All Entries Tagged With: "Domain Name System"

Does ICANN’s TLD Policy Create Trademark Conflicts?

When the Internet was very young, all you had to do to get a domain name was call a man named Jon Postel, and ask for it. Things have changed greatly with the popularity of the Internet. Now the competition for a good, short, generic domain name is fierce. If you want a domain name in the popular .com namespace, you have to settle for a long, sometimes confusing, domain name.

ICANN has been using a process of ?rounds? to introduce new tlds. When they do create these new tlds, they are generic in nature, like .info or .biz. This creates trademark conflicts. Many companies hold the same word as a trademark, such as Apple Records and Apple Computers. Both are legal trademarks. Both have the legal right to use the word apple to sell their respective products and services.

So which one has the legal rights to apple.com or apple.biz? What if I start a company tomorrow called Apple Printing Services and get a trademark on the word apple to sell printing services? Do I not then have equal rights to use apple.com or apple.net as my domain name?

If ICANN would open the TLD market, so that any company with the technical expertise and the financial capability, could start a new TLD, we would have more option like apple.computer, apple.music, apple.printer. TLDs like .lyr, .atty, .cpa, would crop up. This would help eliminate trademark conflicts.

First come, first serve, in the demand for domain names was the method used and seemed fair when namespace was less congested. Now, if we are going to insure that future generations of people, who are not even on the Internet yet, or who have not even started their business yet, will have the opportunity to get domain names they want, we must create more tlds. ICANN claims there is no demand for new TLDS.

I disagree. Demand is far from being met. It is not fair business practice to have few TLDs where a few companies/people get short one word domain names while the rest must settle for two and in most cases three word domain names. By limiting space with few TLDs, ICANN makes the decision that businesses that were in existence at a certain point in time shall have an advantage over any business created at a later time.

As a city grows, more streets get paved and more buildings get built allowing for more businesses to get good locations, more corner lots if you will. As name space expands ICANN wants businesses to continue to build upward and not outward. They leave new businesses the equivalent of existing on the third and fourth levels Vs having a ground-floor storefront.

Cities grow outward to allow for more development. TLD space needs to grow outward to meet the same demand. Cities that stifle development and that are not business-friendly find their economy in ruin before too long. Cities that do their best to offer more development opportunities to businesses i.e. corner lots, breaks in certain costs, etc., prosper.

It would be uncommon for a city to tell a new business, ?nope can build on that lot, you have to build onto existing buildings above your competitors, so that they have the ground floor and your customers must walk past your competitors to get to where you are.? That is the analogy. If you own design.com already, I must get something like webdesign.com (a 2nd floor location), the next business must get something like websitedesign.com, (3rd floor), the next few businesses can share the 4th floor with greatwebsitedesign.com, websitedesignplanet.com, etc. Others will get the 5th floor with even longer names as new businesses come to the web.

You might say well they only need their business name for their website and that should be easy to get. I would answer that many businesses have the same name and in addition to that, generic keywords in domain names are an advantage to only having your business name as a domain name. People are not searching the web for you, but they do search for what service or product you sell.

ICANN is currently forcing an unfair disadvantage to new business owners and to people new to the web by not allowing them to get good, short domain names for their personal or business use. Not allowing new tlds to be created is an unfair business practice and a restraint to free trade. It is also anti-free enterprise because they are telling me I cannot go into the domain name selling business and that only a few businesses they have selected can do so. They may also be in violation of laws written to avoid monopolies.

Chris McElroy has been an advocate for domain name owners and individual users of the Internet since 1995. He participates in working groups, mailing lists, and forums, that deal with issues regarding domain names, IP Number allocation, and the DNS.

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Can Google Handle Google DNS?

From Google;

Why does DNS matter?

The DNS protocol is an important part of the web’s infrastructure, serving as the Internet’s phone book: every time you visit a website, your computer performs a DNS lookup. Complex pages often require multiple DNS lookups before they start loading, so your computer may be performing hundreds of lookups a day.

Google Public DNS is a free, global Domain Name System (DNS) resolution service, that you can use as an alternative to your current DNS provider.

Why should you try Google Public DNS?

By using Google Public DNS you can:

• Speed up your browsing experience.
• Improve your security.
• Get the results you expect with absolutely no redirection.

My issue is this. I’ve been testing Google Chrome as my browser. After long use during the day, it freezes. The software isn’t really totally frozen. I can still type a web address in the address bar. It just won’t take me there when I hit enter.

If I close Google Chrome and wait a few minutes, then restart it, it works fine. That tells me there is a caching issue after using it for a long time. It could also be a server issue as if I’ve used the alloted cache for the day or something.

If Google can’t keep Google Chrome running, then how can it keep serving DNS for thousands or potentially hundreds of thousands of people.

You may say one has nothing to do with the other and you may be technically correct. I’m not sure. But given the enormity of running DNS services for that many people and Google’s inability to make Google Chrome work properly, it seems to me that they are not ready to run DNS.

DNS is complicated and resource intensive. I’d like to hear comments from anyone who has used Google DNS to see what their experience has been.

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Google DNS, Google Caffiene & Google Local Search?

Google didn’t get where they are by being stupid. Those guys at Google really know what they are doing and they are usually able to do things before anyone saw it coming too. They are full of surprises.

Hopefully, you already know about Google Caffeine and Google Local Search. You may have already heard about Google DNS as well. But read this about Google DNS from the Google Code Blog.

A proposal to extend the DNS protocol Wednesday, January 27, 2010Today a group of DNS and content providers, including Neustar/UltraDNS and Google are publishing a proposal to extend the DNS protocol. DNS is the system that translates an easy-to-remember name like www.google.com to a numeric address like 74.125.45.104. These are the IP addresses that computers use to communicate with one another on the Internet.

ICANN has to approve it before it happens, but ICANN usually signs off on whatever these companies wants to do, so don’t expect a long debate. Vint Cerf, (the inventor of email), used to run ICANN and now works for Google.

By returning different addresses to requests coming from different places, DNS can be used to load balance traffic and send users to a nearby server. For example, if you look up www.google.com from a computer in New York, it may resolve to an IP address pointing to a server in New York City. If you look up www.google.com from the Netherlands, the result could be an IP address pointing to a server in the Netherlands. Sending you to a nearby server improves speed, latency, and network utilization.

Sounds really good doesn’t it? We all want more speed. But there’s more. Right now when that load is balanced, none of your IP Address is passed along from your ISP to the other resolver.

Our proposed DNS protocol extension lets recursive DNS resolvers include part of your IP address in the request sent to authoritative nameservers. Only the first three octets, or top 24 bits, are sent providing enough information to the authoritative nameserver to determine your network location, without affecting your privacy.

That part, as the post states, will not reveal to your whole IP Address to Google, so they won’t know exactly who you are. As long as the agreement ICANN approves does not include some obscure legal clause that states this can change later. As long as Google maintains the “Do no evil” policy.

But this post isn’t about privacy issues. With the launch of Google Caffeine and with Google Local Search becoming more popular, I suspect that Google DNS is part of an overall strategy to make local search even more powerful.

I’m not a DNS expert, but it seems very logical that with Google having the ability to know your general location combined with the ability to send you to the server they want to send you to will have a major impact on Google Search results.

What do you think?