LWN: Comments on "ICANN adds new gTLDs"

ICANN adds new gTLDs

dark — Fri, 29 Jun 2012 18:23:21 +0000

That depends on whether someone with 'standing' actually files an objection. The applicants for .game and .games actually have a motive to agree NOT to object; they might be happier to see both domains go in than to risk having their application denied.

ICANN adds new gTLDs

philomath — Fri, 29 Jun 2012 16:57:35 +0000

One of the "grounds for objection" is "String Confusion", so .games and .game can't both be accepted, right?

While the sun still shines

gvy — Thu, 28 Jun 2012 11:13:28 +0000

Yup, ICANN is rather UCANNT these days. What's the reason for .secure if anyone with a few bucks can get a .pro for example (which wasn't -- and isn't -- the stated intent and policy)? I cann't believe they'll be able to provide any more integrity after having already failed.

ICANN adds new gTLDs

dlang — Sat, 23 Jun 2012 23:52:38 +0000

but you can have zork.com.uk etc.

it's very easy to end up with conflicting names, and any global naming scheme that you create will have problems dealing with the conflicts. There's nothing inherently wrong with any option, it's just a question of how people end up using it.

Time to consider change of ICANN governance

sorpigal — Fri, 22 Jun 2012 16:05:58 +0000

If fragmentation is going to happen anyway (seems inevitable, now) we might as well stop pretending that ICANN has some kind of actual monopoly on gTLDs. They only have any kind of authority within the confines of the traditional root servers and anyone is free to use a competing set of roots or even a completely different name resolution system.

ICANN adds new gTLDs

jengelh — Fri, 22 Jun 2012 11:55:21 +0000

Somehow, dc=www,dc=zork,dc=com does not strike me as any win over www.zork.com :)

Or we could just abolish DNS, since many already do a Google search these days just to find the right TLD to add to a company's name to get to the right site in a particular pool of same-named sites/companies. Take http://arpa.net as an example...

ICANN adds new gTLDs

nybble41 — Thu, 21 Jun 2012 19:45:47 +0000

Strictly speaking, to avoid confusion the DNS namespace should probably be divided up according to trademark domains, i.e. zork.games.pto.us, or by corporate registration, i.e. zonk.corp.md.us. Then it would be up to the PTO and/or the state to ensure unique and non-confusing names within their respective domains. The UN or WTO or similar international organization could manage a TLD for the truly international domains. Finally, we would need a place for personal domains, perhaps under each ccTLD based on citizenship.

Besides the ccTLDs and a small number of international domains (.intl or .un, .wto, etc.) there would be no other TLDs.

ICANN adds new gTLDs

nix — Thu, 21 Jun 2012 19:24:33 +0000

This is an occasion for song, I'd say.

ICANN adds new gTLDs

josh — Thu, 21 Jun 2012 19:04:16 +0000

And only one of those can own zork.com today, so the issue still applies. The same first-come-first-served rule applies, but without the added confusing of having zork.{com,net,org,biz,bz,co,co.uk,...} all mean different things.

So, one will get zork, one will get zork-enterprises, one will get zorkinc, and so on.

ICANN adds new gTLDs

dlang — Thu, 21 Jun 2012 17:59:43 +0000

> game.zork, games.zork, com.zork. All of which is owned and controlled by a single Zork Corp.

except that there can legitimately be more than one Zork Corp (let alone Zork Enterprises, Zork Inc, etc) so this does not eliminate confusion

ICANN adds new gTLDs

raven667 — Thu, 21 Jun 2012 17:38:40 +0000

Maybe we'll get rid of DNS and all switch to X.500/LDAP/AD naming...

ICANN adds new gTLDs

drag — Thu, 21 Jun 2012 17:23:59 +0000

> eliminating country codes and the ,org/.com/.net top level domains would only promote the second level domain names to be the top level names.

Yes it would just mean that all organizations have their own top level domain.

This is a good thing, not a bad thing.

Domain names are hierarchical namespace designed specifically for human recognition and therefore they should reflect how humans run hierarchical organizations.

So instead of

zork.game, zork.games, zork.com ...

you have:

game.zork, games.zork, com.zork. All of which is owned and controlled by a single Zork Corp.

So the difference is instead of forcing Zork to purchase multiple domain names from multiple groups.. name spaces that try to force some organizational methodology dreamed up years ago that doesn't apply to Zork Corp in any meaningful way.. they are in full control of their own name space and can divide up how they see fit. They can easily have new.australia.zork or africa.zork or corp.zork to divide up domains into subdomains for various purposes, internal and external.

Also it prevents confusion and deceptions from people purchasing zork.net or zork.me and such things to deceive users. Or squat on and essentially hold parts of Zork's name space hostage.

This allows a very simple human readable way to drill down a organization:

specific <----- less specific <--- organization tag

Instead of forcing people to guess if zork.eu and zork.net are owned by the same people....

=============================

Even better though would simply to have _only_ TLD and get rid of hostname.tld completely and just go with:

zork/corp/sausage/linux/whatever/file.txt

or
zork:corp:sausage:linux:whatever:file.txt:protocol

I would like that MUCH better then any other scheme. Just have all hierarchies global in nature. Although this, I suspect, would be far too much.

