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?
ICANN is wrong
31–40 of 94 posts
Re: ICANN is wrong
#32If 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.
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 gran…
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.
Re: ICANN is wrong
#33Why are TLD's needed at all? Why can't I just name my host any arbitrary set of characters?
Re: ICANN is wrong
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
OK, sorry. But it greatly increases the surface area, no? Would you say it really isn't an issue?
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. T…
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.
Re: ICANN is wrong
#35"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…
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.
Re: ICANN is wrong
#36If 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.
"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."
Seems like I covered the Apple case.
Re: ICANN is wrong
#37"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…
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.
"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).
Re: ICANN is wrong
#38I 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.
Re: ICANN is wrong
#39Each 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 Sou…
No, because there are hundreds of other places one can register 'amazon' as a second-level domain.
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
Re: ICANN is wrong
#40With 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.