It rarely changes. But the root is all ICANN has with respect to naming (IANA is the real jewel of their crown, though the US Dept of Commerce may take that away if ICANN is not careful). ICANN wants to play the domain name game. If this whole new gtld proposal does not make you see the level of double dealing going on at ICANN, I'm not sure what will. ICANN's role is overstated. The addresses of the tld servers we all use rarely change. Any user could manage their own copy of the root. The root really just serves to prime DNS caches. It is not something that should get queried very often.

sajid 14y ago

Each reason the author gives against the new TLDs also applies to domain names. For example, he writes: "Not so sure about Amazon buying .amazon, because it also is the name of a rainforest in South America, and .apple could be a problem for growers and lovers of the fruit." But the same reasoning applies for domain names: "Not so sure about Amazon buying amazon.com, because it also is the name of a rainforest in South America, and apple.com could be a problem for growers and lovers of the fruit."

__alexs 14y ago
The Amazon rainforest is not a commercial entity. Associating the rainforest with .com makes no sense.
- joshschreuder 14y ago
  There are plenty of non-commercial entities with .com addresses.
sneak 14y ago
No, because there are hundreds of other places one can register 'amazon' as a second-level domain.
- icebraining 14y ago
  But only .com and .net have no real meaning attached to them. It doesn't really make much sense to register amazon.es or amazon.biz for the Amazon rainforest, now does it?
  - TazeTSchnitzel 14y ago
    Eh? .com is for companies. amazon.org or amazon.info might work.
    - icebraining 14y ago
      .com was for companies originally. It's been a long time since that was true.

Gring 14y ago

Of course ICANN is wrong. There just in it for the money. Their TLD-creation is like a money press, why stop?

grabeh 14y ago

My original thought when hearing about the prospect of new gTLDs was that a central body would look to claim a descriptive term such as 'blog' and make it available to anyone who wanted to host a blog under set criteria, and provided that centralised body committed to providing access to anyone under reasonable terms. This would act as a guarantee of origin of the site and would be helpful to consumers. I don't therefore see an issue with the registration of new descriptive gTLDs but only if access is provided in line with the above. The issue with Amazon/Google's land grab is that we cannot guarantee the basis on which access will be made available which could in turn lead to segregation, particularly if google were to control a gTLD and also provide greater prominence to it in search results. At the present moment in time, it is the lack of certainty in the process which is troubling. Of course, if I read ICANN's handbook more fully things might become much clearer.

wmf 14y ago
It's worse than that; Google said that if they get .blog it will only be available to Blogger users.

drivebyacct2 14y ago

Previous discussion from this author/blog on this topic: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4119060 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4119060

obituary_latte 14y ago

I haven't seen anyone talk about it, but there is another important implication of all these new TLD's: security. This will give malware purveyors a whole new plethora of vectors to exploit insofar as social engineering goes. Imagine regular user 'A' is surfing, looking for a cool new pair of shoes. They know that kewlShoes is their fav shoe company evar. Some entity has paid the huge fee to acquire the .shoes TLD in order to sub-let domains at whatever nominal fee they decide. User 'A' browses to kewl.shoes instead of kewlshoes.kshoes and unwittingly becomes the latest drive-by-download victim happily handing over their credentials to who-knows-who. I know this is broad and speculative, but think it is worth consideration. Has there been other discussion about this out there that I haven't seen?

icebraining 14y ago
That already happened with second-level domains, it's not a new vector.
- obituary_latte 14y ago
  OK, sorry. But it greatly increases the surface area, no? Would you say it really isn't an issue?
  - icebraining 14y ago
    I think the vector itself is an issue; but I don't think this will make it significantly worse. For any domain, there's already hundreds or thousands of possible similar domains across the existing TLDs - adding a few more TLDs won't make much of a difference. I also doubt that the future owner of .shoes - whoever that may be - will be stupid enough to devalue his own TLD by selling second-level domains like candy. There's probably more money to be made by banking on its exclusivity.
    - obituary_latte 14y ago
      True, there are tons of similar TLD's out there already. But this ins't a "few more TLDs". This is ~2,000 new TLD's. Indeed, 'shoes' was a bad example. But many of these new TLD's have been applied for by entities who plan on sub-letting the TLD to others.

sp332 14y ago

Sex, love, laughter, babies, books, songs, cars, poetry, etc..., they're too important, too basic to life. Not the kinds of things any company, for crying out loud, should be able to claim to own. No one claims that Verisign owns commerce just because they manage the .com domain. Or that Google would own all blogs if they get to sell .blog domains.

