The whole idea of adding more TLDs is incredibly stupid.

"Hmm, domain name land grabs have always proven to be chaotic, expensive and time-consuming. Let's do it again."

A .london TLD? WTF?

According to Wikipedia (OK, I know) there's 2 Londons in each of Alabama and Ohio, one each in Arizona, Arkansas, California, Indiana, Kentucky, Minnesota, Missouri, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Illinois. There's also Londons in Canada, Belize, Equatorial Guinea, Finland, and Nigeria. Oh, yes, and UK.

And they want to do this for all city names?

And they want to have random non-heirarchical names for anyone with $200K?

Pure greed-driven madness!

The Kentucky casino domain name grab has already proved the US is not to be trusted with this stuff. Now they want to FU the TLDs!

Enough already. Pass control of TLDs to the UN. Make the USians use the .us TLD and then they can simply firewall anything that doesn't have it. Put them in the Unsullied Sandbox of America where they belong.

[/rant]

and will your distinguished organ be purchasing any?

.paris, because she'll wonder why all her sites are in french

Can I get .cotton or .matrix please?

...typical-icann.ripoff

And the porn industry.

Pairs? try www.onenightinparis

that is all

The whole world clubs together to create, say, a .geographic TLD.

Then are they free to add (sell off) .london.england.uk.eu.geographic, .london.ontario.canada.geographic etc through the whole gazeteer.

and ICANN gets one top level domain fee?

The whole world cant club together to feed the poor or even stop filling the air with crap. Theyre hardly going to put millenia of conflict behind then to piss Icann off are they?

Are you a troll?

More like price gouging and trebles all round for ICANN..

For 200 grand no system is needed at all. It'll happen infrequently enough for all the administrators of the root servers to be paid to manually edit config files, or any database that happens to be behind the root DNS.

How to turn something reasonably logical that works into chaos that will cause complete confusion. This is greed driven, not need driven.

if the $200K is purely to cover the $20M cost of implementation then once there have been 100 new TLDs registered, they'll back of the fee then?

Didn't think so.

....this is going to end it tears, by the bucketful !!

What would happen if someone registered .1 ?

Suddenly the loopback stops looping back ...

It isn't being used right now, but it might be worth a fortune one day.

Seriously, though, will there be a ban on two- and three-letter TLDs, on the grounds that at some point in the future a new country might come along and would then *need* that domain as its country-code domain? Perhaps .vla might be a test case?

This is *such* an ill-though-out venture that it surely represents the last nail in ICANNs coffin, banged in by their own fair hand.

'nuff said....

I covered this in a Rocketboom episode that I scripted a couple of weeks ago.

Thing is, with the OpenDNS, there is already an "underground" version of this free for all. Wonder if it's worth checking out to see what kinda of mess this is in or if it's one of those "great in theory, breaks badly when the unwashed get their hands on it" situations.

It's all about whom or what got there first!

What do people in the UK call their vacuum cleaners? Yep, it's the first company who managed to make it big. You don't say get the vacuum cleaner out, you shout "Grab the Hoover!".

So by that token when your average Joe talks about a website he thinks "www" and ".com" on the end, with whatever brand is in between. The number of arguments that have come about when I have asked my old man to go to site X only to find that he has automatically assumed WWW.xyz.COM.

No one will remember www.overpriced.tat.market or useless.IT.news.site, will they?

...I'm a troll.

So if not the whole world (that was facetious) an enterprising geezer with 200k to invest...

X -> WWW.xyz.COM?

you couldv'e caused a meltdown if you asked him to go to XYZ!

$200,000 so I can set up .xxx please?

...should be good for a laugh.

Will the cyrillic one be .commie ?

I want .exe

Nope xxx has been banned .

It isn't likely, fortunately, that a modest number of vanity TLDs will break anything too badly. The main impact seems likely to be how many fat-fingered typing errors will cause bogus queries to the root servers, looking for .londin or whatever.

If people want to give .bogon registrars free money for nonsense, why worry? It's just another form of income redistribution, something we so badly need in these desperate times...

and set up wildcard entries pointing to HTTP proxies directing to tor hidden services? could be interesting if tor hidden services could be accessed with or without tor with the same URL

...Sounds like a good choice. Visit our web site at www.dot.slash/dot/.

www.www.www

looks nice