XBIZ: ICANN to Consider Free-Form Top-Level Domains
 

ICANN to Consider Free-Form Top-Level Domains

By Bob Preston
Monday, Jun 23, 2008 Text size:
CYBERSPACE ? In a move that could give the .XXX top-level domain a back-door onto the Internet, ICANN will vote Thursday on a proposal to relax requirements for top-level domains.

If approved, the proposal could potentially let companies and individuals make up their own top-level domains in a fashion similar to how some countries have made use of the top-level domains assigned to them.

For example, the top-level domain .tv was introduced in 1996 and eventually assigned to the the Polynesian island nation of Tuvalu. The country wound up cutting a deal to sell domains bearing the dot-TV ending to anybody, not just citizens and businesses of Tuvalu.

In a similar fashion, companies and individuals might be able apply for their own unique top-level domain, which would cost "several thousand dollars" and be subject to a review process. Applicants would have to submit a business plan and demonstrate that their proposed top-level domain has some kind of "technical capacity."

But such a fluid system raises the specter of a recent pain the in the adult industry's neck: .XXX. To date, ICANN has regulated the existence, if not the use, of most top-level domains, and if they were to approve this proposal on Thursday, then someone could simply submit .XXX for approval.

Dr. Paul Twomey, chief executive of ICANN, said that the proposed new system would be open to anyone.

The adult industry reached a near-consensus in its opposition to the .XXX top-level domain. Free Speech Coalition Chairman Jeffrey Douglas said that .XXX would have meant there would be an Internet ?ghettoization.?

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This is one of the more important decisions ICANN has ever made. It's unfortunate it won't get many comments here, but I guess who's buying someone a beer at a show and how much board props they get is more important than actual business stuff.

Yep, even if they approve this they could still choose not to allow the .xxx extension, but it would be pretty hard to stop it at that point.

wtf.......

Net result if that goes ahead, domains become way less important and everybody uses google to find every web site.

Basically just gives more power to google.

:2 cents:

are we going to get back doored ??:disgust

An article I read stated that they could still reject submissions for top level domains for moral reasons etc... so perhaps they would reject the .xxx under that excuse, if enough people complained.

Definitely agree here. Makes SE placement that much more important.

I jUst pre-regsitered the TLD .tube just in case ;)

i doubt it will go thru

Why? What is wrong with the current system that they need to make changes this big?

$ :2 cents:

Won't happen. With ICANN, nothing ever happens, except lots of talk and bureaucracy.

But what about .sex or .porn or .porno couldn't the owners of those tlds make a case that porn sites should have to use their TLD? If government madated that pornsites have to use .xxx I'm sure you could see lawsuits from the owners with .sex, .porn etc because those are equally valid for the use of porn sites.

it would be huge business for them if they could make it happen. vanity extensions would be nuts.

I wonder how much for .cumdumpguttersluts TLD?

I've never liked this idea. Just imagine all companies in the world and maybe some ISPs blocking the whole xxx TLD, that means no one watching porn from office ... I can only see less customers with this.

It is a very good point. If all those existed all of them could make the argument. It would only really matter if the government passed a law stating that all adult sites had to exist on one of these TLDs. If that happened then the one that was chosen by the government would flourish and the others would probably end up worthless.

Adding many thousands, let alone millions, of real (as opposed to say IDN aliases) TLDs would stress the root servers, and create a huge single point of failure for custom-vanity TLDs.

Many ISPs / resolvers cache the root server addresses and the corresponding TLD zone data, so if the roots are unavailable / busy or whatever, it's generally a situation that can be worked around - that won't be true in a custom-vanity TLD situation. The upshot being that traditional, popular TLDs would end up being more reliable in such instances.

And from a business aspect, such a scheme would in essance be a monopoly far worse than Internic ever was - because the root would directly be serving resource records (ie. name server addresses) for end-user domains in the custom-vanity TLDs.

Bottom line, in my view, is custom-vanity TLDs (a glorified keyword system) is unlikely to happen anytime soon, if ever.

Ron

If everyone got off their asses an employed Ipv6 wouldn't that alleviate that issue?

Not to mention how much easier it is going to be for scammers to use phishing techniques to scam people.