Use a misleading domain name, go to prison. A new bit of pending legislation (warning: PDF) called the "Child Abduction Prevention Act" (and really, who WOULDN'T vote for that?) has made the use of misleading domain names for sites of "purient interest" punishable by a sentence of up to two years in prison. Seriously. This is going to be very troubling to the White House. No, this White House.
posted by jonson on Mar 28, 2003 - 22 comments

ICANN disses the the dot. The guy who runs the Internet Multicasting Service teamed up with the guy who runs the Internet Software Consortium and submitted a proposal to mange the .ORG registry. ICANN's conslutants [sic] dumped on the proposal (300KB PDF) claiming it is among the worst proposals from a technical standpoint. Mind you, ISC produces the software that runs the DNS and actually operates root and top-level servers. And ICANN thinks they lack the technical mojo? Wow! Are we all ready to admit that ICANN is completely corrupt and beyond saving? More info here. (via IP)
posted by chipr on Aug 31, 2002 - 12 comments

Anyone who ever spent any time on the Domain-Policy mailing list before NetSol shut it down without warning a year or more back (it was starting to look evidentiary, you see, and they didn't want to get sued...) will be familiar with much of what's in this Salon piece about John "Gnu" Gilmore, CORE, ICANN('t), and the Great Domain Registration Fiasco.
posted by baylink on Jul 3, 2002 - 7 comments

The president of ICANN, the organization that has been attempting to coordinate the Internet's domain name system, has suggested that the body virtually eliminate public participation and be more controlled by governments and corporations. If you're concerned, one thing you can do is join ICANN at Large.
posted by tranquileye on Mar 8, 2002 - 4 comments

Worried that the ICANN might take away your personal .org site address? Join the fight at handsoffmy.org.
posted by hit-or-miss on Mar 31, 2001 - 0 comments

Feeling Safe about the Keeper of Domain Names Anyone notice that at least at 10:30am EST that Network Solutions homepage brings up an Error page? Doesn't that make us all feel safe. And then there was the Registrars.com registrar transfer form which didn't think the domain I was trying to transfer had been registered (but if you used their WHOIS it showed it was).
posted by matte on Jan 31, 2001 - 18 comments

ICANN announces new international TLDs
Apparently they resolved the problem of businesses buying up their domain names in the new namespaces by choosing TLDs that no one would want. Visit me at www.rattanchairs.info! My personal web site is www.ryan.name...
posted by rschram on Nov 16, 2000 - 12 comments

All of this talk about madonna.com and string.com seems to me to be just a mad scramble to grab a 'scarce' resource (ie. the .com TLD). The only problem is that the scarcity is completely artificial. Networking expert and lawyer Karl Auerbach has just been elected to ICANN as the US at-large rep on a platform of reducing ICANN's role from it current one as a overreaching international law making body. He says that the DNS system is capable of handling far more than just a few top-level domains like .com, .org, .net, .uk, .au etc. He says it could handle millions.
posted by lagado on Oct 17, 2000 - 5 comments

Free domains, it looks like. Register a .cc domain, and get some coupons to register some .com domains. The catch seems to be is that the .cc people are the administrative contact for the first year, which I guess means they "own" it. Should be okay though, as long as you don't do anything naughty.
posted by endquote on Jul 12, 2000 - 1 comment

Here's a nice survey of geographic location of domain name ownership. I was surprised to see that people in Los Angeles own more domains than San Francisco, but I assume the researcher didn't lump all the Silicon Valley cities together to get that number. I'm sure a "Bay Area" grouping would be number one. Of the .com, .org, and .net addresses, the US still leads the world with 2/3 of all addresses in that domainspace, so I guess the web will continue to be American-centric for some time.
posted by mathowie on Feb 14, 2000 - 1 comment

The delay in adding new top level domains drags on, and there seems to be no solution in sight. ICANN can't agree on whether or not to add new TLDs like .biz, .cars, or .corp., but they are discussing it at an upcoming meeting in March. I would hope they add enough domains to make domain squatting difficult, but I bet large corporations will just buy everything with their name it anyway, and fight over others' use of their name with a different TLD. What a mess.
posted by mathowie on Jan 28, 2000 - 0 comments

Available Domain Name of the Week In homage to zipper.com's available domain name list, I've started my own decidedly manual dotcom availability list. Let's see how long it takes for someone to snatch up deathplane.com Aw, come on... it'll be fun.
posted by grant on Nov 7, 1999 - 0 comments

If one wants to register a domain, one should go to Joker. No, that price, twenty bucks a year, isn't a joke, nor are their any more catches than with InterNIC. And you thought ICANN and de-regulation wouldn't do anything good.
posted by tdecius on Oct 12, 1999 - 0 comments

Due to the recent truce between the ICANN and NSI, new suffixes may be prevented from ever being allowed or at least delayed. It's a shame, because good URLs are running out fast and domain squatters are making a killing.
posted by mathowie on Oct 5, 1999 - 0 comments