I meant to blog this last week but didn’t get round to it. ICANN, the body which oversees the addressing structure of the Internet, voted on Friday to open up Top Level Domains (TLDs) to allow companies or individuals to have any suffix they like. So, for example, News.com reports that instead of being limited to .com or .co.uk, eBay could have its own .eBay TLD. This is a bad, bad decision on so many levels; it will cause a ‘gold rush’ on domains, confuse users, result in convoluted non-standard URLs, remove the existing sensible structure from domain naming, and is potentially an open invite for fraudsters wanting to mimic or hack URLs. Just about the only positive thing is the decision to allow non-Latin domains, which means that (unlike currently) domains could be registered in character sets such as Chinese or Cyrillic.

CNET News.com reports on this stupid mistake here.

Posted Monday, June 30th, 2008 @ 12:52 am
Filed in business and productivity, science and tech

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Further reading

These posts may be related to the one above:

1. eBay cancels Google’s party
2. TLD for banks
3. Opening up search