Phishing, cybersquatting scum could ruin gTLD fun for biz

Businesses face extra costs and risks because of new internet domains, but the publication of a list of newly applied-for domains will not allow them to calculate those risks precisely, an expert has said. Last summer directors at the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which is the body that oversees …

[wowfood]

bah

Why can't we just return to sanity.

.co.uk etc for local based sites and personal ones

.gov for government websites

.biz for businesses etc

Why would we need all this extra crap like .google or .honda

I'd rather see them police domain names rather than create more. Because honestly cybersquatters really bug the hell out of me. For starters the ones who buy out trademarked website names so they can sell them to the trademark owner (which i'm pretty sure is illegal)

Then of course the people who just buy out every domain under the sun so when you're looking for a domain you find over half of them are being used to park some god aweful search engine for viagra and penis enlargement.

Get rid of all this crap and they wouldn't need to make new domain names.

[Mike Flugennock]

Re: bah

Why can't we just return to sanity.

.co.uk etc for local based sites and personal ones

.gov for government websites

.biz for businesses etc..

Huh. .biz for spammers, more like.

Granted, your mileage may vary, but just after the .biz and .info TLDs came online, I noticed a metric pantload of spam coming out of those domains. Simply shitcanning anything from .biz and .info reduced my spam to a bare trickle.

[Benjamin 4]

"gTLD fun"????? The only people this has been fun for is ICANN! Everyone else thinks this is a needless, expensive waste of space. Everyone who wants a web address already has it, and the majority of people use search engines, so the actual web address doesn't matter, why are you making life difficult for the people who actually type web addresses and expensive for companies?

[GrumpyJoe]

I've got a feeling it'll be like when .ltd.uk was launched

Can you remember the last time you saw/used a ltd.uk domain? They exist, I remember them years ago, but because .co.uk was the familiar one they never got used (they 'looked wrong' to end users).

Of course, with loads of people typing a word/domain into Google (hands up, I've done this!) it may just work - but as it gets harder to 'guess' where a business is on the internet we may have to move to something else to navigate it.

Any ideas?

Mine? Intelligent agents (remember what Autonomy did before it became a 'business intelligence' company - the autonomy 'dog' agents that searched the net for you). Don't depend on Google, but on an 'aggregate' of agents perusing the net and exchanging information.

Just an idea (plus I loved the little dog when it came out of its kennel with my search results!).

[Hardcastle the ancient]

wierd

How can it be correct for ONE bank to own .bank?

Surely they should all be allowed to use it?

[Ol'Peculier]

Re: wierd

I though the idea was one company, such as the FSA, would register .bank and only allow legit companies to register domains under it, so you'd know that barclays.bank or hsbc.bank were OK for online banking.

Obviously not.

[Anonymous Coward 15]

Let's see some Russian phisher

apply for .сом.

[Anonymous Coward 15]

Re: Let's see some Russian phisher

Just tried it in Google Translate- apparently it means 'catfish'.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Let's see some Russian phisher

All right then ... Let's see some Cajun Russian phisher ...

[Drew 11]

Re: Let's see some Russian phisher

.сом would be disallowed under the "string similarity" rules.

[Brewster's Angle Grinder]

*snigger*

Gillian Anderson? Really?! That's what she's doing these days - working as a trademark lawyer?!

Paris, because she must have been trademarked a million times...

[JakeyC]

Why defensively register?

Why should companies have to bother actually registering their brands to defend them?

Surely if someone other than Google tried to register .google, it would be sufficient for Google to tell ICANN "erm, 'scuse me but that's our brand name! Don't permit them to register it, cheers."

ICANN surely can't turn round and say "well unless you buy it, we'll let them use it", because trademark/copyright law trumps ICANN's jurisdiction on internet names.

It'd be like Companies House allowing me to set up "The BBC Ltd." unless BBC agreed to register that company name.

So if any marketing bods want to send me their $185k registration fees instead of blowing them on pointless "defensive" registrations, I'll go halves with you.

[Drew 11]

'Enria had also identified potential regulatory issues because websites rooted at .bank would "not [be] linked to a specific country, to a specific supervisor or to a specific regulatory framework."'

Because you don't get that problem in .com or .net do you?

Oh, wait...

[dotTICKETS]

adding trust to the internet with gTLDs

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The ticket sector globally is largely unregulated and generates billions of dollars in ticket fraud against vulnerable users, fans, and customers.