Here's an article from The Register that talks about the country code top- level domains (ccTLDs) being mad at ICANN for not including them in its decision-making process. The ccTLDs had no say in the new global top-level domains (gTLDs) that ICANN approved a week ago. Since ICANN expects the ccTLDs to pay some sort of licensing fee to operate, they want some say in the matter. The ccTLDs are discussing three options: pushing for Supporting Organization status in ICANN, forming their own ICANN-like group but using the same DNS system, forming their own ICANN-like group with a new DNS system.

The other somewhat related article is from Wired. It talks about alternative DNS networks, including OpenNIC and the Open Root Server Confederation (OSRC). These are rogue DNS networks that already have dot-biz and a host of other gTLDs defined, the catch being that it's only defined on their networks so you have to point to their DNS servers (either manually or have your ISP do so). Since 99% of DNS servers out there use the ICANN approved servers, most people won't even see the rogue domains. People who point to one of the rogue DNS networks do see the ICANN servers too (otherwise it's totally pointless).

For the most part my feeling is that if the ccTLDs want to set up their own DNS network, fine by me. The majority of sites are using the standard ICANN TLDs anyway, so it will only affect small companies and organizations that use ccTLDs. Same for the rogue DNS networks. If the majority of people can't resolve the domain names, they might as well not exist. It's only if a rather significant number of ISPs and organizations start using the rogue networks that we'll get into trouble because then there can feasibly be more servers set up using rogue domain names which starts fragmenting the DNS system. But I don't see that happening because without reliable domain name resolution the Internet will lose a lot of its appeal and businesses want users more than they want a particularly neat domain name.

Someone made a comment on Slashdot that way too many irrelevant domain names are being registered, especially for products. Why are there so many "<the-movie>.com" domain names? Wouldn't it be just as easy to use "red-planet.fox.com" or "www.fox.com/red-planet"? It's just getting a bit too silly, especially since they'll just be thrown away in a year or two so they just take up space in the root-level DNS servers. That and the names are getting way too long since all the good names are taken. "www.areyouunbreakable.com", what the heck is the point of that monstrocity?

Me, I'm still going to just stick with the COM TLD. It's by far the most common and the natural default if you happen to be searching for something by guessing it's domain name (really though, people should be using search engines instead. A good search engine starts to make the domain name irrelevant.). I'm not going to get a "kevin-wong.name" domain. You know, if a truly fast and easy to use and accurate search engine is ever developed (and Google comes close in several categories) then that would kill the domain name licensing business. Especially if you have a way to give someone your domain name without having to tell them. Instead of saying "go to my web page at www.kevin-wong.com" I could instead click a button and have their computer record that Kevin Wong's web page is at www.tgd-inc.com:8080. Then it almost doesn't matter what your web page address is (other than if you don't have a computer so you actually have to tell someone what the exact address is). Even on a business card it'd be nice to have a reader that can read the contacts garbled DNS address so you don't have to type it in (I've seen OCR programs that can read business cards and parse them, but it's not an easy process yet).