New Domains Considered Harmful, Says Tim Berners-Lee

from the all-a-big-racket dept

As lots of folks are pushing to get ICANN to expand the number of top level domains (so people an get more than just .com, .net, etc.), Tim Berners-Lee is argung against the idea, saying that current proposals are really just a racket to get more money out of companies. The original idea was that the domain name space (really just the .com space) was getting too crowded and good names were increasingly difficult to come by. However, instead of really expanding the market, adding .biz and .info mostly just made companies feel the need to buy up the same domains they already owned the .com for. If anything, he considers it domain "inflation" - devaluing existing domains. He is particularly against the idea of a .mobi domain name specifically for wireless content, agreeing with us that there's really no need for it and it will make things more confusing. Increasingly, mobile phones and devices are able to access the entire internet without any problems. There's no reason they need a specific separate TLD all their own. He's also against the idea of the .xxx domain, pointing out (as always) that figuring out exactly what is porn is quite subjective. That's true, but as long as no one is forced into the .xxx domain, it might make sense for certain sites that want the domain. He's not entirely against new TLDs, but wants them to have a specific purpose - such as mapping to telephone numbers, which some groups have proposed as well.

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