Create your own TLD?

[Ookii]

Under the new system, the web's 1.3 billion users will be able from the third quarter of 2009 to buy generic top-level domains (gTLDs) based on common words, brands or company names, cities or proper names.

http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5jienXKDbIYHNPcywgq84IqyHtbPw

[Furiously]

somehow forums.F13.F13 doesn't do much for me.

[Merusk]

Well fuck.  It just got a lot harder to find shit.

[schild]

Time to sell all of my domains I bought for lulz.

[Miasma]

I hate this idea.

[Samwise]

If you look at it completely objectively, there isn't really any good reason for every domain name to end in a ".com" or a ".net" or whatever.  Our children will no doubt see old-style domain names as quaint and retro.

But it's been that way for so long that right now, the mind recoils from the idea of ever changing it.  I wonder what brought this on.

[Soukyan]

Well, it would be nice just to have your name as your domain, no?

How much better would that make life.

Friend: What's your web site address?

You: first.middle.last


Whoa. The mind boggles.

[Merusk]

If you look at it completely objectively, there isn't really any good reason for every domain name to end in a ".com" or a ".net" or whatever.  Our children will no doubt see old-style domain names as quaint and retro.

But it's been that way for so long that right now, the mind recoils from the idea of ever changing it.  I wonder what brought this on.

Money. The org may be a non-profit but corps have been after this for a while, as I understand.  E-bay was mentioned in that article but I'm sure others were as well.   They love the idea of .ebay or .pepsi etc. 

They haven't thought through the creative assholery of the internet, however.  They'll now have to shell out a lot more  for domain names if they don't want asshats putting porn or redirects or anti-corporation sites at ebay.auctions or pepsi.sucks or any thing else our creative little minds can come up with.

Whoops!

And that's before you get into the new phishing domans that can be created, or the lookalike sites to creatively steal folks money or make the company look bad.

[Viin]

From what I understand this isn't for every Tom, Dick, and Harry - this is for corps/groups that want to spend $10k/year for their own TLD. I suppose you could pay for one of your own, but I think the prices are very high.

[Trippy]

If you look at it completely objectively, there isn't really any good reason for every domain name to end in a ".com" or a ".net" or whatever.  Our children will no doubt see old-style domain names as quaint and retro.

But it's been that way for so long that right now, the mind recoils from the idea of ever changing it.  I wonder what brought this on.

No there are very good objective reasons to have a limited set of TLDs since DNS is a lookup system and having an unlimited number of entries in top level hierarchy makes for a much more complicated distribution and delegation system. Also radically expanding the TLDs without first totally overhauling the current DNS to account for the security realities of today is going to cause untold number of security headaches for people. E.g. if you think DNS hijacking is a cause for concern now just wait till 2009.

[Samwise]

That seems like a relatively minor implementation issue. 

Put it this way: as far as any end user is concerned, it's just as if the ".com" is being hidden and the domain name can now contain an extra dot somewhere else.

[Trippy]

That seems like a relatively minor implementation issue. 

Then you don't understand how the system currently works

For the end user browsers already support "bare" .com domains. E.g. type in "ebay" as the URL and see where you go.

For companies like eBay with unique names it should be easy for them to grab their own TLD. Good luck to the companies that want to grab, say, apple, as their TLD, though. That'll be a court battle that'll last for decades.

[Samwise]

That seems like a relatively minor implementation issue. 

Then you don't understand how the system currently works

Then neither do the people proposing this, I guess.  Which means the Internet is due to unravel sometime next year.

Better start making offline copies of it now, eh?

[Trippy]

The Internet (as we know it) is unraveling. The original (and current) design assumed everybody was trustworthy. Originally when everybody literally knew everybody else that was connected together that was true. That is obviously no longer the case and more and more unscrupulous and criminal people are taking advantage of that.

In the case of DNS there is no way to verify that the IP address you get back from a hostname lookup is in fact the correct one and people are taking advantage of that today for all sorts of fraudulent activities. With the mass proliferation of TLDs additional avenues for attacks will open up because of bugs in software and additional vulnerable spots in the infrastructure. E.g. it's highly unlikely the current root nameservers will be "authoritative" for all of the new TLDs so those will somehow be divided and delegated to other name servers (potentially under administration by people with less experience with the security issues surrounding DNS) which means more targets to attack.

[Kitsune]

Yeah, this could be a clusterfuck for DNS lookups.  Right now when you put in forums.f13.net, your computer goes to your DNS servers and requests the address.  The DNS servers don't know the address, so they go to the root DNS servers and ask for it.  The root DNS servers don't know the address, but they give the address to the .net server.  The DNS server then goes and asks the .net server.  The .net server doesn't know forums.f13.net, but it does know f13.net, so it gives that address.  The DNS server then goes and asks the f13.net DNS server, gets the forums.f13.net address, and returns it to your computer.

What's the problem?  Having thousands of custom TLDs means that the root servers will now need to juggle a vastly larger database of top-level domain DNS servers.  These root servers are queried for each and every DNS lookup on the planet, barring cached results, and the extra processing time needed to handle the greater complexity could easily turn out to be significant.

[Yegolev]

Time to sell all of my domains I bought for lulz.

Yup.

[Salamok]

From what I understand this isn't for every Tom, Dick, and Harry - this is for corps/groups that want to spend $10k/year for their own TLD. I suppose you could pay for one of your own, but I think the prices are very high.

I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that it was going to cost $100k set up fee per TLD.  so definitely not for your average joe.  If I were a billionaire i'd probably try and land 1 for personal use and giggles.

[Lantyssa]

Well, it would be nice just to have your name as your domain, no?

How much better would that make life.

Friend: What's your web site address?

You: first.middle.last


Whoa. The mind boggles.

That's great for someone like me who has a guaranteed unique name.

Bob Smith on the other hand, has a little competition.  Is that robert.smith.23 or robert.smith.323?

[schild]

Bob Smith has a middle name. I'm sure.

[Signe]

In parts of America, Bob is everybody's middle name.

[Lantyssa]

Bob Smith has a middle name. I'm sure.

He is still not a unique little snowflake.

[Salamok]

Bob Smith has a middle name. I'm sure.

yes but the TLD is his last name, so to get his name turned into a domain name he still has to deal with whoever ends up owning .smith