# How do you feel about the domain name changes? **URL:** \ **Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\ **Created:** [June 20, 2011, 7:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-you-feel-about-the-domain-name-changes/586124 "2011-06-20T07:37:47Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![aceplace57](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/aceplace57/32/3500_2.png) [@aceplace57](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/aceplace57)\ **Post date:** [June 20, 2011, 7:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-you-feel-about-the-domain-name-changes/586124/1 "2011-06-20T07:37:47Z")
We’ve had nearly 30 years of order and common sense in domain names. .com commercial, edu education, .gov is government and so forth. The ones we see most are those three. There are country domains, but nothing I visit use them. Now we’ll have total chaos. some dumb idiot can create jerseys.cows or jackin.box All kinds of silly crap. Meanwhile we’re the ones expected to memorize this mess. At least some of us still type in URL’s. I do if they are a reasonable length. I can type in [Amazon.com](http://Amazon.com) in about 2 seconds. It takes 15 seconds to go to Google or 30 seconds to scroll through my list of 100’s of bookmarks. What’s your thoughts? Do you think it will hamper typing in URL’s? \ will this bright idea cause a mass exodus from the traditional URL’s? Will [Amazon.com](http://Amazon.com) become Amazon.allkindsofcrap, [cnn.com](http://cnn.com) cnn.newsyouwanttoread, [straightdope.com](http://straightdope.com) straightdope.cecil .? It bugs me to think something so simple as [cnn.com](http://cnn.com) could become some bloated, ridiculous garbage that we can’t even remember. > [@](#): > > SINGAPORE — The regulatory body that oversees Internet domain names voted on Monday to revamp the domain naming system for websites, allowing them to end with words like “apple” and “orange” instead of suffixes such as “.com” or “.gov.” [http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/43460131/ns/technology\_and\_science-tech\_and\_gadgets/](http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/43460131/ns/technology_and_science-tech_and_gadgets/) ---
**Author:** ![Isamu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/7c8e57/32.png) [@Isamu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Isamu)\ **Post date:** [June 20, 2011, 7:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-you-feel-about-the-domain-name-changes/586124/2 "2011-06-20T07:46:24Z")
We’ll finally be able to get clownpenis.fart. Every cloud has a silver lining. ---
**Author:** ![GSV\_Consolation\_of\_Dreams](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/f1d935/32.png) [@GSV\_Consolation\_of\_Dreams](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GSV_Consolation_of_Dreams)\ **Post date:** [June 20, 2011, 7:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-you-feel-about-the-domain-name-changes/586124/3 "2011-06-20T07:57:11Z")
How is news.cnn or www.cnn difficult to remember? Also, considering it will cost the better part of $200,000 to register one, and 25K/year to keep it going, I don’t think every Tom, Dick and Harry will get one. It will take some getting used to, but I don’t see it as being inherently worse than everyone trying to have a .com or mangling a word to get something like [www.delicio.us](http://www.delicio.us) ---
**Author:** ![aceplace57](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/aceplace57/32/3500_2.png) [@aceplace57](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/aceplace57)\ **Post date:** [June 20, 2011, 7:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-you-feel-about-the-domain-name-changes/586124/4 "2011-06-20T07:59:27Z")
One technical question. What will this change mean to the hundreds of thousands of domain name servers out there? I know at work we have a primary dns, secondary dns and even a third dns. DNS is critical for our Intranet and also our Internet. We can’t have our staff idle waiting on a dns reboot. If I get a chance, I’ll call one of our Systems Analysts tomorrow and see what they say. They are responsible for the DNS machines. At the minimum, it probably means enlarging the dns tables in the server. Adding more memory etc. But, that’s just a guess. ---
**Author:** ![aceplace57](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/aceplace57/32/3500_2.png) [@aceplace57](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/aceplace57)\ **Post date:** [June 20, 2011, 8:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-you-feel-about-the-domain-name-changes/586124/5 "2011-06-20T08:06:35Z")
IIRC correctly, nearly all DNS servers run Linux. Because it has such a small footprint. You can use practically any old pc as a print server or a DNS server with Linux. ---
**Author:** ![aceplace57](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/aceplace57/32/3500_2.png) [@aceplace57](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/aceplace57)\ **Post date:** [June 20, 2011, 9:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-you-feel-about-the-domain-name-changes/586124/6 "2011-06-20T09:45:43Z")
Another article. > **[New web naming rules to change Internet browsing](http://www.cnn.com/2011/TECH/web/06/20/domain.names/index.html?hpt=hp_t1)** > > Coming soon to a website near you: dot-anything ---
