- Thursday, 9 July 2009
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Potatoes are more intelligent than grass because people can eat them - Gurdjieff
Domain naming blown wide open
ON THURSDAY THE Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) approved a major expansion of Web addresses, opening a whole plethora of top level domains. What it practically means is that now instead of just plain and boring .org and .com, we can now all likely expect to see a load of .orgy and .cum addresses instead.
ICANN unanimously passed the proposal in Paris, along with another decree which will allow domains to be written in scripts other than Roman letters, including Chinese, Arabic and Cyrillic. .секс anyone? No... how about .性別?
Apart from revolutionising the web addresses of online porn sites, the move will probably also cause endless legal battles between corporations fighting over the same domain names. Colombia, for instance, is rumoured to already be drafting an injunction against Coca Cola corp for wanting its .coke web domain.
ICANN’s chairman, Peter Dengate Thrush, himself in the midst of bitter legal scuffles with several women’s pharmaceutical companies, noted “We’re expecting a broad range of applicants”. Using the most boring example that sprang to mind, he added “We may see a .smith so that all the Smiths in the world will have a place.”
Of course squatters, spammers and scammers will be having a field day with so many new domain name options up for grabs, but ICANN says it will require applications to go through an independent review process, in which third parties can challenge applications which threaten “morality and public order”.
We’re sitting tight with our pens poised for when the application for .gay turns into a major court case in the American mid-west.
Price is something that ICANN didn’t disclose on Thursday, but certain un-named officials predicted that starting prices would reach the low six figures (in American dollars). Of course, it depends how popular a domain suffix might be, and popular ones (.movies, .music, .travel) could go to the highest bidder at auction.
But ICANN know they’ll have to take things slow, probably through a year-long public review process, crossing the .bridges when they .com to them. µ
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I assume you wanted the Chinese translation for sex. You just need the first character 性. The word you used means gender.
These are the same frackers that did not allow .web but now release .domains to every Tom, Dick and Harry? MotherFrackers!
Assuming that one would have the capability to buy up complete rights to a domain extension, I'll be rolling my dice on the .WTF extension. Long reaching application I'm sure.
I can already see the arbitration committee at work. Imagine someone in Germany starts a domain .dick to promote an obesity support group in Germany. Guess how long it takes for an enlightened torturer in Kansas to think about a penis and file a complaint.
Can ICANN I say.
I imagine that this decision will end in an uncontrollable snafu on a level that the internets never experienced before! You might think that they will be the ones to dig through 50 tons of sh17, but in the end we'll be the ones drowning in it.
Any bets as to how soon Mageek takes the .world+dog domain?
The most useful ones would be .xxx & .scam
What is most impressive is that they (inq) and comments from Joe, actually managed to get the web server to display those characters.

Can you imagine how joe public (no pun intended) is going to cope.

I can really see that happing on high profile web domains (NOT).

Most people cant even spell .com let alone anything else....

This going to open the floodgates for site spoofing, can you imagine all the hate sites for example nvid.t*ssers....
Why extensions at all, this is just as stupid as the www. infront of every domain.
Why not simply declare a domain a single word without an extension at all.
And simply add something in front for subdomain, far more simple.
Since the author forgot, here's the link to see the official announcement:
http://www.icann.org/en/announcements/announcement-4-26jun08-en.htm

Great, as if it is hard enough to find what you are looking for on the web. Dibs on .1337