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I think that this misses forest for the trees.

There should be no restrictions on the domain names at all. We only have the arbitrary segmentation into m.n form (where n is a limited set of (org, com etc.)) for technical reasons.

Preferably, there should be no such restrictions at all. Or the n part should be an infinite set. But I don't see why people are partisan about restricting the available namespace.



We already had a de-facto infinite set... it was the m part. We could either buy up common variations of, or ignore the n part. Now it is becoming obvious that ICANN views n as the new m for one of two reasons: money or stupidity. I'm still not sure it can't be both.

If I'm a major corporation, do I now have to buy up my .n tld? Cannon did. Will IBM have to buy .ibm? Will apple have to buy .apple?


I believe that would be fine if everyone was as tech savvy as you and I. Unfortunately I still know of people who go to a site in the following way:

1) Type www.gooogle.com (not google, google.com or the browser search)

2)Type facebook.com in google search bar at google.com

3) go to facebook.com

Now add to it facebook.mobi, fb.me, facebook.xxx (that is a nice idea thought :P) and how can we expect the average user to understand that all these point to the same DNS?

DNS? What the hell is a DNS? I just want to see last night's party pics on Facebook


> But I don't see why people are partisan about restricting the available namespace.

Duplication of data.

Go to any major site and you'll see it has been registered as the same site in almost all of the other tlds or the rest of the domains are run by domain squatters.


Definitely. Current domain names have been around so long they seem natural, but they're pretty arbitrary given the way the web is used today.

Honestly, how often do you type in a full domain anyway? I generally type the first couple of letters into Chrome's address bar.


There is one theoretical advantage to having multiple TLDs: bad policies on the part of one registry don't affect all domains.

Of course, since this only gives you effectively two choices right now (Verisign = com/net and Afilias = org/info), it's not a particularly good reason.




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