ICANN to allow commercial gTLDs

Sat Jun 18 02:18:41 UTC 2011

On Jun 17, 2011, at 7:09 PM, David Conrad wrote:

> On Jun 17, 2011, at 4:00 PM, Jay Ashworth wrote:
>>> On Jun 17, 2011, at 3:13 PM, Jay Ashworth wrote:
>>>> http://apple/ is going to break a bunch of shit.
>>> 
>>> All fully qualified domain names have a trailing dot so that you know
>>> where the root is. At least as parsed internally by your resolver...
>> 
>> Sure.  And Apple's gonna make sure they put that trailing dot in their
>> ads and links and stuff... and their users will, without fail, remember
>> to type it.  :-) 
> 
> I suspect the folks who spend $185K + yearly fees will be able to afford 
> engineering staff that will point out that a naked TLD is unlikely to
> work for the great unwashed masses.  And if they don't, they'll get exactly
> what they deserve.
> 

That won't stop them from building zone files that look like this:

@	IN	SOA	...
		NS		...
				...
		A		...
		AAAA	...
www	A		...
		AAAA	...

Sure, they'll advertise www.apple, but, you better believe that
they'll take whatever lands at http://apple and you can certainly
count on the fact that any mal-actors that get control of one of
these TLDs (whether they paid the $185k or not) will take full
advantage of the situation and its security risks.

> What I suspect you'll more likely see will be macbook.apple or 
> japan.cisco or copyright-enforcement.universal.
> 

Sure, you'll see all of that, TOO. They're not mutually exclusive.

> Maybe.
> 

Almost certainly.

Owen