**Author:** ![Harmonious\_Discord](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/74df32/32.png) [@Harmonious\_Discord](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Harmonious_Discord)\ **Post date:** [June 20, 2011, 10:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-you-feel-about-the-domain-name-changes/586124/7 "2011-06-20T10:39:12Z")
I don’t care what they do. 3 letters at the end is 3 letters. I book mark all sites and use them instead of typing in an URL anyhow. ---
**Author:** ![GuanoLad](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/guanolad/32/42_2.png) [@GuanoLad](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GuanoLad)\ **Post date:** [June 20, 2011, 11:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-you-feel-about-the-domain-name-changes/586124/8 "2011-06-20T11:31:20Z")
I can’t remember the last time I typed in an entire URL. It would’ve been recently, maybe within a month, but only the one time. Usually a single word will either be searched on, or come up in my awesome bar history, or I’m following somebody else’s link. It’s not going to be a problem, and may actually be a good thing in that you can have more memorable creative urls that make a certain amount of sense. Certainly very few people stuck with the “commercial” “internet” guidelines for .com and .net (though .org seems to have been unsullied). Heck, my own domain is a .com, not even a .com.au, and I don’t use it for anything commercial. ---
**Author:** ![BigT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bigt/32/12044_2.png) [@BigT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BigT)\ **Post date:** [June 20, 2011, 9:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-you-feel-about-the-domain-name-changes/586124/9 "2011-06-20T21:59:16Z")
Wow, this is stupid. It doesn’t make things more memorable to add another word you have to remember. And it removes any indication of official versus unofficial websites. And how many extra domains are you now going to have to register now that there are two different labels that can be typoed? Typo based attacks are going to become a lot more frequent. It’s not going to be just [yotube.com](http://yotube.com), but also yotube.goggle, yotube.googol, yotube.gogle, etc. And, yes, many people still use the URL bar, or these places wouldn’t still exist. ---
**Author:** ![KneadToKnow](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kneadtoknow/32/3999_2.png) [@KneadToKnow](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/KneadToKnow)\ **Post date:** [June 20, 2011, 10:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-you-feel-about-the-domain-name-changes/586124/10 "2011-06-20T22:16:31Z")
Great. Like my students in Internet Basics didn’t have a hard enough time figuring out domain names. ---
**Author:** ![LSLGuy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lslguy/32/5813_2.png) [@LSLGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LSLGuy)\ **Post date:** [June 20, 2011, 11:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-you-feel-about-the-domain-name-changes/586124/11 "2011-06-20T23:28:22Z")
When you add the increasing support for IDN, this will be a phisher’s dream. ---
**Author:** ![Larry\_Mudd](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/f14d63/32.png) [@Larry\_Mudd](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Larry_Mudd)\ **Post date:** [June 20, 2011, 11:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-you-feel-about-the-domain-name-changes/586124/12 "2011-06-20T23:34:41Z")
> [@BigT](#): > > Typo based attacks are going to become a lot more frequent. It’s not going to be just [yotube.com](http://yotube.com), but also yotube.goggle, yotube.googol, yotube.gogle, etc. > > And, yes, many people still use the URL bar, or these places wouldn’t still exist. Contrariwise, any arsehole can register a “typo” domain using the appropriate top-level domain, currently. If Amazon moves everything over to an Amazon TLD. (eg; shop.amazon) then that will really cut into scammers relying on people’s fat fingers to drive people to their crap site. You can’t register sjop.amazon, because you don’t have any right to have a subdomain under amazon. If you register an entirely new top-level domain like “amazom,” in the hopes that people will sometimes type in the wrong URL and wind up glancing at your front page for a moment before correcting their mistake, you have _seriously_ misused your resources, because your ROI is not going to look nearly as sensible as it might for a $5 .com registration. ---
**Author:** ![Asimovian](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/asimovian/32/172_2.png) [@Asimovian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Asimovian)\ **Post date:** [June 20, 2011, 11:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-you-feel-about-the-domain-name-changes/586124/13 "2011-06-20T23:41:50Z")
> [@LSLGuy](#): > > When you add the increasing support for IDN, this will be a phisher’s dream. I understood everything except this. Can you explain? ---
**Author:** ![Sunspace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sunspace/32/1250_2.png) [@Sunspace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sunspace)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2011, 12:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-you-feel-about-the-domain-name-changes/586124/14 "2011-06-21T00:24:29Z")
IDN = Internationalized Domain Name. This means you can use any character in a domain name, even non-latin characters that look the same as latin-alphabet ones. It’s like the difference between O and 0 or I and l, but worse, because you’re not expecting it. Consider the difference between C and С. The first one is the latin letter “capital cee” (Unicode code point U=0043) , and the second is the cyrillic letter “capital es” (Unicode code point U+0421). So I could register a domain “.сом” with the three Cyrillic letters “small es”, “small o”, and “small em”. How many people in a hurry under non-ideal conditions would notice that ‘м’ doesn’t look like ‘m’? ---
