While this is slightly off of the open source topic, I felt this was a newsworthy issue to cover in Open Sourcery. ICANN released information on March 19 on ten new proposed top level domains (TLDs) to be added to the registry by sponsoring applicants. These domains include .asia, .travel and .xxx (you can guess what that is for).
There is an open comment period throughout the month of April for the public to voice input, and then an independent committee will begin review and discussions in May.
An important distinction to note is on how this process works. These new TLDs here are sponsored. According to the ICANN release, unsponsored domains operate under the policies of the global Internet community as set through the ICANN process.
Sponsored domains are specialized TLDs that have a sponsor representing the narrower community that is most affected by the TLD. The sponsor thus carries out delegated policy-formulation responsibilities over many matters concerning the TLD.
Complete information is available at ICANN –> New Proposed TLDs
March 25th, 2004 at 11:49 am
It would be nice if, say, the xxx sites were forced away from .coms & .nets and made to purchase a .xxx domain. That would bring some order to the TLDs as at the moment, everyone knows, .com still rules.
March 25th, 2004 at 10:37 pm
It’s easy enough to do with new people registering domains, but what do you with all the companies that have spent tens of thousands of dollars on porn .Com domains? They’re not going to be too keen to give away an asset like that for nothing.