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

http://benwerd.com/blog/2012/06/14/clusterfuck/

by benwerd • 14 years ago

59 68 14 years ago

cleverjake7• 14 years 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.

ishansharma3• 14 years ago

Exactly the issue, they are cute but serve no purpose.

cleverjake7• 14 years 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.

ishansharma3• 14 years 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.

cleverjake7• 14 years 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/

riffraff• 14 years 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)

ivix• 14 years ago

Yes, the money is spent on the review process, which is another way of saying that ICANN spends the money on itself.

ceejayoz• 14 years ago

> According to ICANN they are not making money off of it. The money is spent on the reviewal process.

Most of which is probably ICANN salaries.

My health insurer does this. "We're non-profit, our profit margin was only 2% last year." Meanwhile, we see headlines about the CEO's $4 million bonus.

darrellsilver• 14 years ago

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

ishansharma3• 14 years ago

.clusterfuck !

Spooky23• 14 years 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• 14 years 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• 14 years 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• 14 years 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, and US states have subdomains assigned under .us (and often regional subdomains under those)

Jacqued2• 14 years 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• 14 years 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• 14 years 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.

SeanLuke2• 14 years 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"?

Jacqued2• 14 years 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...

jgrahamc2• 14 years 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

pm2152• 14 years ago

However, that's not the only convention for postal addresses. In Japan they write them the other way around, starting with the prefecture and working down through city, subarea, block/building number and finally the addressee's name. I don't think it's the only country using major-to-minor order, although minor-to-major is more common.

jgrahamc2• 14 years ago

For those of you too young to remember and not from the UK... we used to do it that way here. It was called the JANET Name Registration System and we had addresses like UK.AC.OX for a machine at Oxford.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JANET_NRS

The DNS system from the beginning has the names the other way around (see RFC 882 from 1983). Since JANET and ARPANET were largely disconnected from one another the systems were able to develop separately. Ultimately, TCP/IP beat out X.25 and the Internet protocols took over.

One side effect of this is the the ccTLDs are drawn from ISO 3166 which would have the UK specified as .gb. But since we already had a whole addressing system based around UK. it was easier to switch to .uk and ignore the ISO 3166 standard.

Worth noting that for a while there were mail gateways between JANET and the Internet that did all sorts of fun flipping addresses so that someone at Stanford say could email foo@cam.ac.uk which would turn into foo@UK.AC.CAM at the gateway and vice versa.

macavity23• 14 years ago

Not only like IP addresses but also like the path part of the URL.

Interestingly, Tim Berners-Lee now thinks the same: http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/FAQ.html#etc

Harkins• 14 years 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• 14 years ago

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

brianbreslin• 14 years ago

so the author is upset that he might not be able to register http://benwerd.book when he can just as easily get 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 ?

benwerd2• 14 years 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• 14 years 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• 14 years ago

I don't think that's true. Google gives more value to .gov and .edu domains, for example.

x12• 14 years 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• 14 years 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.

shykes3• 14 years 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?

Navarr4• 14 years 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.

seanp2k23• 14 years 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.

5l• 14 years ago

It's a bad thing - effectively it gives a few search companies control over the entire namespace. ie. if it's not searchable, it doesn't exist.

seanp2k23• 14 years 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.

nachteilig• 14 years ago

This is really already the case for some people. When I watch my mom use the web, she'll type "gmail" into google rather than typing "gmail.com".

crazydoggers2• 14 years 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-disput...

benwerd2• 14 years 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.

crazydoggers2• 14 years 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?

marcuspovey• 14 years 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...

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

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