Internet domain names

Where is the coverage of the positive aspects of this program?

At least three proposed new gTLDs have social responsibility in their business plans: .hiv is slated to give profits away as grants for research in the fight against AIDS, .kiwi has announced an intention to give 20% of profits to disaster recovery in New Zealand, and .gay has said it would also give back to the gay community.

Many of these domains would make it easy to sort out the content on the site. Who knows what content is on a .com domain? A .hotel site would definitely be about hotels or hospitality. A .nyc site would be relative to New York. We have classification systems in libraries, why not the Internet?

New gTLDs will have to meet standards of security to protect against cyberquatting. In any society, there will always be people who want to exploit the system for profit or gain, but that shouldn't prevent us from trying new ideas, or making innovations.

Nightmare waiting to happen and also too late.

For a start the free for all will work against the relatively successful because limited taxonomy of first, second and in some cases third level domains. Non-geopgraphic TLDs have always been outliers due to the American bias of the IANA that set up the original: com.us, org.us; gov.us would have been better than giving them their own TLDs. Anyone who has ever tried to work with other people on creating hierarchical taxonomies - and the DNS is nothing else - will know that it is almost impossible to consistently agree on things when new additions are possible.

But I suspect domain names have already passed the peak of their importance. With IE and Chrome subsuming the address bar into the search bar (the order is important) there is already the implicit recognition that people cannot remember domain names; and much as I despise it Twitter has started something similar with the "@"-prefix.

FWIW
janesmith.ny.us is already possible. I suspect that in Germany we could use the number plate convention for similar localisation, France could use department numbers, etc. But more likely NFC and Smart TV will come with ways of broadcasting the internet address to whichever device is handy. Oh shit, TV's that store relevant website addresses for convenience could be a business idea I ought to be trying monetise!

NagNagNag: it's nothing to do with hijacking the system. Just go into your thunderbird preferences and change your email address. Even if the DNS system were made secure, there is still no way to authenticate email other than requiring digital signatures.

Only citibank could have seng it. Not quite.

It still doesn't prevent someone from hijacking the domain name search algorithm anywhere in the chain of resolving the domains names to their computer equivalents, so it solves no security issues at all.

Even more so: this just gives malware programmers more ammunition to bamboozle the user.

The winners: Anti malware software will all have to be upgraded.

"But if you see an e-mail ending in .citibank, you will know that only Citibank could have sent it."

That's dangerous, ill-informed nonsense. Email sender addresses are as easy to forge as the sender address on a physical parcel. Take a look through your spam folder if you don't believe me. One of our favourite pranks as undergrads was sending emails to unsuspecting victims from "president@whitehouse.gov".

People will remember addresses like ipad.apple more easily than ipad.apple.com.

A couple of decades ago, that might have been true. But by now, years of experience have made remembering ".com" no real problem at all.

How this is anything but a security disaster is beyond me. Now legitimate sites only need to track near variations of their name with .com on the end. Now they need to track near variations of their name in all top level domains!
How many variations of citibanc.something can be created now, to defraud customers of citibank.com?

This is going to open a new can of worm in terms of phishing. Obvious homograph attacks like .сом (.som in Cyrillic) will no doubt be disallowed by the ICANN. What's problematic are right-to-left scripts like Arabic and Hebrew. Without a top-level domain in the Latin script, the sub-domain would appear on the furthest right.

!!! Are you sure you are correct when you say, of
"generic top-level domains (gTLDs)": "There are currently just 21 of these (22 if you count .arpa, used only for managing the internet's technical infrastructure), and most are reserved for specific users: .edu for American universities, .aero for air-transport companies, the recently-launched .xxx for pornography purveyors, and so on. Only four—.com, .org, .net and .info—are open to anyone." Really? Only four? I have paid for the alleged right to a DOT.ASIA domain name. Have I got something worth anything? Is it not a generic top level domain just like the four you cite?

Just a correction: there's no technical rule that prevents a TLD from having an A record (or with less jargon, from pointing to a website).

For example, try "http://ac/" or "http://tm/".

So, there could perfectly be a http://microsoft, that in Firefox and Chrome would appear simply as "microsoft".

Sir:
This seems like a gold mine for redirection companies such as Google-- especially, as one may want to find a non-Latin URL that has a Latin web subset, a relative rarity now.

The security aspect is also daunting. A small company can't possibly buy into thousands of gTLDs. This leaves an opening for criminals to take advantage of the situation to spoof the company and skim, say, credit card information while passing sales through to the real company. Perhaps ICANN ought to indemnify companies for this sort of thing, folding the indemnification cost into the quarterly gTLD support fee... get rich quick ICANN might suddenly become a bankrupt ICANN.

"Moreover, the new gTLDs can be in non-Latin script, adding to the diversity.”

In that case, maybe use of non-Latin script gTLDs should be limited to sites that use the said script in the site itself. (ex. Only Japanese language sites should be awarded .日本 or .東京　gTLDs, with the English language sites awarded .japan and .tokyo gTLDs instead)

What an utter mess this will be!

And a licence to over-charge / print money.

Here is a million dollar idea: Other than Porn, a guaranteed revenue model for the Internet is Cyber Squatting.

Buy a web address for a known deep pocket corporation like www.coke.bev or www.gap.store or www.ibm.biz or www.starwars.mov
or www.google.arpa

Then sit on it until their marketing department demands it.

A $50 investment can become millions.

It is interesting how an intangible nothing can be so highly valued.

It is a cyber gold rush that rewards the unscrupulous.