ICANN urges US, Canada: Help us stop the 'predatory' monster we created ... dot-sucks! DNS overlord ICANN – which opened the floodgates to waves of new dot-word domains on the internet – says it needs help in killing one of those dot-words: .sucks. In a letter [PDF] to the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Canadian Office of Consumer Affairs (OCA), ICANN claims .sucks domains are being sold to trademark …
I thought this kind of force-'em-to-defensively-register-more-domains was the whole raison d'etre of the pointless creation of countless worthless TLDs.
Of course, as Blone Bramble pointed out, ICANN have *their* money from the .sucks sale now, so there's nothing to lose here, except their already-squandered reputation, at least not unless it scares off other registrars they want to flog off more poxy TLDs to.
As commentard TeeCee said below:
"ICANN are a bit skint."
By selling rights to create new TLDs ICANN are earning money. I don't know whether they need that money to continue operating, but at the end of the day, they are being caught out by their own actions when the "wrong people" get involved.
Erm...remember that ICANN replaced one guy.
Interestingly, the author of that paen, Vint Cerf, seemed to forget the point when he joined the ICANN board.
> Vint Cerf, seemed to forget the point when he joined the ICANN board.
Well, in fairness, he tried to limit the madness. Vint didn't create ICANN; actually it was forced on the world by Ira Magaziner in the Clinton administration, and by some fairly powerful commercial interests that didn't want to see such a cash cow left to techies who might throttle the free money faucet.
And yes, there's a DNS record for icann.sucks. But it's a loopback address (127.0.53.53). And no whois server will admit that it's been registered by anybody. How strange.
Johnny come latelys were upset that all the good domains, like johnnycomelately.com, were already taken.
It is kind of a problem that I can start a business called Bob's Burgers, for instance, and so long as there isn't one in town or the next few towns over, or a chain elsewhere in the state, I have no problem. Having only .com makes it so there can be only one bobsburgers.com, and everyone else has to do weird stuff like theoriginalbobsburgers.com, bobsburgerschicago.com and so forth. The real problem was that while countries like the UK used the .co.uk domain as intended, no one in the US used .co.us and everyone wanted .com in the rest of the world.
New TLDs aren't a fix for this though, if there was a .burgers domain there's still only one bobs.burgers. Domain names are unfortunately just not a good solution on the scale we use them today, which is why search engines become so popular. I don't blindly type bobsburgers.com and hope it is the right one. I google "bobs burgers chicago" or "bobs burgers glasgow" and even if it is called bobspizzaburgersandhummus.com I'll find it. ICANN and registrars refuse to admit that the domain name system has been irrelevant for the past decade.
In some cases that is true. However, there are hundreds of thousands, if not millions of registered names for which there is not even a website in place. This is exacerbated by the many registrars that offer "parking" services. So called brokers register these names and hold them for very minimal cost, hoping to some day sell them to a real business at a substantial, often ridiculous, profit.
If the only use of the name is for a one page website stating "The bobsburgers.com somain name is for sale", then any one of the Bob's Burgers with a copy of their business license or some other proof of legitimacy should be able to force de-registration of the name and make it available for actual use.
"what was wrong with .com and .co.<country code>..."
Yeah, that bugged me a bit too, especially all those towns a cities spending wodges of cash on, for example .london. Depending on where in the world you live, .london could mean different things so .town is a prime example of a TLD that should have been created at the second level by the country TLD registry, eg .london.uk. I know there is .amsterdam.nl so did they spend money on .amsterdam or did they not see the point?
"Interestingly icann.sucks redirects to an Apache2 Ubuntu server default holding page, but the other iterations of ICANN redirect to icann.org. Wonder if someone nabbed .sucks before they had a chance to"
Hehe, that's your local machine? icann.sucks resolves to 127.0.53.53 which is the loopback network.
So ICANN thought they were onto a winner by extorting $185,000 from everyone applying for a TLD, and are upset by the fact that someone has outsmarted them.
Quite honestly $2500 is probably small change to most companies that wish to pre-register. I quite honestly believe that no real company should be able to own its own .sucks domain.
.
How is that any different than the the plugs shown in the following link to Google Images?
https://www.google.com/search?q=European+Computer+plug&safe=off&rls=com.microsoft:en-us:IE-SearchBox&rlz=1I7GZAZ_en&prmd=ivns&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=u98nVaLJCYz1oAS014GYDA&ved=0CAUQ_AU
It may not be but it is quite different to these:
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=uk+computer+plug&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X
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Do ICANN really not have a process in place for taking domains back from registrars who are abusing them, or running them badly?
Why the hell did they write themselves a contract that doesn't give them a get-out clause? Given that they can have some byzantine appeals process that basically means you appeal to one subcommittee of the ICANN board, and then appeal against them to a different sub-committee of the same board... For an organisation that are so good at subverting any kind of due process, with vague rules and no proper oversight, I'm amazed.
Still, if they've paid themselves all the previous gTLD cash in bonuses, and can't afford any lawyers, they could always auction off dot.skint, dot.needaloan, dot.loanshark, dot.fuckup and dot.buggeriti'moffdownthepub...
There was an article on CNBC about how Kevin Spacey bought up Kevinspacey.sucks, and Yahoo! bought yahoo.sucks.
This domain is a bit of a shakedown, and it doesn't add much to the public discussion. However, ICANN created this monster, and were happy to take the money to create it. I guess now they are getting nasty calls from their corporate masters who have to defensively buy up the domains now.
What law do ICANN think Vox Populi are breaking? From what I can see, they're just charging a vastly inflated price for the goods they are selling (in order to recoup the large sum demanded by ICANN in the first place, one might add).
If that's against the law, then there are other companies that should be a long way ahead of them in the queue to the courthouse. Starting with one from Cupertino.
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