New TLDs Safer Than Old Ones?

from the hmm-yeah-okay dept

ICANN approved the useless .travel top-level domain last year -- well, useless to anybody except the registrars collecting the fees -- and it opened for business this week. Apparently because applications are reviewed by some trade groups to ensure they're made by groups that meet an arbitrary definition of travel-related, consumers can have "confidence" they're dealing with a legitmate travel site. I guess all those .com sites people buy plane tickets and make hotel reservations on aren't reputable anymore, and on the flip side, anybody involved in the travel industry (and that can bother to fill out a .travel application) is automatically reputable. Almost none of the justifications for adding new TLDs at ICANN's discretion add up, except for the idea that they exist just to generate more registrar fees. If ICANN wants more TLDs, throw things open to any TLD, rather than just tricking a few out every so often.
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  1. identicon
    Anonymous, 3 Oct 2005 @ 6:12pm

    DNS needs to evolve

    DNS is ripe for changes anyways. I know there have been some proposals floating around from time to time, but this is one area where time is running out. There are just too many issues with the current system (administration, name camping, name collisions, typo camping, slowness of adding useful domains (.xxx), speed at adding worthless domains (.travel), security, etc., etc., etc.) ...

    DNS names are just user hostile anyways...

    link to this | view in thread ]

  2. identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 4 Oct 2005 @ 11:52am

    Re: DNS needs to evolve

    .jobs was a big joke as well. Like every website on the planet really needs a separate domain for $100/yr to list their job openings. Um duh.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  3. identicon
    crystalattice, 4 Oct 2005 @ 4:26pm

    Where's .xxx?

    Apart from from the big three (.com, .org, and .net) it seems like .xxx would be the most valuable. Not only would it help the right-wingers "protect the children" by allowing easier filtering (especially if they forced all "obscene" sites to use it), users could be guaranteed to find what they wanted.

    link to this | view in thread ]


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