ICANN's unrestricted TLDs will make configuration harder to understand.
06 Jul 2008OK, I’m a stick in the mud.
In addition to all the normal reasons why unrestricted TLDs are a bad idea, there is one additional downside:
Unlimited TLDs will make unfamiliar configuration files more difficult to understand.
- If you are looking through pages of configuration and see “RandomProperty=10.0.0.5” you know it’s an IP (v4) address.
- If you see “RandomProperty=foobar.com” you know it’s a domain name.
- If you see “RandomProperty=foobar”, what is it? It could be a new TLD, it could be an unqualified domain name, it could be a directory/file name, it could be anything at all.
Hopefully ICANN will charge £1m for the new TLDs, so their use will be minimal. If you can get a TLD for £1k, thousands will proliferate. It’s rather strange how the UK media has covered this topic, drawing parallels with ‘opening up the wild west of America’. Perhaps they should draw parallels with allowing people to choose their own telephone numbers; where all information on what kind of number it was, would be lost (mobile/landline/geographic region/free/local rate/etc.).