NNSquad - Network Neutrality Squad
[ NNSquad ] Rich Kulawiec on gTLDs (via IP)
------- Forwarded Message From: David Farber <dave@farber.net> To: "ip" <ip@v2.listbox.com> Date: Thu, 26 Jun 2008 10:36:31 -0700 Subject: [IP] Re: FROM PARIS -- (STILL MUST HAVE BEEN FINE WINES TO COST $10M) must have been very good meals $10m ________________________________________ From: Rich Kulawiec [rsk@gsp.org] Sent: Thursday, June 26, 2008 1:22 PM To: Olivier MJ Crepin-Leblond Cc: David Farber Subject: Re: [IP] FROM PARIS -- (STILL MUST HAVE BEEN FINE WINES TO COST $10M) must have been very good meals $10m On Thu, Jun 26, 2008 at 09:12:25AM -0700, David Farber quoted: > Having been present at all the debates, my feeling is that there are three > broad camps in existence: > > 1. People who are concerned about endangering the stability of the DNS > through introduction of too many gTLDs > 2. Registrars/registries who are looking forward to the new gTLDs and seeing > this as a new business opportunity > 3. Registrars/registries who are seeing the creation of new gTLDs as a > threat to their own business model by seeing a reduced marketspace for their > already established gTLDs There's at least one other camp (and probably more): 4. People who see the proliferation of TLDs as an opportunity for still more abuse -- via spammers, phishers, squatters, link farms, typosquatters, registrars, and anyone else who can leverage it to their advantage and to the disadvantage of everyone else on th e Internet. Some examples: A. We all know that there is absolutely no technical justification for the .mobi TLD. Anyone wishing to offer mobile services could have used mobi.example.com (either as a host or a subdomain) and thus avoided the expense of yet another domain. B. The .name TLD is being rapidly overrun by spammers, aided and abetted by the lack of a proper WHOIS server for it. This isn't surprising: it follows on the heels .info and .biz (so heavily used by spammers and thus so heavily blacklisted that not even *they* are setting up many new domains there). Locally, I blacklisted the entire .info TLD after noting over 100,000 spammer domains; the count is now over 300,000 and still going up fast. And I'm not alone: .info is rapidly becoming scorched earth, useless to anyone. There little remaining reason for it to exist at all. C. As soon as any new TLD is created, domain speculators will rush to buy popular names in it: if .foo is created, sun.foo, google.foo, ibm.foo, myspace.foo, etc. will all be snatched up quickly. The only question is whether they'll be grabbed by squatters or whether the companies most often associated with them will get there first. Of course this kind of land rush creates substantial income opportunities for registrars and squatters (who can always offer to sell domains to legitimate operations who wish to avoid litigation) but it benefits nobody else and imposes substantial costs on people who don't need, don't want, and have no reason to use a .foo domain. D. Repeat (C) but with typosquatters, who will attempt to do there what they've done in .com and .net and other TLDs. I doubt the folks at eBay actually wanted paypa1.com (which is not the same as paypal.com) but self-defense against typosquatting likely compelled them to acquire it. They can now look forward to the expense and headache of acquiring not just paypal.foo, but also paypa1.foo for the same reasons. E. There is now evidence on the table that some registrars are nothing more than spammer fronts, created to provide a layer of obfuscation and plausible deniability, as well as to reduce operational costs. We don't need any more gTLDs: if any are created, they will quickly be overrun by abusers and rendered as much a wasteland as .info is today. In the process, registrars will profit, abusers will profit, and everyone else will be forced into pointless expenditures (to proactively or reactively defend themselves from the ensuing abuse). What we *do* need is an end to nonsense known as "domain tasting", an end to the abuse known as "front-running", rigorous vetting of registrars, unfettered WHOIS access, and an end to obfuscated domain registration [1]. These are steps toward end-to-end accountability in the domain registration process, something that's been sadly lacking over the past decade. - ---Rsk [1] It's often falsely claimed that this will expose addresses to spammers. This is silly: spammers already have or will soon acquire any address they wish, via a myriad of means. They're way, WAY ahead of the curve on this one, and security-by-obscurity is not going to work here any more than it does anywhere else. The best course is to presume that any email address will be targeted and defend it appropriately. - ------------------------------------------- Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/247/ Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com ------- End of Forwarded Message