.clusterfuck

Comments

18 responses to “.clusterfuck”

1. 

   Chris Padfield

   June 14, 2012

   Completely agree with this. I wrote this in another forum; but we come to the same conclusion.

   >>

   The whole process seems like a disaster in the making to
   me and is a complete change to the structure of the domain system; in
   particular the move away from open-to-all registrars to companies
   controlling/restricting extensions for their own purpose. It’s one thing having
   a registrar let anyone (including Amazon) buy .book domains – another when this
   is controlled by one party for their own end.

   We might see this in our market; 3 companies have bid for
   .help; I think these 3 do look like they are being bought by registrars so
   presumably anyone can buy the domains. I am all in favour of that – it would be
   another thing entirely is salesforce goes and buys .help or .crm for example.

   Reply
   1. 

      Navarr Barnier

      June 14, 2012

      “Open to all” registrars?

      Like.. .gov .mil .edu .museum and .aero?

      Reply
      1. 

         Nick B

         June 15, 2012

         In the right way, yes. Inasmuch as you are talking about US domains, they are open to all government departments, all branches of military, all education establishments etc. In other territories there are equivalents under country TLDs as that country deems fit, e.g. .gov.uk, .ac.uk.

         There is a big difference between reserving a TLD for a specific category (which helps users gauge legitimacy), and a private enterprise taking a TLD such as .books and then potentially controlling registrations for their own competitive advantage.

         As it goes, I’m not sure that anti-competitive practices will be permitted, certainly in the EU, so it might be that we worry about nothing other than now having to remember whether Amazon is at amazon.com or amazon.books, and what about the UK version is that amazon.uk.books or amazon.books.uk and so on.

         Reply
         1. 

            Navarr Barnier

            June 15, 2012

            While what you say makes sense on the surface, I feel obligated to point out to others that, as you already know, .gov.uk is not a TLD. Having the US be in exclusive control of .gov .mil .edu (the one’s mentioned in your post) is the political equivalent of a corporate entity being in control of .books or .love (to completely ignore the point that a corporate entity is in control of .com and .net at the very least) – as the US could just as easily use .gov.us, par examplur.

            I really don’t see this as a big change, just a small one: TLDs are no longer special. And I’m fine with that. I’m very very tired of having to pay Verisign a growing number of $$$ each year for a domain name. Hopefully, competition will force them to behave by destroying their near-monopoly on the market.

            Reply
2. 

   Bret Piatt

   June 14, 2012

   They could solve this by making it a requirement that anyone with a .tld will have a clearly documented and non-bias registration process. For the examples on .author or .book, a process of, “Please provide a link to an ISBN registered work you have written” for .author or likewise for .book allowing registration of your name or the title of the book.

   Reply
   1. 

      Ben Werdmuller

      June 14, 2012

      I completely agree. This simple requirement would change the whole nature of the process in a very positive way.

      Reply
3. 

   Jonathan Dahan

   June 14, 2012

   browser makers have the ability to introduce a p2p dns system transparent to the user. These TLDs might be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.

   Reply
   1. 

      Marcus Povey

      June 14, 2012

      Agree with this.

      The DNS system (for the web at least and web!=internet) is largely for machines now – a useful abstraction that lets people move sites from machine to machine – since most people search rather than go direct to a URL.

      DNS is hierarchical and centrally controlled and makes a tempting target for censorship (blocking dns queries) and snooping (seeing which domains you visit and when, even if the packet is encrypted).

      A peer to peer, distributed and self repairing alternative of converting names (or more accurately resource searches) into addresses would be less of a target for political shenanigans.

      I speculated a little about this when the SOPA nonsense kicked off: http://www.marcus-povey.co.uk/2012/01/10/dns-is-a-symptom-of-broken-search-sopa/

      Reply
4. 

   chrisco

   June 14, 2012

   Let them have their clusterfuck / who cares! A big reason why:

