

Internet domain names


A messy and expensive row is brewing over new suffixes for internet addresses

See article

Readers' comments



It's ironic that the so-called revolution in information technology has made it easier to produce and edit text, and yet editorial skills have withered. But it's somehow fitting that two examples of that trend - "applications will be probably be made public" and "Such questions remains" - appear in this article about ICANN's heroic attempt to boost revenues in the domain name industry.


Our company though about investing in few .TLDs as they call them back in 2009. Raising the money was not an issue. Guaranteeing decent returns was a big one.

More jotted notes can be found on:
* http://brief.ly/~ZfVR$q
* http://➸.ws/~o0i5$F


When internet started, business got the first pick because they had money and knowhow. Now, there are more players who can go and buy a name, so what? in a way, isn't it the same thing? if united airlines has already bought, unitedair, airunited, airlinesunited, flyunited etc, then why now add a dot and get a second level name as well. Just means more business for ICANN, after all, they need money too...just saying


It turns out that ICANN fails to put domain wars under control. when new application for doamin address is on progress, if ICANN predict what will happen and take an action to grant a firm applying for nes name, I think that cases wrrien did not take place.

If i can add my personel opinion, a purpose of posting this article is quite good. From this article, I figure out what is new bad ternd on intermet domain market. And it give us a potential of new war or new market that got a chance to make an investmetn to earn money.


This system won´t last long...too many loopholes and possibilities. Besides search engines do most of the work, why bother with the .findme
Only mentally insane would I pay 1, 2 or 3 million plus attorney fees for it.


I think in general companies, particular "old economy" companies, greatly overvalue domain names.

I would say the vast majority of people these days don't blindly type in the address of what they're looking in their browsers address bar. They search for it on Google, or Bing, or whatever and click on the first thing that comes up. Or they start filling out their address bar and then choose the thing that pops up because most people go to the same handful of sites over and over again.

Searching will almost never bring up a squatter's address before the legitimate site, so companies spend (or at least used to spend) millions of dollars to get a particular domain name to defend against a problem that doesn't really exist any more. Sure, the occasional grandma is going to go to zippo.store and buy a competing or knock off lighter. Who cares? The company would be better off spending its resources improving its own web presence than trying to fight this hydra-like problem of minimal consequences.

Obvious exceptions include banks and other companies where phishing sites could lead to serious problems for careless or technologically illiterate users.

Bob Griendling

Martin, your answer perfectly illustrates why a closer look is needed at these TLDs. The value of a TLD is not simply a vanity name. In fact, that's the least important aspect.

The TLD is valuable because its owner, the registry, controls how it is used. For example, the American Bankers Association has applied for .bank. They plan to validate every application for a second level domain, meaning that if you apply, they will validate that you are a bank. Thus they eliminate cybersquatting and reduce phishing expeditions. In most phishing, someone buys a name close to but not exactly a legitimate business’s name. Say Citybank.com, instead of citbank.com. They then send out an email asking you to log on to your account. If you don’t notice the typo, they track your key strokes and now have your password and logon id to do some real damage. But the ABA won’t sell citybank to anyone, meaning that end users will be better protected. If they know their bank’s website ends in .bank, they’ll know not to log on to any website that is not .bank.

Other TLDs will develop services that their particular industry needs and sell domain names that come with these value-added services. Thus companies will get these applications with the domain name, meaning they have lower development costs.

Today, domain names are sold through registrars like Go Daddy. A .com is a commodity and registrars will sell to all comers. But a .music, for example, will have a much narrower target audience and now will be able to market directly to that audience of people in the music business. Again, it could validate that everyone who applies for domain name under .music is a legitimate entity and then offer music applications (e.g., music playing & calendar listing software) along with the domain name.

So a TLD is far more than simply another name. Google will still find new TLDs in a search and people will bookmark their favorites. But that’s not the issue. Control is.

Google "adage raad" to understand the possibilities.


...and why exactly do we leave this stuff under the control of a U.S.-based private company (ICANN) again???

Because it was felt that having it run by the U.S. government was not appropriate long term. Why was it run originally by the US government? Because the Internet, names and all, was the outgrowth of a US government (DARPA) project. Thus does history explain how and why we ended up where we are.

Now if you want to argue that a new and different authority should be created, fine. But coming up with an existing international authority which has the same scope, and which functions well (just to serve as a template) might be a challenge.


