Decius wrote:

Acidus wrote:
ICANN needs to be stopped. They proposing and prompting concepts that will irrevocably damage the Internet with essentially no one to keep them in check.

For the record, I couldn't disagree more. The original US centric TLD structure was kind of fucked up, given that the Internet is a global system, and I think its the scarcity of TLDs that makes names artificially valuable. If there were a thousand different TLDs that you could register your website in why would you pay some squatter $500 for .com?

I agree that the list of followon TLDs was hit or mis, but I use .info, and I don't think .asia or .travel are terrible. The problem is the fundamental idea that some committee should decide what names are and are not useful. If I want to create a TLD, and I can do it responsibly, why should I not be able to pick any name I desire?

Rightly or wrongly, the very scarcity of domain names also creates a reputation or trust in the domain names. Only one entity has shopping.com, and they probably had to pay a pretty penny for it. Odds that this is a dangerous site that will harm me, or steal my credit card, etc are very low. What about johnnysShop.widgetsForU?? No freaking idea. There is only one Wachovia.com and at most a dozen possible legitimate wachovia.[a-z]{3,}$. I see ".ru" or ".ua" and I don't visit. If something is .mil, I know what I'm dealing with. If something is .gov I know what level of truth I can expect (depending on whether I'm at *.senate.gov or not :-) )

If you flatten the space, you will lose this trait and you lose uniqueness. And I'm not saying these traits are so important that ICANN must always persist them. However I'm saying discarding a fundamental principle that was guided domain names for a decade+ should be made with thought and care and not to create a marketing opportunity.

What problem are you trying to solve Tom? That spammers have all the good names? Is the solution to that radically changing the way internet naming works? Or is it registrars charging a $5 tasting fee? Or that you need a more creative name?

RE: ICANN == Whores