
ICANN is wrong - falling
http://scripting.com/stories/2012/06/20/icannIsWrong.html
======
dsr_
_If it's a company's trademark, fine -- let them buy the corresponding TLD. No
harm done._

Bzzzt, wrong. Trademarks are industry-specific: that's why Apple Records can
exist alongside Apple Computer. If there's no likelihood of confusion, there's
no conflict.

And of course, trademarks are not fully international.

Winer is right about ICANN being wrong. There's just so much else that ICANN
is wrong about.

~~~
duskwuff
As an excellent example of this: Consider "Monster". Both Monster Worldwide
(e.g, Monster Jobs) and Monster Inc (e.g, Monster Cable) applied for the
.monster TLD, and there's at least one other significant claimant to that
brand who didn't apply for the TLD (Hansen Natural / Monster Beverage Company,
makers of Monster Energy).

Hilariously, both Monster Worldwide and Monster Inc claimed in their
applications that granting them the TLD would reduce user confusion:

Monster Worldwide (application #477):

> The proposed .monster gTLD has the following user experience goals: [...]
> Reduce the risk of Internet users being misled, believing and⁄or acting on
> erroneous, information about Monster Worldwide, its business partners and⁄or
> its products and services presented online by unauthorized 3rd parties

Monster Inc (application #271):

> Therefore, .monster gTLD will: [...] represent authenticity and assurance
> that the domain names are directly associated with Monster thus promoting
> user confidence...

~~~
grabeh
In terms of reducing the risk that users would mistakenly use a site where a
third party was intentionally looking to pass themselves off as the particular
variant of Monster, it is a good argument. When a consumer is aware that the
only legitimate Monster sites are those with the .monster suffix, this would
reduce the risk of them using fraudulent sites.

If on the other hand a user looking to find the jobs variant stumbling upon
.monster domains controlled by the energy variant, there is no risk of user
confusion in this regard.

In summary, the confusion they allude to is third parties using the mark or a
variant thereof in a deliberate attempt to mislead, as opposed to confusion
between established brands.

------
larrys
"How does Google get the right to capture all the goodwill generated in the
word blog? They are not the exclusive owner of it, as they are with the name
Google. However they claim the right to become that owner, by paying $185K to
ICANN. Nowhere in their proposal is an offer to pay money to the people who
created the idea that they would take over. And what if the creators aren't
willing to sell it to them? permalink"

Dave - you own scripting.com. What gives you the right to control that? How is
that any different? I can't use me.scripting.com without your approval. You
didn't agree to letting anyone do that when you bought the domain for $x per
year in fees. You didn't invent the word "scripting" you were just the one to
get the domain back in 1995, right?

What gives anyone the right to own any domain name "news.com" or "boat.com"
etc?

That said I am not a fan of the new TLD's but that's a separate issue.

~~~
davewiner
It's not entirely different, but those were the rules everyone was playing by
then. So in that sense it's very different. We haven't agreed to these new
rules yet. I don't think we should. Hopefully that's not too subtle.

~~~
larrys
"We haven't agreed to these new rules yet."

Who's "we" sucka?

(Sorry - see 2:17 in on the following had to crack a rare joke):

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoXDzsuqXFg>

"the rules everyone was playing by then"

The rules are clearly laid out now. The difference is that you need to be able
to pay real money to play now. Some of that is greed and some is practical.
You need to limit the applicants to organizations with the financial
wherewithal to be able to provide the stability needed (that said they do have
some kind of program for less financially worth non-profits).

"I don't think we should."

To late for this now. The time to do that was many years ago when comments
were invited and there were meetings etc.

By the way there are many parts to the ICANN process that are exclusionary. To
get to one of their meetings you have to be able to afford to get in an
airplane and fly to an exotic (and sometimes) unsafe location. Nothing fair
about that. But that is the way things are (in Washington as well).

~~~
davewiner
We as in the users of the Internet.

~~~
larrys
Meanwhile the gTLD director resigned yesterday:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4147181>

------
sajid
Each reason the author gives against the new TLDs also applies to domain
names.

