A new series of top-level domains (or TLDs) is about to be unleashed on the world — or so the backers of suffixes like .islam, .sport, and .gay hope. DotGay LLC wants to run the show for .gay, and CEO Scott Seitz promises two-thirds of the revenue will go toward “social causes.” The Washington Post reports on the new Internet land rush:
Who gets to run .abortion Web sites – people who support abortion rights or those who don’t? Which individual or mosque can run the .islam or .muhammad sites? Can the Ku Klux Klan own .nazi on free speech grounds, or will a Jewish organization run the domain and permit only educational Web sites – say, remember.nazi or antidefamation.nazi? And who’s going to get .amazon – the Internet retailer or Brazil?
The decisions will come down to a little-known nonprofit based in Marina del Rey, Calif., whose international board of directors approved the expansion in 2008 but has been stuck debating how best to run the program before launching it. Now, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, is on the cusp of completing those talks in March or April and will soon solicit applications from companies and governments that want to propose and operate the new addresses.
This week, hundreds of investors, consultants and entrepreneurs are expected to converge in San Francisco for the first “.nxt” conference, a three-day affair featuring seminars on ICANN’s complicated application guidelines. The conference’s Web site, which has a list of applicants, is not without a sense of humor: “Join the Internet land rush!” a headline screams, above a photograph of the Tom Cruise character galloping on a horse in the movie “Far and Away,” the 1992 film about giveaways out West in the late 19th century.
So who’s going to decide whether you can own TedHaggardIsABig.Gay or Thats.Gay? Back in 2009, there was a battle between two competing firms: the Dot Gay Alliance, which was backed by Rosie O’Donnell’s gay lawmaking brother Daniel (and which hasn’t posted a Twitter update since 2009), and DotGay LLC, from Seitz. “I buried 40 friends in 18 months [who died from complications related to HIV]. Having .gay is scary, it could be crazy. I’ve already told people to get steel doors and window bars for security to protect against anti-gay organizations that wouldn’t want dot-gay to happen.”
I call first dibs on NOM.gay.
Red Meat
I don’t know much about how internet domains are regulated but I think it would just be better if every country had its own
.(initials)so that it could be more transparent where a website or company is from. So drop the .net .com and .org ….. so useless.
Yuriy
@Red Meat:
uhhm actually every country does have its own domain, like for example: Germany= .de, Ukraine= .ua, France= .fr, Russia= .ru …..and so on
Red Meat
@Yuriy: yes, that why im implying using those.
Steve
@Red Meat: You don’t seem to understand. Every country _does_ have its own two-letter “top level domain”. The “.net”, “.com”, and “.org” top-level domains are explicitly for entities that are located in the United States. Entities in other countries are supposed to register with the naming authority of their own country.
If entities in those countries do use those per-country domain names properly, then the domain names do say exactly what country the entity is located in. Businesses in the UK, for example, are located in a domain named “.com.uk.” , which is a second level domain under the “.uk” top-level domain.
Of course, a corporation doesn’t need to have much of a US presence to qualify for a name in the “.com” or “.org” top-level domains. And, of course, some countries have registered names to entities that don’t really live there. An example is, “.tv”.
The proposal to expand the top-level domain registrations to include additional names, has been in process for about twenty years. Because of both technical issues and politics, the proposal has taken a long time to implement.
Probably a more important proposal is also happening now… Domain names have been restricted to the ascii alphabet until recently. Going forward, they will be unicode characters, in utf8 encoding. This means that Chinese, Japanese, and Arabic names will be possible, and can be spelled correctly in their native characters.
David Gervais
A couple of places where this discussion is also occurring:
http://www.appscout.com/2009/10/gay_domain_proposed.ph
http://technolog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/02/07/6005547-is-us-leading-charge-to-quash-gay-internet-domain
These are more general discussions, but they might also help understand the internet management part of the issue.