Wacky Weekend: The '.secure' gTLD

Fri Jun 1 02:52:43 UTC 2012

>What will drive the price up is the lawsuits that come out of the
>woodwork when they start trying to enforce their provisions. "What? I
>have already printed my letterhead! What do you mean my busted DKIM
>service is a problem?"

History suggests that the problem will be the opposite.  They will
find that the number of registrations is an order of magnitude less
than their worst case estimate (a problem that every domain added in
the past decade has had), and they will make the rules ever looser to
try to gather more registrations and appease their financial backers
until it's yet another meaningless generic TLD.

For concrete examples, see what happened to .AERO, .TRAVEL, .PRO, and
of course the race to the bottom of first regular SSL certificates,
and now green bar certificates.

What might be useful would be .BANK, with both security rules and
limited registrations to actual banks.  Identifying banks is
relatively* easy, since you can use the lists of entities that
national bank regulators regulate.

R's,
John

* - I said relatively, not absolutely.