For example, he writes:

"Not so sure about Amazon buying .amazon, because it also is the name of a
rainforest in South America, and .apple could be a problem for growers and
lovers of the fruit."

But the same reasoning applies for domain names:

"Not so sure about Amazon buying amazon.com, because it also is the name of a
rainforest in South America, and apple.com could be a problem for growers and
lovers of the fruit."

~~~
sneak
No, because there are hundreds of other places one can register 'amazon' as a
second-level domain.

~~~
snowwrestler
And these will continue to exist even if Amazon.com the company secures
.amazon the TLD.

I think Dave's mistake is that he believes that TLDs represent anything
canonical. Originally they were meant to, but only a few do anymore[1]. In
almost every case, they're just a few extra characters at the end.

[1]gov and mil

edit: formatting

~~~
Kerrick
Also, .edu and a couple ccTLDs. Basically, any TLD that has a rigid filtering
process for obtaining one actually means something.

~~~
quesera
There are a few absolute and total lies buried in .edu, and have been for
decades.

I hesitate to mention the domain names, because I appreciate the humor in
them.

Also because they were approved by John Postel himself, and he was a good guy.

------
obituary_latte
I haven't seen anyone talk about it, but there is another important
implication of all these new TLD's: security.

This will give malware purveyors a whole new plethora of vectors to exploit
insofar as social engineering goes.

Imagine regular user 'A' is surfing, looking for a cool new pair of shoes.
They know that kewlShoes is their fav shoe company evar. Some entity has paid
the huge fee to acquire the .shoes TLD in order to sub-let domains at whatever
nominal fee they decide.

User 'A' browses to kewl.shoes instead of kewlshoes.kshoes and unwittingly
becomes the latest drive-by-download victim happily handing over their
credentials to who-knows-who.

I know this is broad and speculative, but think it is worth consideration.

Has there been other discussion about this out there that I haven't seen?

~~~
icebraining
That already happened with second-level domains, it's not a new vector.

~~~
obituary_latte
OK, sorry. But it greatly increases the surface area, no?

Would you say it really isn't an issue?

~~~
icebraining
I think the vector itself is an issue; but I don't think this will make it
significantly worse. For any domain, there's already hundreds or thousands of
possible similar domains across the existing TLDs - adding a few more TLDs
won't make much of a difference.

I also doubt that the future owner of .shoes - whoever that may be - will be
stupid enough to devalue his own TLD by selling second-level domains like
candy. There's probably more money to be made by banking on its exclusivity.

~~~
obituary_latte
True, there are tons of similar TLD's out there already. But this ins't a "few
more TLDs". This is ~2,000 new TLD's.

Indeed, 'shoes' was a bad example. But many of these new TLD's _have_ been
applied for by entities who plan on sub-letting the TLD to others.

~~~
icebraining
_This is ~2,000 new TLD's._

No, this is ~2000 TLD _applications_. We have no idea how many of those will
ICANN approve.

 _But many of these new TLD's have been applied for by entities who plan on
sub-letting the TLD to others._

My point wasn't that they won't sell domains, but that many or most won't sell
them to any random shmoe like .com/.net/etc are sold, but only to businesses
in the fields and how are willing to pay a lot more for the privilege, which
doesn't describe scammers.

~~~
obituary_latte
Fair point about the approval.

>but only to businesses in the fields and how are willing to pay a lot more
for the privilege

Here's to hoping you're right.

Though, I doubt anybody would be surprised to find the bar vastly lower than
you expect--especially when it comes time for these purchasers to recover some
of the cost and find these fields are smaller than anticipated.

------
grabeh
My original thought when hearing about the prospect of new gTLDs was that a
central body would look to claim a descriptive term such as 'blog' and make it
available to anyone who wanted to host a blog under set criteria, and provided
that centralised body committed to providing access to anyone under reasonable
terms. This would act as a guarantee of origin of the site and would be
helpful to consumers.

