Order of the Bath

I wrote a while ago about how there were more top level domains than I was aware of—.aero, .museum etc. Well on Thursday ICANN, the controlling authority, voted to drop most restrictions and allow applications for any string of three or more letters not already allocated.

It is amazing, however, how most of the commenters to the article in The Register seem to have missed the point and/or not read the article. What this ruling does is allow organisations to register a Top Level Domain so that the sub domains (which are the ones actually used) can be allocated either on request or sub-letting. Each organisation will have to both put up a substantial sum of money (where that goes beyond the administration expenses is unclear) and provide an approved registration and regulatory mechanism to conrtol the lower levels. It is not for Tom, Dick, or ASDA to register fancy addresses for their own personal use.

This ruling also allows strings in alphabets other than the current Latin/Roman but it is not clear if digits will be available. An early use of this facility will be local alphabet equivalents for the national codes for Russia and China. This liberalisation was already coming for lower level domain names and some Cyrilic ones can already be seen. There are (supposed to be) rules to stop the use of characters that look like Roman ones to spoof look-alike addresses. The newer browsers have built in safeguards to warn you of this.

This entry was posted on 28 Jun 2008 at 13:19 by Rick and is filed under Browsers, Technical. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.