jessedhillon 14y ago
These are entirely different things: .com is managed for the benefit of all commercial entities (and Verisign). Google's intended use of .blog would only be to assign domains to Blogger properties.
- sp332 14y ago
  Do you think so? I think they would make far more money by selling subdomains.
  - duskwuff 14y ago
    From Google's application for the .blog TLD (application #527): > The purpose of the proposed gTLD, .blog, is to provide a dedicated Internet space where Google can continue to innovate on its Blogger offerings. The mission of the proposed gTLD is to provide a dedicated domain space in which users can publish blogs. All registered domains in the .blog gTLD will automatically be delegated to Google DNS servers, which will in turn provide authoritative DNS responses pointing to the Google Blogger service. So, yes -- it's just for Blogger.
  - jessedhillon 14y ago
    In addition to being uninformed about the basic facts here, I think you are overestimating the market for $7 - $50/yr blog hosting and underestimating the brand value of an exclusive Blogger TLD.
    - sp332 14y ago
      I didn't mean hosting, I just mean selling the subdomain. Like Verisign sells *.com subdomains.

larrys 14y ago

"How does Google get the right to capture all the goodwill generated in the word blog? They are not the exclusive owner of it, as they are with the name Google. However they claim the right to become that owner, by paying $185K to ICANN. Nowhere in their proposal is an offer to pay money to the people who created the idea that they would take over. And what if the creators aren't willing to sell it to them? permalink" Dave - you own scripting.com. What gives you the right to control that? How is that any different? I can't use me.scripting.com without your approval. You didn't agree to letting anyone do that when you bought the domain for $x per year in fees. You didn't invent the word "scripting" you were just the one to get the domain back in 1995, right? What gives anyone the right to own any domain name "news.com" or "boat.com" etc? That said I am not a fan of the new TLD's but that's a separate issue.

davewiner 14y ago
It's not entirely different, but those were the rules everyone was playing by then. So in that sense it's very different. We haven't agreed to these new rules yet. I don't think we should. Hopefully that's not too subtle.
- larrys 14y ago
  "We haven't agreed to these new rules yet." Who's "we" sucka? (Sorry - see 2:17 in on the following had to crack a rare joke): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoXDzsuqXFg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoXDzsuqXFg "the rules everyone was playing by then" The rules are clearly laid out now. The difference is that you need to be able to pay real money to play now. Some of that is greed and some is practical. You need to limit the applicants to organizations with the financial wherewithal to be able to provide the stability needed (that said they do have some kind of program for less financially worth non-profits). "I don't think we should." To late for this now. The time to do that was many years ago when comments were invited and there were meetings etc. By the way there are many parts to the ICANN process that are exclusionary. To get to one of their meetings you have to be able to afford to get in an airplane and fly to an exotic (and sometimes) unsafe location. Nothing fair about that. But that is the way things are (in Washington as well).

marshray 14y ago

I am considering configuring all DNS resolvers I am responsible for (i.e., those at my house) to block these new ICANN gTLDs. Who's with me?

marshray 14y ago
For the record, this received 2 upvotes :-)

kalleboo 14y ago

One thing I've not seen addressed about these new proposals are how cross-domain cookie wildcards are going to be handled. Right now all the major browsers have large tables they've manually compiled to make sure you can't register a cookie on say, .ac.uk, or .pp.se to track people across domains. Who is going to manage the security of these new TLDs?

naturalethic 14y ago

Why are TLD's needed at all? Why can't I just name my host any arbitrary set of characters?

davewiner 14y ago
This is by far the most interesting comment in this thread. I think it's a fair question. Maybe at one point there was a need to have different namespaces, but what need there is now for it, hard to say.
- pyre 14y ago
  Of the top of my head: * Domains + sub-domains allows for wildcard SSL cert registrations (e.g. a cert that covers .example.com). There's also cookie registration. * How do I differentiate between my_blog_host, my_blog_host_2 and really.my_blog_host? Are they all owned by the same person? Is really.my_blog_host associated with my_blog_host?
- quesera 14y ago
  I would like to read a proposal for arbitrary names in a federated, peer to peer, global, and consistent naming system. For anything really, but let's start with domain names, since we're on the topic.

