

Why ICANN's gTLD process leaves a lot to be desired - benwerd
http://benwerd.com/blog/2012/06/14/clusterfuck/

======
Harkins
A few years ago when this was announced I seriously considered setting up shop
to host these gTLDs. (I rebuilt the .pro registry, so I have the domain
knowledge.) Then I realized I'd have huge risk from ICANN, if they dragged
their feet I'd run out of cash. Glad I walked away, the extra couple years
this took would've killed me.

Later I realized that, while the tech is easy for me, the sales cycle would be
a long, painful slog. Every time I see a story about new gTLDs I feel like a
dodged a bullet, as enticing as it is to want to build this product. :p

If other folks are considering this business, buy a beer for someone who's had
to work with ICANN. This is one of those many businesses where the tech looks
atraightforward but the everything else will crush a techie.

~~~
mjwalshe
Thats one of the things that helped kill poptel who built the .coop domain :-(

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cleverjake
>By failing to regulate usage, ICANN have left the door open for companies to
have a monopoly on certain thematic addresses on the web.

ICANN reserves the right to revoke a gTLD due to abuse. That being said, I
don't think anyone would have any form of hindrance from not having a .author
domain. ever. Saying that amazon controls .author is like saying Lybia
controls a suffix. It /really/ /doesnt/ /matter/. New gTLDs are cute, but
thats about it.

~~~
ishansharma
Exactly the issue, they are cute but serve no purpose.

~~~
cleverjake
I disagree wholeheartedly. The purpose of the article was that the author
believes that People could be blocked from registering .book or .love due to
corporate interests - thereby causing a "clusterfuck" This is just silly. No
one will be up in arms over this, at all.

~~~
Tloewald
Perhaps they won't be up in arms be but maybe they should be. What if American
Express owned .com? Ten years from now owning .book might be seriously
distorting.

I don't know the solution, but I suspect that having generic TLDs is better.
This is like giving big companies the naming rights over cities and streets
(the latter they already do to very limited extents). If Chicago became "AT&T
Chicago" an that's what you had to refer to it as to get mail delivered or
travel there...

~~~
cleverjake
Its a free market. If amazon acts like a clown with .author, authors won't use
it. If they abuse their position once it is actually influential, they can be
sued and have their right to registrant revoked.

simple as that.

I don't understand your Chicago argument. No one is forcing anyone to use
.author, .book, or anything else. It is one of hundreds (and soon to possibly
be thousands) of available TLDs.

This just seems like a steaming pile of FUD

~~~
ceol
Sued by whom? I only see another large corporation being able to take on
Amazon. Then we're in the same boat as before.

These TLDs are supposed to be generic, not country-specific like .ly or .io or
.uk. Giving private entities control over them is an all-around bad idea.

~~~
cleverjake
>Sued by whom

ICANN. They are the final say over domains, and can revoke any TLD at will.

>These TLDs are supposed to be generic, not country-specific like .ly or .io
or .uk. Giving private entities control over them is an all-around bad idea.

What is 'generic' to you? Either way, you need to satisfy some form of
requirement to the organization that owns the root server. Giving amazon
control of .whatever is no more dangerous than giving north korea control of
.kp.

~~~
ceol
If ICANN has the final say, they don't need to sue them then, do they?

 _> Giving amazon control of .whatever is no more dangerous than giving north
korea control of .kp._

The TLD denotes some sort of category. Giving North Korea control over .kp is
fine because .kp represents North Korea. Giving Amazon.com control over .books
is _not_ fine because .books does not represent Amazon.com, nor is Amazon.com
representative of the concept of books. If they were giving .books to the
American Library Association, I wouldn't have a problem with it.

Do you see the difference?

~~~
cleverjake
>If ICANN has the final say, they don't need to sue them then, do they?

Sue was a misnomer. The point being amazon wouldn't have ultimate control.
They could lose it.

>The TLD denotes some sort of category. Giving North Korea control over .kp is
fine because .kp represents North Korea. Giving Amazon.com control over .books
is not fine because .books does not represent Amazon.com, nor is Amazon.com
representative of the concept of books. If they were giving .books to the
American Library Association, I wouldn't have a problem with it.

Yes, I just disagree with it. This is a slippery slope on a slippery slope
argument.

Amazon is more representing of books on the whole that the US Goverment
represent all of .gov(ernment) and ICANN represent all com(panies).

In order for your argument to hold water, you would need to show that having a
.book domain is inherently valuable. If it isn't then it is of zero
consequence. Google doesn't care that there isn't a google.kp becuase it
doesn't matter. If we are to assume that we are several years in the future,
amazon has been given control over .book, and they are now basically required
socially for any kind of book tour/signing/press junket etc, /and/ if amazon
starts turning people away who don't give them good deals, then sure, i'll be
standing right beside you. And ICANN would most likely react with a request to
change behavior from amazon, or they would take it away and manage it
themselves.

But I can practically guarantee that

a. .books won't be that popular

b. amazon won't prevent a single author from getting a .book (they would just
be turning away possible sources of income)

In the end, none of this will really matter.