Yawn... this topic is so uninteresting for the common man.

Who cares if United Airlines gets .united or if it eventually goes to Manchester United (or, more likely, to DC United).

A much scarier scenario for on-line fraud is the use of non-latin letters. As such a Cyrillic a could be used instead of a Latin a and send the browser to a fraudulent site.

aidan clarke

Who the hell thought this was a good idea? If anything we should be reducing the number of TLDs (or entirely getting rid of the idea), not adding the capacity to create an infinite number of new ones. If there was ever a reason to fire ICANN from overseeing the Internet, this is a pretty good one.


Easy solution: for a small or no fee, existing domain owners on the left side of the dot, get to own the name on the right side of the dot.
Not hard at all!

Jonathan R in reply to andymul

Not sure that would fix the problem. Even if United Airlines got first option at .united (under your scheme would they also get .unitedairlines & .unitedair?) they'd still have to worry about people registering names like united.fly, united.travel, flyunited.air, etc. And that would a giant pain for companies to deal with. A pain that could result in higher prices to consumers to offset all the excess registrations and litigation.

Gordon L

Perhaps they ought to pack up and move to a jurisdiction such as the UK or Canada where the loser in a lawsuit pays the legal costs of the winner.

After wearing a cost order or two, the trolls might find something else more profitable to do.


Isn't there a better way? A combination of existing country and global tlds should be sufficient. Why complicate matters?


There have always been problems with the ICANN decision process, take for instance the non-English TLD, as for instance with the Greek cctld in Greek .ελ that was rejected!

Antilocos in reply to Tz1

The aicceptance of .ελ for the Hellenic Democracy would sow confusion principally because many attempt to appropriate the homophone demonstrative article for a handful of shekels.

Tz1 in reply to Antilocos

I am not sure I can follow your argument.

Surely the ability of the Greek registrar to provide Greek-language users with names with native language URLs, must take precedence over any considerations about possible confusions. I would say that it is far more important for a culture to be able to use the network using identifiers in their native tongue.

Regardless of where you stand in the argument of what should be done. The main issue is that there is an organisation, in a position to make a decision that can significantly impact a culture without any justification and without so much as a constitution. At least the ITU and the united nations take cultural rights very seriously and I would be very surprised if they did not need to have a lengthy study demonstrating why the Greek registrar needs to pay (i believe) $150.000 twice for their application (as I believe they need to reapply after the fast track round), in a time that the Greek state is bankrupt, just for the privilege of writing the name of their country as it is written in their own language. ICANN was able to just say NO without justification. That is a serious problem for me.


What will this do to search results? Will movies.movies list higher in a search than movies.com? New domain names just seems to add confusion, while siphoning off money from businesses and institutions.

Who Values Freedom and the Common Law

ICANN is just another pseudo-government body. I wants control and money. Their 'control' is misplaced, and their greed leaves them short-changed.

ICANN should have an open policy on suffix registration, allowing anyone to register a suffix for the same price as a domain name. ICCAN can then demand a portion of all revenue earned by the suffix registrant when the suffix registrant sells domain names. ICANN will earn load of revenue from the MASSIVe number of suffixes sold, plus they earn even more money from the domain names sold within each new suffix.

Perhaps we should get rid od ICANN altogether.

Jester II

The internet cannot stagnate; change is good but always accompanied by a storm, which, ultimately, is only weathered with time. Whether it is moving on to IPv6 protocols or updating TLDs there seems to be staunch opposition to any form of change. Similar to the www prefix, the structure of current TLDs is largely outdated.
On a more specific note, to claim that there might be confusion between .ups and .ubs is no different than potential confusion between ups.com and ubs.com. To say that the change is a new minefield for fraud is short-sighted: there is no reason someone who will be fooled by a misleading domain like .disneyexperience would not be fooled by disneyexperience.com.

aidan clarke in reply to Jester II

But now there are an infinite number of combinations. You can have disney.movie.brave for instance. Or disneymovie.brave.disneyexperience. Or whatever else someone's inflamed imagination comes up with.

Change is not good – only good change is good, and this is a pretty stupid change. It offers absolutely no benefits (apart from an opportunity for registrars to extort more money from people), while making things more difficult to find and vastly increasing the scope for phishing attacks and malware.

The domain system is outdated in its requirements to make repeat payments to a cartel of registrars in order to get anything does, but this decision is trying to make an obsolete system even more obsolete.