CPops 14y ago

I don't know how the internet could easily transition out of this mess, but I think it would probably be good to eventually get rid of as many TLDs other than .com as possible. Does it add any real value to users to have to try and remember and differentiate between .com, .org, .net, .info, .me, .ly, .tv, all the others I'm forgetting about, and now .shoes and .pants and whatever else companies come up with? It just creates more and more opportunities for phishing attacks to have essentially unlimited TLDs created where it makes it harder for anybody to easily figure out what is the actual home of any company. Also, I'm not worried about Amazon or Google or Facebook or Microsoft, but for smaller businesses, they're going to be faced with costly and unnecessary legal battles and challenges over all kinds of trademarks. It's such a waste of effort. It's bad enough when there were just a handful of TLDs that were relevant, but now that we have essentially unlimited domain names all sorts of additional costly conflicts will emerge. If these new TLDs have to exist, one potential way to minimize confusion and minimize disputes would be for all .com owners to automatically be assigned that respective TLD, so you always automatically know that "icloud.apple" is owned by Apple.com and that "books.amazon" is owned by Amazon.com and if you went and bought "xyz12345.com" you would also automatically own the xyz12345 TLD so these disputes would mostly be already settled. But that's not going to happen because there would be no extra money in that.

Karunamon 14y ago
Problem with that (aside from the lack of capitalistic motive) would be management (IIRC, ICANN isn't directly managing the new TLD's, that job goes to the companies who actually end up with them), as well as what happens when someone who illegitimately owns a .com name were to get the associated TLD.

snowwrestler 14y ago

With a few exceptions, TLDs are not canonical in any real sense anymore. That ship sailed years ago when .org and .net were opened up to general registrations. And it continues to sail today: is bit.ly really based in Libya? No of course not. So who cares if Amazon.com the company secures .amazon the domain. In practical usage it's not that different from what they've done snapping up amazon domain names for years.

zobzu 14y ago

Its all about "getting more money" anyway. Capitalism issue. Things always get corrupted into that. Not that any other system we have had so far was better.

koide 14y ago

I've said it on the previous Dave Winer's article about it. I really don't get what's the big deal as long as the all the previous TLDs continue to exist and operate just like they have been operating. Some enterprises will have the new fancy TLDs, good for them. The rest of us will have to keep going as we have been going (we might even get access some of the new TLDs.) I really doubt that, for example, having my.book will be a significant competitive advantage versus having mybook.com What am I missing? (Yes, greedy ICANN is evil, but what else?)

klez 14y ago
So why do people still buy myname.com when myname.wordpress.com is ok?
- koide 14y ago
  myname.wordpress.com is not ok when compared with myname.com, but my.babe compared with mybabe.com or myba.be is ok

ciex 14y ago

Isn't the real issue here that it's just unnatural to use fixed combinations of letters to refer to websites? There is a reason that natural language is so hard to process for computers: It's inherently context-dependent and never has meaning per se. The domain name system on the other hand tries to impose a fixed naming system on us that is absolutely incomprehensible to anyone without technical knowledge. The only solution to this mess I can see is a non-profit HTTPS server certificate verification authority in combination with a complete revamp of the user experience for browsing web ressources. I should be able to just search for the page I want to visit instead of having to remember its exact name.

icebraining 14y ago
We already have those, they're called search engines. If you want a non-profit one you can use YaCy: http://yacy.net/ http://yacy.net/

akshayagarwal 14y ago

The internet can be made a much better & safer place if the new registries enforce proper regulations. Of course, there will be exceptions but there are many major players in this race who will work towards this objective. If you look at it in another way, it opens up a whole new world of opportunities not just for ICANN or the registry but for us, developers! Lets say I made a super awesome Iphone App and want a website for it, how much is the probability of me finding a relevant .com domain name for it? On the other hand, I have higher chances of getting a very relevant name with a .app extension & if this extension is popular amongst app users (which the .app registry would definitely ensure) then I have just multiplied chances of my app being discovered easily! Now some would argue that apps are to be found in app markets but then this was just a simple example, the possibilities are endless. I believe we are in a historic moment of the evolution of internet, something which would make the internet better, easier & safer for all of us.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

TheMagicHorsey 14y ago

The author is blowing the problem out of proportion. If Google uses the .blog TLD abusively or in a way that is irrelevant, users will go to another .TLD. There is no limit to the number of places users can go. The value in the mindshare of a word like "blog" is overblown, and it isn't the same as the monopoly power granted by an exclusive patent. If .blog domains suck, then we won't go there. Nobody will host blogs there. Nobody will care. It won't be a hip place. On the other hand, if someone makes a .TLD called something arbitrary (say .ddffdd) and everyone likes it, then guess what, it won't matter squat what is on .blog, everyone will go to .ddffdd. That's all. Lets not act like the landing page URL is such a big deal. It is if you built up a trademark and if everyone is used to going to .blog for every single blog. But nobody is used to that. And nobody cares. And even if they are used to that habits can very quickly change. There were lots of so called "monopoly" destinations a decade ago and not even one of them is still standing today. Its a whole new ballgame on the Internet. And every ten years its going to be a whole new ballgame again. Dude is seriously getting emo about a non issue.