I don't therefore see an issue with the registration of new descriptive gTLDs
but only if access is provided in line with the above. The issue with
Amazon/Google's land grab is that we cannot guarantee the basis on which
access will be made available which could in turn lead to segregation,
particularly if google were to control a gTLD and also provide greater
prominence to it in search results.

At the present moment in time, it is the lack of certainty in the process
which is troubling. Of course, if I read ICANN's handbook more fully things
might become much clearer.

~~~
wmf
It's worse than that; Google said that if they get .blog it will only be
available to Blogger users.

------
CPops
I don't know how the internet could easily transition out of this mess, but I
think it would probably be good to eventually get rid of as many TLDs other
than .com as possible. Does it add any real value to users to have to try and
remember and differentiate between .com, .org, .net, .info, .me, .ly, .tv, all
the others I'm forgetting about, and now .shoes and .pants and whatever else
companies come up with?

It just creates more and more opportunities for phishing attacks to have
essentially unlimited TLDs created where it makes it harder for anybody to
easily figure out what is the actual home of any company.

Also, I'm not worried about Amazon or Google or Facebook or Microsoft, but for
smaller businesses, they're going to be faced with costly and unnecessary
legal battles and challenges over all kinds of trademarks. It's such a waste
of effort. It's bad enough when there were just a handful of TLDs that were
relevant, but now that we have essentially unlimited domain names all sorts of
additional costly conflicts will emerge.

If these new TLDs have to exist, one potential way to minimize confusion and
minimize disputes would be for all .com owners to automatically be assigned
that respective TLD, so you always automatically know that "icloud.apple" is
owned by Apple.com and that "books.amazon" is owned by Amazon.com and if you
went and bought "xyz12345.com" you would also automatically own the xyz12345
TLD so these disputes would mostly be already settled. But that's not going to
happen because there would be no extra money in that.

~~~
Karunamon
Problem with that (aside from the lack of capitalistic motive) would be
management (IIRC, ICANN isn't directly managing the new TLD's, that job goes
to the companies who actually end up with them), as well as what happens when
someone who illegitimately owns a .com name were to get the associated TLD.

------
brownbat
Funny, I've heard all these same complaints about second-level domains.

It's a human-readable addressing scheme. At some point, words will be used.
The more memorable, the more usable. All those words that were "too important"
to be used as TLDs should be allowed as TLDs precisely because they are
important.

TLDs should be open to any string of characters, unicode if possible, and
registrars should have universal single price registration fees for any site
on any domain.

If in that nightmare world .llama should be bought by a fad in comfortable
footwear, depriving some Llama rancher's association of their god-given rights
to address space, we will just have to hope Mother Earth will somehow learn to
heal.

Instead of imagining future conflicts, we should look at TLD behavior right
now. Look at the rise of super short TLDs flooding profits to random
countries. It might make you realize that appending the meaningless ".com" at
the end of everything is a giant waste of time, since people will pay so
handsomely to avoid this, all proceeds to random lottery winners like Tuvalu.
(Nothing against Tuvalu, who undoubtedly needs the money for boats to leave
their poor drowning island.)

If you look into what consumers want, instead of the complaints of a few
random interest groups, it'd be clear we should somehow be able to go to
"google" instead of "google.com" or "wiki" instead of "wikipedia.org" or "bit"
instead of "bit.ly." Chinese users should be able to spell Baidu in their
natural language, without resorting to a half-assed toneless Westernization.

ICANN's biggest mistake is not going far enough. They should chuck the whole
TLD system and start from scratch, driven by the revealed preferences of those
who actually browse the internet.

------
Gring
Of course ICANN is wrong. There just in it for the money. Their TLD-creation
is like a money press, why stop?

------
kalleboo
One thing I've not seen addressed about these new proposals are how cross-
domain cookie wildcards are going to be handled. Right now all the major
browsers have large tables they've manually compiled to make sure you can't
register a cookie on say, _.ac.uk, or_.pp.se to track people across domains.
Who is going to manage the security of these new TLDs?

