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posted by janrinok on Thursday March 05 2015, @05:11PM   Printer-friendly
from the I'm-sure-that-it-will-be-in-our-interests-/sarcasm dept.

El Reg reports:

A raft of patent applications has presaged a possible legal war in the rapidly expanding domain-name industry.

This year alone, market-leading registrar GoDaddy has applied for no less than eight patents specific to the DNS world, covering everything from searching for a domain name to register, to recommending a specific domain based on user input.

At the same time, market-leading registry Verisign has applied for a wide range of patents, many covering more technical aspects of the domain name system and also covering commercially valuable ideas like enhanced privacy protections (20150058999) and abuse protection (20150047033).

[...] In the past six months, the number of internet top-level domains has more than doubled as 500 dot-words – from .london to .xyz – have been added to the roughly 300 that already existed. That number will grow by another 500 in the next six months.

The result has been a jump in competition in the registry market, and the domain-selling arena (the registrar market).

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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Jeremiah Cornelius on Thursday March 05 2015, @05:52PM

    by Jeremiah Cornelius (2785) on Thursday March 05 2015, @05:52PM (#153576) Journal

    The VALUE of any one TLD is reduced by the addition of additional TLD nodes to the root namespace.

    There are morons who view the Internet Namespace as a virtual Real Estate Market - and believe that they are inventing whole new continents for the renting.

    Ridiculous semantic complexity is introduced for no purpose but to serve non-technically informed marketing interest. Complexity is increased with the addition of names and returns no actual benefit. This is an intended bubble, that will leak away before it can pop.

    --
    You're betting on the pantomime horse...
    • (Score: 2) by SlimmPickens on Thursday March 05 2015, @06:28PM

      by SlimmPickens (1056) on Thursday March 05 2015, @06:28PM (#153585)

      Not knowing much of DNS, what's the problem with the extra TLD's? Does it really make a difference if you're seeing com.xxx or xxx.com? If you're curating them manually I would have thought they make your job easier.

      • (Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 05 2015, @06:55PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 05 2015, @06:55PM (#153597)

        One of the problems is that it's easy to fool the gullible into thinking that whatever.newfangledtld = whatever.com. They might go to the wrong one by mistake, and hopefully it isn't malicious. Another problem is that people have to buy as many of these as possible in order to prevent their users from being fooled.

        • (Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday March 06 2015, @04:25PM

          by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) Subscriber Badge <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Friday March 06 2015, @04:25PM (#153867) Homepage Journal

          back during the dot-com boom, some joker had the bright idea of selling a browser extension that "enabled" the user to enter only a single keyword, without the need for the ".com". Of course these keywords were sold by his same company.

          He gave the specific example of entering "bambi" to look up Disney's page about the classic movie. That was just a hypothetical example, and it only worked if the browser had his extension installed.

          Let's just say that "bambi.com" didn't depict a young, animated deer.

          Good Times.

          --
          Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
      • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Jeremiah Cornelius on Thursday March 05 2015, @07:31PM

        by Jeremiah Cornelius (2785) on Thursday March 05 2015, @07:31PM (#153609) Journal

        I "own" a "brand". Now, instead of paying for .com and maybe .net or .co.uk to avoid confusion? Let's see if we go for .brand and .hot and .consumer and .mobile and...

        Value is decreased.

        Now? How does anyone know which to go to? Is there additional semantic meaning to the expanding taxonomy? Is it significant enough to justify the various complexities and ambiguities that result?

        No F*cking Way. Useless land grab.

        The MEANING of TLD is for a root authority for national government, commercial entity, etc. Admittedly, this is an anachronism and DNS is not an ISO x.666 namespace.

        The way to advance this or provide meaningful innovation is not through patent-locking methods to drive splintered taxonomy based on rent creation instead of use case.

        --
        You're betting on the pantomime horse...
    • (Score: 2) by Wootery on Friday March 06 2015, @05:38PM

      by Wootery (2341) on Friday March 06 2015, @05:38PM (#153881)

      Ridiculous semantic complexity is introduced for no purpose but to serve non-technically informed marketing interest.

      Oh, nonsense. It generates lots of money for ICANN.

      Not only are there lots of gimmicky new TLDs to get people buying, but companies now have to buy up even more domains, just to 'lay claim' to their own name.

      Engineering company? Better register your .engineering domain too. The .com just isn't enough these days.

      Curiously the .engineer TLD is seeing little uptake.

      • (Score: 2) by Jeremiah Cornelius on Friday March 06 2015, @05:42PM

        by Jeremiah Cornelius (2785) on Friday March 06 2015, @05:42PM (#153883) Journal

        I will assume you meat to "smirk" after the statement about ICANN... ;-)

        --
        You're betting on the pantomime horse...
        • (Score: 2) by Wootery on Friday March 06 2015, @08:08PM

          by Wootery (2341) on Friday March 06 2015, @08:08PM (#153921)

          Yes, just so.

          I'm not exactly impressed with the way ICANN generally behave. They accumulate [domainnamewire.com] huge amounts of money [domainincite.com] just in case they get sued... but in fact have nothing at all to do with the money, as they aren't getting sued.

          I'm not sure how the domain-space would best be managed, but ICANN ain't it.

  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by BananaPhone on Thursday March 05 2015, @05:56PM

    by BananaPhone (2488) on Thursday March 05 2015, @05:56PM (#153578)

    The only way to make me go to one is by fooling my with Bit.ly and the like.

    The true value of these TLDs only occur if people are willing to type them in a URL.

    And right now they are worth $0

    • (Score: 2) by bryan on Thursday March 05 2015, @06:24PM

      by bryan (29) <bryan@pipedot.org> on Thursday March 05 2015, @06:24PM (#153584) Homepage Journal

      Ditto goes for the inappropriately used country code TLDs like Libya (.ly) or British Indian Ocean Territory (.io)

  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 05 2015, @06:36PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 05 2015, @06:36PM (#153587)
    All of the really unique words i've searched for on google. Things that brought up ZERO results when used with quotes.

    Within a month all those words are now registered domains belonging to godaddy.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 05 2015, @09:37PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 05 2015, @09:37PM (#153658)

    with the glut of new gTLDs, hopefully somebody (probably Google) will make one of them free. like .tk

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by kaszz on Friday March 06 2015, @08:55AM

    by kaszz (4211) on Friday March 06 2015, @08:55AM (#153764) Journal

    There's something that can be done about this. Block new .tld in DNS handling software. I think it's time to teach bling-bling people a tough lesson in computer science engineering.

    Or even just make DNS software fail crap .tld with a specific failure rate.