febeling 14y ago

The current default is that a company can own its name under all important TLDs. That is feasible because there are only so many generic ones (.com,.net,.org, maybe .info and .name) and a few of countries you want to do business with. So you could cultivate the expectation that you need and once will have your brand name (in its variations) under all of these. That will no longer be possible. Also, it will not possible to just assume that the TLD is the new domain name, with every middle-sized company snatching up their brand name as TLD. So when that expectation is no longer there, there will be no problems at all. Some of these TLDs will work similar to the existing generic TLDs, with the possibility for third parties to buy regular domains. Others will operate more like private tropical islands, used as some kind of status symbol. The whole thing has one likely positive consequence, though. It might weaken the idea that you could somehow own a name or word. Some arbitrary slightly deep-pocketed entity grabs a name that most legitimately interested people cannot afford. That happens often enough, and nobody gives much about that name plaque any longer. Plus, old-fashioned brand operators will have a tough time buying up all "their" domains under the newly formed TLDs until they eventually give up and realize they cannot control "their" name in every conceivable abstract namespace. Everyone wins.

brownbat 14y ago

Funny, I've heard all these same complaints about second-level domains. It's a human-readable addressing scheme. At some point, words will be used. The more memorable, the more usable. All those words that were "too important" to be used as TLDs should be allowed as TLDs precisely because they are important. TLDs should be open to any string of characters, unicode if possible, and registrars should have universal single price registration fees for any site on any domain. If in that nightmare world .llama should be bought by a fad in comfortable footwear, depriving some Llama rancher's association of their god-given rights to address space, we will just have to hope Mother Earth will somehow learn to heal. Instead of imagining future conflicts, we should look at TLD behavior right now. Look at the rise of super short TLDs flooding profits to random countries. It might make you realize that appending the meaningless ".com" at the end of everything is a giant waste of time, since people will pay so handsomely to avoid this, all proceeds to random lottery winners like Tuvalu. (Nothing against Tuvalu, who undoubtedly needs the money for boats to leave their poor drowning island.) If you look into what consumers want, instead of the complaints of a few random interest groups, it'd be clear we should somehow be able to go to "google" instead of "google.com" or "wiki" instead of "wikipedia.org" or "bit" instead of "bit.ly." Chinese users should be able to spell Baidu in their natural language, without resorting to a half-assed toneless Westernization. ICANN's biggest mistake is not going far enough. They should chuck the whole TLD system and start from scratch, driven by the revealed preferences of those who actually browse the internet.

FixThisPOS 14y ago
AMEN. ICANN's failure to abolish TLDs entirely simply confirms what we already know: It's a scam organization, dedicated to doing essentially nothing except setting up as many of these rip-offs as possible. First there was the $60K rip-off for registrar applicants (even when they were rejected), and now this even more offensive money-grab.

zhoutong 14y ago

IMHO, the biggest problem of gTLD is the inequality created on the Internet. Google.com's registry cost is less than $8/year, just like any random .com domain. Everyone has the fair chance to get a domain and start a business online. But when the gTLDs are available for grabs, the big companies will definitely get their trademarks as TLDs, even when they have no intention to open that to the public. gTLD scheme is not new - .COM is managed by Verisign, the same way as the potential .google being managed by Google. What's new is the removal of the requirement of opening for public registration, and much less regulation and evaluation of eligibility. When the big companies have their special branding schemes, small businesses lose out. Suppose that the new gTLD scheme is a huge success (which IMO not likely), .google, .apple and .amazon are official tags for big companies, and .COM will be the small business paradise. This divide is definitely harmful for internet development.

andyjohnson0 14y ago

I wonder what the chances are of these new gTLDs being as successful as, say, .biz or .mobi? In other words, not at all successful. One reason to be optimistic about the failure of gTLDs is recognition. I think people understand that something ending in .com or .net or a ccTDL is an 'internet address', but how do you indicate this with a gTLD like 'book' or 'blog' where there is no visual hint to indicate that it is a domain?

BadLogInMyAss 14y ago

Misguided argument. TLD limitations should've been abolished altogether. A domain name should be able to end in any string, and registered by any registrar. ICANN't has turned this idea into a massive scam and rip-off, squandering the opportunity to take TLDs to their logical conclusion and end this fake, asinine domain-name "shortage."