Re: ICANN to allow commercial gTLDs

[Owen DeLong <owen () delong com>]

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