**Author:** ![RealityChuck](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/realitychuck/32/195_2.png) [@RealityChuck](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RealityChuck)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2011, 2:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-you-feel-about-the-domain-name-changes/586124/15 "2011-06-21T02:15:21Z")
> [@Sunspace](#): > > IDN = Internationalized Domain Name. This means you can use any character in a domain name, even non-latin characters that look the same as latin-alphabet ones. It’s like the difference between O and 0 or I and l, but worse, because you’re not expecting it. Consider the difference between C and С. The first one is the latin letter “capital cee” (Unicode code point U=0043) , and the second is the cyrillic letter “capital es” (Unicode code point U+0421). So I could register a domain “.сом” with the three Cyrillic letters “small es”, “small o”, and “small em”. How many people in a hurry under non-ideal conditions would notice that ‘м’ doesn’t look like ‘m’? How many people in a hurry are going to specify Cyrillic character when they type? ---
**Author:** ![Sunspace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sunspace/32/1250_2.png) [@Sunspace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sunspace)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2011, 2:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-you-feel-about-the-domain-name-changes/586124/16 "2011-06-21T02:39:16Z")
> [@RealityChuck](#): > > How many people in a hurry are going to specify Cyrillic character when they type? The danger is more in URLs provided in phishing-type emails. “The web address requesting my credit-card info looks like [bigbank.com](http://bigbank.com), I’ll click it!” But it goes to “bigbank.сом” in the pirate .сом domain, and there you are at the phisher’s carefully-prepared fake login screen. ---
**Author:** ![robert\_columbia](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/e79b87/32.png) [@robert\_columbia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/robert_columbia)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2011, 9:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-you-feel-about-the-domain-name-changes/586124/17 "2011-06-21T21:16:43Z")
> [@Sunspace](#): > > IDN = Internationalized Domain Name. This means you can use any character in a domain name, even non-latin characters that look the same as latin-alphabet ones. It’s like the difference between O and 0 or I and l, but worse, because you’re not expecting it. Consider the difference between C and С. The first one is the latin letter “capital cee” (Unicode code point U=0043) , and the second is the cyrillic letter “capital es” (Unicode code point U+0421). So I could register a domain “.сом” with the three Cyrillic letters “small es”, “small o”, and “small em”. How many people in a hurry under non-ideal conditions would notice that ‘м’ doesn’t look like ‘m’? It’s even worse. In unicode, you have a captial Roman M (the “normal” M used in English), a capital Greek Mu, and a capital Cyrillic M. ---
**Author:** ![Liche](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/4491bb/32.png) [@Liche](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Liche)\ **Post date:** [June 22, 2011, 7:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-you-feel-about-the-domain-name-changes/586124/18 "2011-06-22T19:57:17Z")
I work in the domain name industry, and am involved in what will probably be quite a high-visibility new-tld project in due time. This is matter in which I have some expertise. From the point of view of the public, and indeed brand owners, the new tld’s are imo a complete waste of time and money. The move benefits only the domain name industry (which, of course, must respond with all its might). (This is my personal opinion and does not represent that of my employer!) ---
**Author:** ![Rain\_Soaked](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/e19adc/32.png) [@Rain\_Soaked](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rain_Soaked)\ **Post date:** [June 22, 2011, 9:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-you-feel-about-the-domain-name-changes/586124/19 "2011-06-22T21:19:02Z")
> [@Liche](#): > > I work in the domain name industry, and am involved in what will probably be quite a high-visibility new-tld project in due time. This is matter in which I have some expertise. > > From the point of view of the public, and indeed brand owners, the new tld’s are imo a complete waste of time and money. The move benefits only the domain name industry (which, of course, must respond with all its might). > > (This is my personal opinion and does not represent that of my employer!) This my opinion as well. It looks like a big cash grab to make the major brands buy up their names at $200k each and an ongoing yearly fee. ---
**Author:** ![robert\_columbia](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/e79b87/32.png) [@robert\_columbia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/robert_columbia)\ **Post date:** [June 22, 2011, 9:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-you-feel-about-the-domain-name-changes/586124/20 "2011-06-22T21:24:35Z")
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