------
TheMagicHorsey
The author is blowing the problem out of proportion. If Google uses the .blog
TLD abusively or in a way that is irrelevant, users will go to another .TLD.
There is no limit to the number of places users can go. The value in the
mindshare of a word like "blog" is overblown, and it isn't the same as the
monopoly power granted by an exclusive patent. If .blog domains suck, then we
won't go there. Nobody will host blogs there. Nobody will care. It won't be a
hip place. On the other hand, if someone makes a .TLD called something
arbitrary (say .ddffdd) and everyone likes it, then guess what, it won't
matter squat what is on .blog, everyone will go to .ddffdd. That's all.

Lets not act like the landing page URL is such a big deal. It is if you built
up a trademark and if everyone is used to going to .blog for every single
blog. But nobody is used to that. And nobody cares. And even if they are used
to that habits can very quickly change. There were lots of so called
"monopoly" destinations a decade ago and not even one of them is still
standing today. Its a whole new ballgame on the Internet. And every ten years
its going to be a whole new ballgame again.

Dude is seriously getting emo about a non issue.

------
zhoutong
IMHO, the biggest problem of gTLD is the inequality created on the Internet.
Google.com's registry cost is less than $8/year, just like any random .com
domain. Everyone has the fair chance to get a domain and start a business
online.

But when the gTLDs are available for grabs, the big companies will definitely
get their trademarks as TLDs, even when they have no intention to open that to
the public. gTLD scheme is not new - .COM is managed by Verisign, the same way
as the potential .google being managed by Google. What's new is the removal of
the requirement of opening for public registration, and much less regulation
and evaluation of eligibility.

When the big companies have their special branding schemes, small businesses
lose out. Suppose that the new gTLD scheme is a huge success (which IMO not
likely), .google, .apple and .amazon are official tags for big companies, and
.COM will be the small business paradise. This divide is definitely harmful
for internet development.

------
marshray
I am considering configuring all DNS resolvers I am responsible for (i.e.,
those at my house) to block these new ICANN gTLDs.

Who's with me?

~~~
marshray
For the record, this received 2 upvotes :-)

------
koide
I've said it on the previous Dave Winer's article about it. I really don't get
what's the big deal as long as the all the previous TLDs continue to exist and
operate just like they have been operating.

Some enterprises will have the new fancy TLDs, good for them. The rest of us
will have to keep going as we have been going (we might even get access some
of the new TLDs.) I really doubt that, for example, having my.book will be a
significant competitive advantage versus having mybook.com

What am I missing? (Yes, greedy ICANN is evil, but what else?)

~~~
klez
So why do people still buy myname.com when myname.wordpress.com is ok?

~~~
koide
myname.wordpress.com is not ok when compared with myname.com, but my.babe
compared with mybabe.com or myba.be is ok

------
febeling
The current default is that a company can own its name under all important
TLDs. That is feasible because there are only so many generic ones
(.com,.net,.org, maybe .info and .name) and a few of countries you want to do
business with. So you could cultivate the expectation that you need and once
will have your brand name (in its variations) under all of these.

That will no longer be possible. Also, it will not possible to just assume
that the TLD is the new domain name, with every middle-sized company snatching
up their brand name as TLD.

So when that expectation is no longer there, there will be no problems at all.
Some of these TLDs will work similar to the existing generic TLDs, with the
possibility for third parties to buy regular domains. Others will operate more
like private tropical islands, used as some kind of status symbol.

The whole thing has one likely positive consequence, though. It might weaken
the idea that you could somehow own a name or word. Some arbitrary slightly
deep-pocketed entity grabs a name that most legitimately interested people
cannot afford. That happens often enough, and nobody gives much about that
name plaque any longer. Plus, old-fashioned brand operators will have a tough
time buying up all "their" domains under the newly formed TLDs until they
eventually give up and realize they cannot control "their" name in every
conceivable abstract namespace. Everyone wins.

------
andyjohnson0
I wonder what the chances are of these new gTLDs being as successful as, say,
.biz or .mobi? In other words, not at all successful.

One reason to be optimistic about the failure of gTLDs is recognition. I think
people understand that something ending in .com or .net or a ccTDL is an
'internet address', but how do you indicate this with a gTLD like 'book' or
'blog' where there is no visual hint to indicate that it is a domain?

------
akshayagarwal
The internet can be made a much better & safer place if the new registries
enforce proper regulations. Of course, there will be exceptions but there are
many major players in this race who will work towards this objective. If you
look at it in another way, it opens up a whole new world of opportunities not
just for ICANN or the registry but for us, developers! Lets say I made a super
awesome Iphone App and want a website for it, how much is the probability of
me finding a relevant .com domain name for it? On the other hand, I have
higher chances of getting a very relevant name with a .app extension & if this
extension is popular amongst app users (which the .app registry would
definitely ensure) then I have just multiplied chances of my app being
discovered easily! Now some would argue that apps are to be found in app
markets but then this was just a simple example, the possibilities are
endless. I believe we are in a historic moment of the evolution of internet,
something which would make the internet better, easier & safer for all of us.

------
sp332
_Sex, love, laughter, babies, books, songs, cars, poetry, etc..., they're too
important, too basic to life. Not the kinds of things any company, for crying
out loud, should be able to claim to own._

No one claims that Verisign owns commerce just because they manage the .com
domain. Or that Google would own all blogs if they get to sell .blog domains.