~~~
ceol
I think it's naive to trust Amazon won't abuse their authority over the .book
TLD. It's not a slippery slope argument so much as it's a common sense
argument. Most companies do not feel obligation to do anything unless it
starts costing them money, and I don't see Amazon losing public favor (and
subsequently money) because they don't keep the .book TLD open to everyone.

The only way I would feel remotely comfortable is if ICANN bound the bidders
by contract to keep their TLDs open, but if that's the case, why open up
bidding in the first place?

And it's difficult to assess how popular a TLD will be. Ten years ago, would
you have said .ly and .nu would have become as popular as they are today?

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shykes
This might finish killing DNS as a human interface.

Thanks to Chrome's universal address bar people are already getting used to
not caring about the domain - with a clusterfuck of tlds which makes the right
address basically impossible to guess, why would they bother trying?

~~~
Navarr
They probably wouldn't bother trying to guess.

And I honestly don't see that as a bad thing.

I rarely guess domain names. If I don't know the address, I search it. I
expect most normal people search it even if they do know the address.

~~~
5l
It's a bad thing - effectively it gives a few search companies control over
the entire namespace. ie. if it's not searchable, it doesn't exist.

~~~
shykes
It's true that the decline of DNS further strengthens the position of a few
gatekeepers - Google on the web, Apple on the phone.

On the bright side, this might kill ICANN or at least make them irrelevant.
That is a good thing because ICANN is arguably the worst possible gatekeeper
for internet names. They combine the worst aspects of the private and public
world: they inherited a monopoly over a public resource which frees them from
the constraints of being an efficient and trustworthy business, like so many
state bureaucracies; yet they are a private entity not accountable to the
public in any way.

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ishansharma
I hate the idea altogether and in my opinion, ICANN is doing this for a quick
buck.

I have a hard time remembering 22 gTLDs as of now and they are just adding
more.

Also, this is going to confuse old people. Whole internet is .com for them.

Whole process is broken and I just hope this whole scheme fails.

~~~
cleverjake
According to ICANN they are not making money off of it. The money is spent on
the reviewal process. They emphasized multiple times during yesterday's
announcement they were pricing it at break even, and if a profit were to be
made, it would be given to the community for them to choose how to spend it.

Their financials are available here as well, if you wanted to follow up in a
year or so <http://archive.icann.org/en/financials/>

~~~
riffraff
I am probably being hardheaded, but what takes hundred of thousand of dollars
in the review process?

(I'd read the link but it seems last updated 4 years ago with data from 8
years ago)

~~~
vacri
Business lunches and executive retreats?

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Jacqued
This is, by all means, a terrible move.

I'm all for destroying the squatting "industry" by introducing an unlimited
numer of gTLDs if technically feasible. However introducing them only to give
some random corporation control over them seems absurd.

I fail to see how these companies could end up not being abusive with the TLDs
they own. Better an Internet with open market .com that cost 200000 bucks than
one with monopolies over many differen TLDs.

~~~
icebraining
Is a monopoly over a TLD really that different from a monopoly over a normal
domain? In the end, there's nothing that special about a Top Level, it's just
a shorter domain.

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Haiperlink
I love the idea of city TLD. it's nice to have domains like sightseeing.paris
or theme TLDs like amazon.shop this is what we already have for .xxx but
giving one company the power over TLD like .book or .author is a big problem
for me...

~~~
Lexarius
But which Paris? Paris, France? Paris, Texas? Paris Hilton? There are a lot of
things named Paris. Who gets to decide? Few cities have unique names, so it's
better to be specific. There's already a <http://www.paris.fr>, and US states
have subdomains assigned under .us (and often regional subdomains under those)

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simias
Off topic, but does anyone know why we use subdomain.domain rather than
domain.subdomain? It's always felt backwards to me.

I think it would make more sense to use com.ycombinator.news or de.google.www.
From general to specific, like IP addresses.

~~~
SeanLuke
I believe UUCP mail did it that way.

At any rate, this is an _address_. There's a convention here. Do I write
addresses as "1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington DC, 20006, USA", or
"USA, Washington DC, 20006, NW, Pennsylvania Avenue, 1600"?

~~~
Jacqued
I've always felt like physical mail addresses were written backwards too. As
it is, every word is meaningless until you have read what follows.

