2,000 dot-word bids rocket ICANN onto $350m cash pile The upcoming expansion of the internet's domain name system could see more than 2,000 new top-level domains come into existence, according to policy overseer ICANN. The organisation revealed at the weekend that it has received 2,091 applications for its controversial new gTLD programme, and could see up to 214 more before it …
Can we see some ICANN-hate? They really deserve it for this. These new domains provide no practical benefit to anyone (Is it that important for people to be able to type 'facebook' rather than 'facebook.com'?) and run the risk of breaking things due to name conflicts between new domains and hostnames used for internal networking. The only reason for any of this is a blatant attempt by ICANN to pull in a ton more money while leaving others to foot the bill for cleaning up their mess.
It's the prospect of this shagging up existing local or company-wide configurations, I run my test websites on my local machines as <sitename>.dev for instance.
OK, an edit of hosts will sort that out, but I can see trouble ahead for others. Like I'm going to start remembering to type in www.facebook.facebook?
<pedantry>
This was specifically warned against in RFC 2606, section 2 - precisely for this scenario.
If you want to be using fake TLDs, you should be using one of the four fake TLDs that ICANN have guaranteed to never be used (.test, .example, .invalid, .localhost).
I don't disagree that this is a colossally stupid idea by ICANN, but the warning was there for a long time that this could happen.
</pedantry>
None of those are really suitable.
.test, .example, .invalid - it's none of those things, we're talking about production use
.localhost - is for 127.0.0.1
And using globally-valid FQDNs may break things differently or reveal the structure of your internal network to outsiders. If it's for internal use only, what do you tell your registrar to delegate as the NS?
Since when would a server with a ".dev" suffix belong in production?
If its for production, you should be using a domain name you own. If you don't want your domain names resolvable externally, you should be using a split horizon DNS.
If you blithely ignore RFCs when they explicitly tell you you should not do a thing, you should not be surprised when the internet bites you on the ass.
It's time we seriously pushed for an alternative DNS infrastructure - one that is not operated or governed by ICANN and that is not under any pressure from ICE to kill domain names at the whim of media companies - basically something independent from the US government.
I know these do exist (in some form) but they are not heavily promoted or used at present - they need promoting.
The thing I hate is those dickheads at ICANN have shagged my nice simple input sanitisation routines used whenever anyone inputs an email or DNS address. A one-line regex now will need to be replaced with a database lookup plus a shed load of maintenance.
Or a message saying "No poncy top-level domain names allowed here. Use a proper name like everyone else."
We already have the situation where some MSP's blacklist any email from a .biz related rDNS IP or domain. All these "vanity" TLD's will have the same ethics as .biz - they will take money from anyone so they can recoup thier losses and we will simplay add all the new TLD's as rules to our content filters or worse to our blacklists.
Pessimist - Moi? :-)
My browser fills in the rest after I've been there once, so it's all a bit pointless really.
Type f for facebook........
I know, I know, I should have better things to do with my time than facebook, but it's free OK? And more enertaining than the drivel on telly these days.
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