An XXX domain is pointless. Porn sites aren't compelled to use it, and those that do will be punished with filter blocks. Hell, some ISPs may choose to block access to the TLD.

ICANN has no idea what the fuck they're doing anymore. These are the people that though .TV and .INFO would be great idea, and those TLDs because virtual slums. There is not a single fucking legitimate .INFO or .TV site. If there are, no one knows about them, because there are so many goddam spam sites using them.

There are only 5 TLDs major we need: org, net, com, gov, and edu. And then of course the country TLDs. Everything else is stupid bullshit.

GPFontaine wrote:

It may take a few years to do this, but once the majority of them have it, it is only a matter of time before the other TLD are reserved for non-pornographic content. I imagine that the major sites will keep front pages that simply point to the .xxx domains at that point.

As one of the board's resident liberals, shouldn't be against this? It makes censorship a lot easier. And censorship is almost always wrong.

I think the more important issue here is that .INFO need to be abolished. ICANN should force registrars to stop accepting new registrants for these TLDs effectively immediately and announce that they will be phased out entirely within 2 years of the announcement date. That should give anyone running a legitimate site on an INFO domain plenty of time to move their brand to a real TLD.

UsaSatsui wrote:

For the record, Syd, .tv -is- a country TLD. It belongs to the tiny Pacific island nation of Tuvalu. They make a significant amount of money from it.

Did not know that. I know .me is a country domain that has been licensed out to all the major registrars, and is quickly becoming spammy as well.

There should be stricter regulations on country TLDs enforced by ICANN, perhaps a severe limit on the number of registrars than can license them. Or perhaps non-essential ones should be phased out. DE, UK, and FR all see legitimate use, but if your country has less than a million, you don't need/deserve a damn TLD.

.info was a poor idea. Actually, all 7 of those TLDs were poor ideas: aero, biz, coop, info, museum, name, and pro.

The fewer TLDs there are, the better. Adding more and more leads to web dilution and brand confusion, not to mention squatting. Plus, you need to be able to be found. SydLexia.com wasn't necessarily envisioned as a commercial site, but .com is and the most legitimate and recognizable TLD, and if you're not using .net or .com or a lesser extent .org, no one's going to take you seriously. The most valuable thing you can have on the web is .com with a catchy name. I'm not sure on this, but I'm pretty sure that due to the poor way the newer TLDs have been used, they get put at an immediate disadvantage in search results via algorithms.

I would argue that the whole idea behind TLDs is antiquated. A TLD was meant as a classification, and web users are simply not interested in that. They're interested in web content that they can easily find. The biggest side effect of TLDs is that is someone already registered a catchy name that you wanted, you can steal it on another TLD. Wish you owned Amazon.com? Well, if you're lucky, you might get Amazon.xxx. Of course, they'll probably take you to court over it and get a judge to make you surrender it, but you can try. But you can do it to a smaller site.

For example, here's Wordpress.biz: http://www.wordpress.biz/

I did. You're certainly more liberal than I!

I think we should be streamlining the internet, not diluting it. The web is a global community, and expanding TLDs is a way of segregating the web, and it's one that has been shown not to work. ccTLDs are part of this antiquated way of thinking. I really do think we need to phase out as many ccTLDs as possible. Some are too big to fail unfortunately (CH, JP, FR, RU, UK, DE), so there's nothing to be done about that. Other countries don't need them. The only real barrier that exists on the web is LANGUAGE. So perhaps we should have language TLDs instead. The primary language of Tuvalu? English. Doesn't need a TLD. The primary language of Montengro? Montenegrin. So Montenegrin should have a TLD. However, L-TLDS should be strictly enforced based on the language they are supposed to represent. What's nice about this is that many of the big ccTLDs (CH, RU, FR, DE, JP) simply switched over to L-TLDs. Ostensibly, AU and UK are the only ccTLDs that would survive. Pretty much every other ccTLD not associated with a language could be phased out.

What are IPv6 addresses?

The-Excel wrote:

What's your stance on those test TLDs with non-Latin characters?

What are they? If it's Japanese/Chinese/Arabic/Russian, then yes, absolutely, those people should certainly be allowed to have TLDs that use their native characters. Greek, I dunno. Greek will almost certainly be abused.

The IP thing doesn't surprise. It wasn't well-designed. Even if it had been hex, they'd be running out by now.