Bespoke top level domains 'to cost $200,000' Internet overseer ICANN plans to reform the top level domain (TLD) naming system so anyone can set up a new registry, but it seems web plebs will have to make do with boring old .com and friends. According to a report, the price for a bespoke TLD will be announced this Friday at about $200,000. The price tag will help ICANN …
A .london TLD? WTF?
According to Wikipedia (OK, I know) there's 2 Londons in each of Alabama and Ohio, one each in Arizona, Arkansas, California, Indiana, Kentucky, Minnesota, Missouri, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Illinois. There's also Londons in Canada, Belize, Equatorial Guinea, Finland, and Nigeria. Oh, yes, and UK.
And they want to do this for all city names?
And they want to have random non-heirarchical names for anyone with $200K?
Pure greed-driven madness!
The Kentucky casino domain name grab has already proved the US is not to be trusted with this stuff. Now they want to FU the TLDs!
Enough already. Pass control of TLDs to the UN. Make the USians use the .us TLD and then they can simply firewall anything that doesn't have it. Put them in the Unsullied Sandbox of America where they belong.
[/rant]
More like price gouging and trebles all round for ICANN..
For 200 grand no system is needed at all. It'll happen infrequently enough for all the administrators of the root servers to be paid to manually edit config files, or any database that happens to be behind the root DNS.
It isn't being used right now, but it might be worth a fortune one day.
Seriously, though, will there be a ban on two- and three-letter TLDs, on the grounds that at some point in the future a new country might come along and would then *need* that domain as its country-code domain? Perhaps .vla might be a test case?
This is *such* an ill-though-out venture that it surely represents the last nail in ICANNs coffin, banged in by their own fair hand.
I covered this in a Rocketboom episode that I scripted a couple of weeks ago.
Thing is, with the OpenDNS, there is already an "underground" version of this free for all. Wonder if it's worth checking out to see what kinda of mess this is in or if it's one of those "great in theory, breaks badly when the unwashed get their hands on it" situations.
It's all about whom or what got there first!
What do people in the UK call their vacuum cleaners? Yep, it's the first company who managed to make it big. You don't say get the vacuum cleaner out, you shout "Grab the Hoover!".
So by that token when your average Joe talks about a website he thinks "www" and ".com" on the end, with whatever brand is in between. The number of arguments that have come about when I have asked my old man to go to site X only to find that he has automatically assumed WWW.xyz.COM.
No one will remember www.overpriced.tat.market or useless.IT.news.site, will they?
It isn't likely, fortunately, that a modest number of vanity TLDs will break anything too badly. The main impact seems likely to be how many fat-fingered typing errors will cause bogus queries to the root servers, looking for .londin or whatever.
If people want to give .bogon registrars free money for nonsense, why worry? It's just another form of income redistribution, something we so badly need in these desperate times...
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
