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Starting today website names can use whatever they want after the dot. Well, whatever they want as long as it's approved and you have $185,000 for the application.

Apparently, unbeknownst to me, there has been for a bit now a .xxx domain for x-rated sites. Now there are no limits on what can follow the dot.

Will this be a good, bad or neutral change for the internets?

STORY

On the users end, no change. On the technical end, I wonder what they're doing to the domain name hierarchy.

.inbed

.noonewillvisitmysite

Time to domain squat.

This was my first thought, honestly. Could be a nightmare....

.desu

Zam.ige

It doesn't really affect anything on the technical end at all, except that top level domains will need to know about the full list of other top level domains.

Most people don't realize that the hierarchy of domain names starts with ".". It's just usually left off when typing a domain name (it's assumed). Unless you configure dns servers (or deal with some of the more esoteric aspects of the protocol), you never have to worry about it. All these new "top level domains" will just sit under the ".", just like all the others that exist.

eh it just means that if Joe fan wants to have a red sox fan page he can be redsox.fan

I don't see why corps are so desperate to make everything more complicated than it has to be. They should just secure a few key addies (.com .baseball etc) and trust that 98% of consumers are smart enough to tell what is the official site and what isn't.

The problem is when someone buys Disney.visitherenow and puts a bunch of porn on it that kids can see. Disney doesn't like that much.

That really only supports my point. The stupid parents see it, and think Disney is doing something untoward.

All true. And I can't exactly fault them for wanting to defend their name, either.

I had the same initial concerns many others have expressed here, but I think it'll ultimately prove to be a minor nuisance.

While you were previously restricted in the sense that you could only use the finite (though incredibly large number) of appendings available, there was zero regulation over them. There was absolutely nothing preventing a business from choosing .org over .com. And many companies got creative and used coutry codes such as .tv for websites pertaining to television (the main export of the island of Tuvalu).

There were already situations like that of whitehouse.gov and whitehouse.com (previously a porn site). I suppose companies could protect themselves by registering all of a somewhat small pool of possibilities, but it still came up.

People will adjust quickly.

I can see such a service being offered, but ultimately I don't think it's necessary.

This seems like a big change, that somehow it will make spoofing easier and allow fake sites to create more convincing doman names. It doesn't. People who can tell that google-services.com is not a legitimate google site will just as easily realize the difference between google.com and google.services. And people who can't make out the difference between google.com and google.services wouldn't have been able to tell the difference between google.com and google-services.com either.

It's a cosmetic change.

The more correct term would be standards, and there absolutely were/are (and frankly, even some regulations too). You cannot get a .mil name unless you are a US military site. You cannot get a .gov name unless you are a US government site. You cannot get a .edu name unless you are an accredited education organization (that gets a bit trickier though). You're correct that the .com and .org restrictions were not fully enforced, but that's largely because it was pretty impossible to do so. You technically had to be a registered non-profit to get a .org name, however over time the means to determine what that was became complicated to the point that they pretty much just gave up.

And frankly, the practice of large organizations obtaining names and then selling/leasing parts of the space did make those distinctions irrelevant. But from the top level perspective, that really only applied to .org and .com and frankly, no one really cared that much how strongly those rules were enforced.

Country top levels are enforced though. Only the authorized name space org (authorized by the country in question) can hand out names within that country's domain.




Again though, that's not a problem with enforcement or regulation at the top level, but the fact that once someone owns "cyb.org", they can turn around and sell "ima.cyb.org", "youra.cyb.org", and any number of variations they want to anyone they want.


The real issue with this change is the sheer number and variation of top level names (and the ability to create new ones for what is actually a pretty cheap price), As stated, those with any sort of trademarks involving name recognition will have much more trouble dealing with copies of their name out there. And you can bet that there will be a scramble for various enterprising groups to buy up names they think they can then parcel out and sell to other companies and organizations.


I suppose the flip side is that it may put some upper limits on how much someone can extort for a name they purchased ahead of time that someone else later wants badly. With the ability to create so many new top level domains, that someone can probably find some other name combination that will suite them just fine. It's a trade off I suppose.

Edited, Jan 12th 2012 7:09pm by gbaji

Could be. I personally don't care either way. I had just read an article in Crain's about the topic so was commenting on company concerns based off that.

They used to have the .mil site generation tool wide open. Some other person who is totally not me might have allegedly briefly had a .mil domain back in 1996...

I plan on registering setup.exe as a url just to annoy people. Anyone want to lend me $184,000

Edited, Jan 13th 2012 10:15pm by Kaolian