D. Sherman

Nobody who can afford to buy and defend their own TLD is going to give up the .com version of their domain name. That being the case, what possibly could be the point of allowing custom TLDs, other than making a lot of money for ICANN?

What's really being thrashed about here is the beginnings of global trademark law. Since the Internet is, by definition, global, and every domain name must be globally unique, we really need some mechanism for adjudicating who gets to use what tradename world-wide. Conventional US trademark law contains several wrinkles that aren't applicable to the Internet. With conventional trademarks, it's legal to use the same trade name someone else is using, if there's no likelihood of the public being confused. If I operate "Joe's Diner" in Cleveland, and you open "Joe's Diner" in Chicago, and you don't attempt to copy my decor, menu, etc, I can't stop you from naming your restaurant the same as I named mine. The two restaurants are physically far enough apart that the public isn't likely to be confused. If you open "Joe's Discount Mattresses" right across the street from my "Joe's Diner", I also have no recourse against you, because nobody is going to confuse an item of furniture with a high-cholesterol breakfast platter.

What's needed on the Internet, which we've all been avoiding dealing with so far, is a way to adjudicate domain names to prevent cybersquatting and defensive registrations. There has to be a way to say that certain names are similar enough that they are all covered by one owner's trademark.

This should be easy for global brands like Coca-Cola and Ford Motors. It will be trickier for regional brands that happen to have the same name. The fairest outcome would probably be to force both of them to add some differentiation to their domain names, rather like "Standard Oil of New York" and "Standard Oil of California" in the old days. At that point, if the two companies wanted to negotiate privately so that one could get the "better" domain name by paying money to the other, that should be allowed.

No matter what is done, there would have to be some court that would rule on how close is close enough. We've sorted that out in the US, to the point where Joe's Diner in Chicago can coexist in the same country with Joe's Diner in Cleveland, and now that we have enough legal precedent's both Joes' lawyers can probably tell them how to steer clear of trouble. We would have to achieve at least that degree of legal trademark certainly on a global level as well. It should be possible for me to register, say "FordsTheatre.com" without fear of a lawsuit from the Ford Motor Company, whereas FordEngineService.com, without the permission of the Ford Motor company, would be on thin legal ice.

Somehow we need to adjudicate global domain name trademarks, as miserable as the task appears to be. The present system of defensive registrations, cyber-squatting, lawsuits in local courts, and now sales of TLDs to the highest (and maybe the quickest) bidder is a mess that's only going to get worse until we admit that even in the wild west there really wasn't "free land for everyone".

I'm using the term "adjudicate" here for a reason. That's the term used in the west for settling water rights, which is a comparable problem. The earliest applications of economic law in the west we related to gold mining, which required two things -- land with gold in it, and water to separate the gold. The 1872 mining act provided a very simple means to establish a mining claim -- get there first, stake the corners, post a notice, and record it in some official database. It's essentially the same method we currently use for domain names. Water rights were similar -- get there first, post a notice, and record it.

Partly because of the simplicity, disputes arose. Who really got there first? Was a prior claim truly abandoned? Did two claims overlap? With mineral claims, the "apex rule" caused much of the trouble -- it gave a miner the right to follow a vein underground even if it went under someone else's claim. The trouble was that veins are rarely neatly defined, are often discontinuous, and generally do not neatly follow the imagined geology of the politicians who wrote the law. It's been said that half the income from the Comstock Lode went to lawyers.

By comparison, US trademark law seems to work better than mining law, possibly because of lessons learned from the excessive litigation spawned by the latter. At this point, with a good century of intellectual property law to look back on, we should be able to devise some sort of global domain name law with an adjudication procedure, that would greatly reduce the current unproductive mess of domain registrations.

Intellectual property law is supposed to not just grant private property rights and protect them, but also encourage the advancement of knowledge and technology. Defensive registrations and squatting are unproductive and should be discouraged.


Latest blog posts - All times are GMT
GM's recall woes: Much old in the new
Schumpeter 1 hrs 2 mins ago
Daily chart: Who pays as America greys?
Graphic detail 1 hrs 13 mins ago
Climate science: Touchy subjects
Babbage 1 hrs 20 mins ago
GM crops, Indian farmers and suicide: GM genocide?
Feast and famine 1 hrs 13 mins ago
Herbalife: The House of Cards put
Schumpeter 2 hrs 58 mins ago


Products & events