   “Non .com extensions will leak traffic to the .com version of that domain name. Every business set up on a [non .com extension] domain will lose a proportion of their traffic to the dot com version of that domain name, although the amount of that leak will be difficult to predict.
   The leak occurs because customers/ potential customers will frequently recall the name of the site and add ‘.com’ almost instinctively, unless they recall that it is on a relatively unusual extension .net, .org etc.
   Inevitably, the more the [non .com extension] site is marketed, the more traffic is sent to the .com, however, the problem is that the .com domain may well resolve to a competing business’s website.
   Some businesses are willing to live with that loss (perhaps because the [non .com extension] is a relevant, memorable generic, for example) – for them the [non .com extension] is a viable option.
   However, without a compelling reason like the one mentioned above, I would argue that a business on a limited budget just cannot afford to develop a site using a [non .com extension] domain name. It is as simple as that.”
   SOURCE: http://www.domaining.org.uk/2007/12/10/spectacular-net-or-a-so-so-com-which-should-you-chose-for-your-business/

   Reply
   1. 

      Daniel Tobias

      June 14, 2012

      You seem to be assuming that everybody who wants to put up a website is a business. If you’re noncommercial, one of the other endings besides .com makes more logical sense.

      Reply
      1. 

         chrisco

         June 14, 2012

         Will still leak, smartypants 😉

         Reply
5. 

   Mike

   June 14, 2012

   You’re grossly misinformed. ICANN has dispute procedures in place for this:

   http://newgtlds.icann.org/en/program-status/objection-dispute-resolution

   Reply
6. 

   Mike

   June 14, 2012

   You’re misinformed. ICANN has a dispute policy in place for this kind of thing:

   http://newgtlds.icann.org/en/program-status/objection-dispute-resolution

   If you’re concerned about “.author” then you need to mobilize the community of authors and file an objection.

   Reply
   1. 

      Ben Werdmuller

      June 14, 2012

      I mentioned the dispute policy and the time period for objections, and encouraged people to speak up.

      That there’s a dispute policy doesn’t contradict what I’m arguing against.

      Reply
      1. 

         Mike

         June 14, 2012

         It seems more like your bashing ICANN (wich i can understand, they’re a horrible bureaucracy), rather than a call to arms to protect a gTLD. In this case ICANN *has* provided the tools to protect the gTLD space.

         In the end, one entity must control and administer a gTLD. Administering a registry is not simple or cheap. Since you believe opening tlds is a good idea, how would you propose handling the situation?

         Already there are non-profit groups applying for gTLDs, .green being a great example. Why not a non-profit authors foundation? I’m not sure how else you’d protect the rights of authors and open up the tld space at the same time.

         Reply
   2. 

      Andrew Coulton

      June 14, 2012

      All well and good, but from my read the fees for assessing an objection (paid by the objector) start at around €17,000 with a non refundable initial deposit of €5,000. Fine (though expensive) if you are protecting your trademark, but steep for a community objecting to an attempt by a corporation to create a monopoly.

      Reply
7. 

   Matt Mazur

   June 14, 2012

   One of the big practical problems that no one promoting these gTLDs is talking about is that they’re not viable to use as your primary domain name because for most normal, non-technical people, going to a website means going to a .com.

   If you currently use .net, .org, .it, .ly, etc for your business you’ve probably experienced the frustration of having someone trying to get to your site navigate to the .com instead. And this is with these other TLDs being somewhat common. When this new batch is released, it’s going to be even more confusing to normal people.

   Are there uses? Sure: there will be some practical uses for certain technical niches, but for businesses, relying on one of these gTLDs for your primary website will not be practical until the general public understands this better. And if adoption rates for .net, .org, etc are any indication, that’s going to take a very, very long time.

   For what it’s worth, if you’re looking for an available .com domain name I built a domain search tool called Lean Domain Search (http://www.leandomainsearch.com) which might be able to help. It pairs your search term with 2,500 other keywords commonly found in domain names and instantly shows you which are available. Hope it helps.

   Reply
8. 

   render

   June 14, 2012

   I think the real problem here is that this does not help the web. Once this rolls out the most common question you will here is “DOT WHAT?” There is also no semantic value to any of this search engines will not improve and the enforcement of what content qualifies will be lax and likely capricious, or worse self serving as you mention.

   I think it would be worth discussing getting rid of TLDs all together as they dont mean anything to non-technical users. If you think squatting is bad now, just see what happens when you can squat on someones book title using .book, this is going to be a nightmare.

   Given the one commenters suggestion about leakage to .COM due to users not remembering the appropriate domain, every single .COM domain is now potentially a typosquatter….g-r-e-a-t

   Reply