~~~
jessedhillon
These are entirely different things: .com is managed for the benefit of all
commercial entities (and Verisign). Google's intended use of .blog would only
be to assign domains to Blogger properties.

~~~
sp332
Do you think so? I think they would make far more money by selling subdomains.

~~~
jessedhillon
In addition to being uninformed about the basic facts here, I think you are
overestimating the market for $7 - $50/yr blog hosting and underestimating the
brand value of an exclusive Blogger TLD.

~~~
sp332
I didn't mean hosting, I just mean selling the subdomain. Like Verisign sells
*.com subdomains.

~~~
maxerickson
How much does Google care about $18 million?

(That's assuming they sell millions of domains at a decent price per. They
currently make that revenue in a few hours.)

~~~
wmf
Yeah, that's what worries me. The strategic value of controlling some TLDs
will be higher than the value of renting them out.

------
ciex
Isn't the real issue here that it's just unnatural to use fixed combinations
of letters to refer to websites? There is a reason that natural language is so
hard to process for computers: It's inherently context-dependent and never has
meaning per se. The domain name system on the other hand tries to impose a
fixed naming system on us that is absolutely incomprehensible to anyone
without technical knowledge.

The only solution to this mess I can see is a non-profit HTTPS server
certificate verification authority in combination with a complete revamp of
the user experience for browsing web ressources. I should be able to just
search for the page I want to visit instead of having to remember its _exact_
name.

~~~
icebraining
We already have those, they're called search engines. If you want a non-profit
one you can use YaCy: <http://yacy.net/>

------
snowwrestler
With a few exceptions, TLDs are not canonical in any real sense anymore. That
ship sailed years ago when .org and .net were opened up to general
registrations. And it continues to sail today: is bit.ly really based in
Libya? No of course not. So who cares if Amazon.com the company secures
.amazon the domain. In practical usage it's not that different from what
they've done snapping up amazon domain names for years.

------
zobzu
Its all about "getting more money" anyway. Capitalism issue. Things always get
corrupted into that. Not that any other system we have had so far was better.

------
naturalethic
Why are TLD's needed at all? Why can't I just name my host any arbitrary set
of characters?

~~~
davewiner
This is by far the most interesting comment in this thread.

I think it's a fair question. Maybe at one point there was a need to have
different namespaces, but what need there is now for it, hard to say.

~~~
pyre
Of the top of my head:

* Domains + sub-domains allows for wildcard SSL cert registrations (e.g. a cert that covers _.example.com).

_ There's also cookie registration.

* How do I differentiate between my_blog_host, my_blog_host_2 and really.my_blog_host? Are they all owned by the same person? Is really.my_blog_host associated with my_blog_host?

------
drivebyacct2
Previous discussion from this author/blog on this topic:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4119060>