It would make a lot of sense with internet subdomains, too. Although to me,
WWW seems far more general than DE, so it would we www.de.google. Which they
will probably take when this goes live, so...

~~~
pixelbath
I suppose it's the way your brain maps it internally. To me, it makes sense to
have the most granular things first, as those become what's important.

To use physical addresses as an example, say I'm delivering a letter (I'm
delivering this letter end-to-end by myself in this hypothetical scenario).
Once I know the country, I don't need to check that information again. Once
I'm down at the city level, that then becomes useless information, and so on.

I'll grant that prepending "www" on every site doesn't make a great deal of
sense, but when the "World Wide Web" came into existence as such, it made
slightly more sense on the surface.

------
x1
I don't really feel this... I guess this might be a horrible thing to say but
"I don't really care".

It costs 100k to get a tld. So if Amazon takes .author then what about
.writer? Or what about biographer, columnist, composer, creator, essayist,
ghost, ghostwriter, ink slinger, journalist, originator, playwright, poet,
producer, prose writer, reporter, scribbler, scribe, scripter, word slinger,
wordsmith, work-for-hire, writer?

Is amazon going to take all of them? So what if they do? Does that suddenly
invalidate FirstNameLastname.com/net/me/us/co.uk or
FirstNameLastnameAuthor.com/net/us/co.uk?

I'm worried about the opposite trend. That is to say Amazon (or any other
company) REQUIRING people to buy a certain tld before allowing them to use
certain services (want to sell in the apple store you must buy a .apple tld,
want to publish a book you must buy a .book tld)

~~~
mikejarema
Interesting last point there. Ties into what I'm thinking will happen with
certain gTLDs, namely that the gTLD will set rules and structure around how
that gTLD can be used.

For example, .tel, domains in that namespace all have the same structure by
design. I don't believe a .tel registrant can change their DNS in order to do
otherwise.

This is a good thing to an extent - DNS for most people is a huge hurdle
preventing them from establishing their own online presence, now more so due
to IPv6. If new gTLD provide tools to get .author's or .lawyer's presence up
and running in an effective and fair way, great.

But overall I am discouraged by this possibility as its a nail in the coffin
of the open internet. It's akin to the review process in mobile AppStores,
really stating what you can and can't do within the confines of a gTLD. Not
something I'm looking forward to becoming comfortable with on the web.

------
crazydoggers
I wish people would inform themselves before blogging on topics they don't
understand.

ICANN has a dispute policy in place for this. Any community group can dispute
a gTLD application that is targeted at them. So ".authors" can get together
and prevent Amazon from getting the gTLD.

See: [http://newgtlds.icann.org/en/program-status/objection-
disput...](http://newgtlds.icann.org/en/program-status/objection-dispute-
resolution)

~~~
benwerd
That absolutely doesn't contradict the point of the post. Yes, a group of
authors could argue against .authors. But the process remains opaque, and the
point is that the onus is on an authors group to make that objection, rather
than ICANN making either a more open/market-like or more fair domain
allocation process to begin with.

~~~
crazydoggers
What process would you recommend? The process was pretty open market. Anyone
was able to apply for a gTLD. Running a registry is not cheap or simple. If
the price for application was lower, every Tom Dick and Harry would have been
applying, and then they'd have to wade through thousands of applications per
tld. So who do you propose is allocated and gets to runs the ".author" tld?

~~~
justincormack
There does not seem to be any requirement to say how the registrar will work,
ie if it is private, public or restricted to certain categories. I don't mind
public tlds and some restrictions (like .book is for books but open for
registration to anyone). And fully private ones if they are company names like
.Samsung are perhaps OK by me if the words are not generuc. But we don't know
what .book or .love will be yet.

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marcuspovey
I'd like to see the death / an alternative to DNS for resolving names to IP.
Its become a little too political + an easy target for snooping/censorship
(yes, techy people can get around blocks but that's not the point).

In terms of web, most people search rather than go to an address, and if they
know an address at all it's google.com.

Domains are now more for machines than people, so perhaps a different way of
resolving / finding information would be better - something peer to peer,
distributed and self repairing.

I speculated a little about this when the whole SOPA thing kicked off:
[http://www.marcus-povey.co.uk/2012/01/10/dns-is-a-symptom-
of...](http://www.marcus-povey.co.uk/2012/01/10/dns-is-a-symptom-of-broken-
search-sopa/)

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brianbreslin
so the author is upset that he might not be able to register
<http://benwerd.book> when he can just as easily get <http://benwerdbook.com>
only 3 characters longer?

People are failing to realize that if google weights these gTLDs then some
could be screwed. imagine if .book is penalized over .author or .read ?

~~~
narad
That's a good point.

Even then, I wonder why would Google choose a gTLD over any other TLD. For
Google, content only matters. It doesn't matter what your address is. If your
meal (content) is good, then spidey is happy to munch it and send it's
recommendations (traffic).

~~~
namityadav
I don't think that's true. Google gives more value to .gov and .edu domains,
for example.

~~~
Navarr
While that's true, it's probably because gov and edu domains are strictly
regulated.

I could imagine google giving higher priority to .book addresses, provided
that (a) the user was searching for a book and (b) .book addresses required
that the registrant prove that they're the author/owner of a book/book series.

In that case, it'd make sense to. I think Google thinks that way with domain
names as well.

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darrellsilver
What would have happened if we had sold .com .net and .org to Tandy, DEC and
Iomega?

~~~
Spooky23
.com addresses would be owned by "the Shack", and you would have to enter your
zipcode before visiting a .com site.

HP would have announced the retirement of .net after the Compaq merger, and
then change their minds.

EMC would raise the price of .org domains to $10,000/year, but you wouldn't be
able to actually assign IP addresses until the next release.