While the sun still shines

pboddie — Thu, 21 Jun 2012 17:15:00 +0000

ICANN's behaviour is completely explicable: while the organisation still has its authority over the Internet's top-level namespace, it can effectively print money by creating one gold-rush after another as brand after brand and company after company have to buy up domains bearing their names before someone else does.

When stewardship of such matters passes to some other organisation, hopefully one with a more responsible attitude, maybe ICANN can still make a few bucks selling tulip bulbs or titles to plots of land on the Moon.

Time to consider change of ICANN governance

gioele — Thu, 21 Jun 2012 12:06:16 +0000

> Yes, I can see that before too long, over-cautious administrators will block DNS lookups of names that aren't in the long-established TLDs like .com, .net and .(ISO country code). That will lead to the establishment of a mirror domain such that X.mirrordns.com resolves to the same as X.

My fear is that these administrators will block the lookup of every non-traditional TLDs *except* .google, .apple, .facebook and .docs. Good luck requesting an exception to another TLD that does not belong to a big brand.

Time to consider change of ICANN governance

epa — Thu, 21 Jun 2012 11:48:50 +0000

Yes, I can see that before too long, over-cautious administrators will block DNS lookups of names that aren't in the long-established TLDs like .com, .net and .(ISO country code). That will lead to the establishment of a mirror domain such that X.mirrordns.com resolves to the same as X.

Time to consider change of ICANN governance

copsewood — Thu, 21 Jun 2012 09:50:29 +0000

I don't think anyone seriously wanted to fix something that wasn't broken until it was. I think now that by polluting the global namespace making brand and phishing protection near impossible, ICANN have made decisions which break things. The ITU would never have allowed the equivalent to occur in connection with international telephony dialling codes which they oversee.

Politically the current arrangement was never going to hold indefinitely anyway, because the idea that non US national governments must treat a company under California law as having diplomatic peer status was never going to be considered acceptable international relations. Once enough of those politically sensitive to the state of Internet governance become technically aware of the alternate root option and its potential for fragmentation, we may as well expect the proposal for ICANN to come under ITU governance to be put onto the diplomatic negotiation table. Once the US wants anything else badly enough at the UN which other countries are persuadable over, but upon which we haven't yet made up our minds, we may well see the status of ICANN changing.

As to fragmentation of the root, I think we're likely to see that anyway, because the more technically cautious resolver administrators will be wary of resolving names within allegedly criminally-managed TLDs and the more TLDs exist, the greater the probability that one or more of these will be criminally managed. Email admins already fragment the Net to a certain extent, by greylisting emails from parts of the net based upon assumptions and measurements concerning the probability of abuse coming from various quarters.

ICANN adds new gTLDs

dlang — Thu, 21 Jun 2012 09:32:59 +0000

I don't think it would make much difference.

zork.game vs zork.games vs zork.com vs zork.net all have the same basic problem, there are more than one way to think about a site and at any level in the name hierarchy there are only a limited number of names available to use.

eliminating country codes and the ,org/.com/.net top level domains would only promote the second level domain names to be the top level names.

I think we're headed in that direction anyway, eventually, but it's really not clear how to manage the result sanely, and taking smallish steps towards it will help find many of the problems.

ICANN adds new gTLDs

steveriley — Thu, 21 Jun 2012 07:05:18 +0000

That appears to be a cached report from September 2009. Here's the URL that generates a dynamic report for the period beginning seven days (604,800 seconds) before the moment you request it:

http://stats.l.root-servers.org/cgi-bin/dsc-grapher.pl?wi...

It's interesting to observe the changes over almost three years. The range of the graph is almost three times as large. ".local" bubbles up from #5 to #3 (which makes me think that DNS forwarders ought to just drop ".local"). ".home" came out of nowhere to grab fourth place. The number of requests for ".arpa" has declined -- but why? Brazil has overtaken Russia for the most-requested country TLD. And what is up with that crazy ".belkin" TLD -- zillions of home wireless routers, pinging a thing that doesn't exist?

ICANN adds new gTLDs

cpeterso — Thu, 21 Jun 2012 06:02:59 +0000

The separate .com, .org, .etc namespaces create these identify problems.

The IETF can just reserve a pseudo-TLD like .local. It already reserves .example, .invalid, .localhost, and .test. Mac OS X already self-assigns hostnames like "hostname.local" and, according to this report [1], .local is the fourth most queried TLD.

[1] http://www.webcitation.org/5jpmlWGWt

ICANN adds new gTLDs

butlerm — Thu, 21 Jun 2012 05:05:01 +0000

The problem with that idea is that it pollutes the local namespace, something that could be a problem if registries are allowed to associate A records directly with the new gTLDs as well. It is much more convenient to allow "ibm" to refer to a host named ibm if you have one defined, for example, rather than possibly resolve to a top level A record for an ibm gTLD.

ICANN adds new gTLDs

josh — Thu, 21 Jun 2012 02:58:12 +0000

This whole ugly process has me wondering yet again: what would the Internet have looked like if top-level domains never existed? What would happen if instead of the original .com, .net, and .org, we had just .?

Personally, I suspect the result would have turned out significantly better.