Comments on: ICANN new gTLD system will brandize the internet

By: Guss

Guss — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 09:10:16 +0000

I don’t follow the “peaceful means” argument.

That being said, there is plenty of abuse of domain space on the network today – the number of junk domains (a domain where you only get a single page with lists of ads for spam sites, viagra and travel agencies – I have no idea why, but they always have travel agencies) is incredible – it may be more then the number of valid domains. The way these things work is that no one is actually paying for these – a spam operation registers tens of thousands of these daily, and unregistered them 3 days later, so they get a full refund. Then they do it again.

Adding grab-a-TLD type of registration will not only increase this behavior a thousand times over, it will allow the creation of junk TLDs whose sole purpose is to generate spam domains. You can say that you don’t care because you normally don’t visit these sites, but it does affect you – more junk domains means more junk on your search engines as they have harder times distinguishing between this and real sites, it means more blog spamming to advertise this junk, it probably means more email spam and so on and so forth.

By: Eran

Eran — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 12:00:26 +0000

Except the mess, which is ICANN’s mess or maybe a portal’s mess but not mine, I don’t see a real problem.
It, maybe, is the same problem as cybersquatting but there are still ways to resolve this. With peaceful means (Like Blizzard and diablo3.com) or less peaceful ways but it’s resolvable still the same.
Yeah, maybe the registration under the TLD thing is still a bug but everything have bugs and bugs can be fixed, by the engineer or by the client, in many ways.

The general idea is this: it’s a technological opening and like every one of those, we should see how it plays out and try and stir it for the best and not for the worst even though it has potential for both.

By: Guss

Guss — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 14:11:51 +0000

Except for the obvious intranet related issues, I have two problems with this:
1. That its messy – its like on Windows where once software installed itself anywhich where it wanted, like c:\stuff, c:\more-stuff and you ended up with tons of junk on your c: drive and now everything is tucked aways in neat directories. gTLDs work the same by letting people experience stuff in an orderly fashion.
2. I have a problem with this capability only available for big corporations that can invest the money in taking out parts of the global namespace and reserving it for themselves. Registering a new gTLD would cost something like $100,000 and registrants will not be required to provide “non-sponsored” domain registrations (which means – they will be required to allow registrations of domains under their new gTLD, but they aren’t required to have this done in a non-discriminatory manner. So for example Sony will need to allow registrations under their “sony” gTLD, but they can allow this only for Sony subsidiaries).

By: Arik

Arik — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 03:13:17 +0000

How exactly is that different than what is happening today?

You have http://brand.com or http://www.brand.com today, and you’ll have only http://www.brand and http://brand if this scheme works through… I don’t see how it will be either better or worse than today.

The only disadvantage I can see is someone registering the intranet TLD and messing up people who think they’re going to their corporate intranet, your .exe example etc. Like command.com wasn’t bad enough.

I wonder how much it will cost.

– Arik