ICANN opens up Pandora's Box of new TLDs

Fri Jun 27 02:49:41 UTC 2008

On Thu, Jun 26, 2008 at 01:34:22PM -0700, Ken Simpson wrote:
> How will ICANN be allocating these? An auction format? It will be a  
> blood bath otherwise.. And for abuse and spam, this is a nightmare.

There's no doubt this last will happen since it has *already* happened,
as I pointed out in a note to Dave Farber's IP list earlier today.

For example: the .info TLD is completely overrun with spammers, to
the point where many people, including me, have simply blacklisted the
whole thing.  It simply became too onerous to maintain a blacklist with
hundreds of thousands of individual domains and hundreds of additions
per day.  We never needed a .info TLD and soon its existence will be
moot -- well, except for all the money wasted dealing with squatters
and typosquatters and spammers and phishers and other abusers.

This follows on the heels of .biz, which is so broadly blacklisted that
not even spammers tend to use it much any more.

And so on.

So the outcome of this is inevitable: expense, litigation, hassle,
spam, abuse, and oh-by-the-way massive profits for registrars, which
had nothing at all to do with ICANN's decision.  Of course not.

---Rsk