The registrar for the top-level domain .travel has a list of 1098 reserved domain names which they will not register. The inclusion of the vast majority of the names in this list seems quite sensible: there are all the other top-level domains, such as “com” and the two-letter country domains, as well as ones such as “www”, “abuse”, “nic”, and names of countries. Including these will prevent miscreants from impersonating the registrar itself, countries’ official travel and tourism boards, and system role accounts; it will also stop typosquatters.
However, in the list are some rather puzzling entries, including the 63-character monstrosity “aljumahiriyahalarabiyahallibiyahashshabiyahalishtirakiyahaluzma”. What would be the purpose of explicitly blocking the registration of this name? What’s so bad about a domain named aljumahiriyahalarabiyahallibiyahashshabiyahalishtirakiyahaluzma.travel? It can’t just be the length, since there’s no way they could list all possible 63-character domain names. Does “aljumahiriyahalarabiyahallibiyahashshabiyahalishtirakiyahaluzma” have some meaning in Arabic or another language which would make it valuable to phishers or other miscreants?
Google has over 100 results for it, mostly coming http:\www.aljumahiriyahalarabiyahallibiyahashshabiyahalishtirakiyahaluzma.com, so it appears to be something someone is interested in…not sure what though.
ETA, I take that back, most of the results aren’t coming from the .com address, but from .com and .info and .firm.in and a bunch of others.
“NIC” stands for “Network Information Centre”, which is a synonym of “domain name registry”. The official registries for a lot of top-level domains have “NIC” in their names and/or domain names. For example, the registry for .sg (Singapore) names is SGNIC, whose website can be found at http://nic.sg/.
The original domain registry in the US for .com, .net., .org, .edu was InterNIC, which was operated by Network Solutions on a sole-source contract from Dept. of Commerce. (The InterNIC was subsequently privatized and Network Solutions was later split into two pieces; the registry is now owned by VeriSign and the registrar is a privately held company.)
Even if it is, who would type all of that out? Also, don’t many other countries have similarly long official names, as compared to their shorter “call names?” Even some American cities have long official names; La Villa Real de la Santa Fe de San Francisco de Asís, New Mexico and El Pueblo de la Reina de Los Angeles. California to name a couple. Let’s not forget the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations.
Nobody. But when preparing the blacklist, it’s easier to define the criteria for inclusion as “For all countries, the long and short form name in English and the native language” rather than “For all countries, the long and short form name in English and the native language, except for the following fifty cases explicitly enumerated in Appendix A (Blacklist of the Blacklist).”
Also, if you’re going to arbitrarily omit certain country names from the blacklist, you run the risk of being accused of doing this for political reasons. I can imagine some Libyan hacker noticing the conspicuous absence of Libya’s official name from this list, and reporting it up the political chain until it gets to Gadaffi himself, who then publically uses it as an example of how the West is oppressing Libya and sues the .travel registry and every organization remotely associated with it for gross negligence. Of course, this is extremely unlikely to happen, and if Gadaffi ever did sue the registry he’d probably lose, but why run the risk of the bad publicity and court costs when you could instead simply apply your blacklist criteria consistently?