[NA-Discuss] Dotless domains

[Thompson, Darlene]

Thank you SO much for this "dotless domains for dummies" explanations!  Thank you all for your postings as this helps all of us that aren't up on this topic.

D

Darlene A. Thompson
Community Access Program Administrator
Nunavut Dept. of Education / N-CAP
P.O. Box 1000, Station 910
Iqaluit, NU  X0A 0H0
Phone:  (867) 975-5631
Fax:  (867) 975-5610
E-mail:  dthompson at gov.nu.ca
 
-----Original Message-----
From: John R. Levine [mailto:johnl at iecc.com] 
Sent: Monday, June 10, 2013 12:50 AM
To: Thompson, Darlene; Evan Leibovitch
Cc: NARALO Discussion List
Subject: RE: [NA-Discuss] Dotless domains

> To try to understand this issue:  why were dotless domains ruled out of the new gTLD expansion?  What is the problem with them?

The SSAC 053 report describes the issues pretty well.  The short explanation is that for the past zillion years (in Internet time) the only use of dotless names has been private use on internal networks, and there's a lot of software that assumes that's what they are.  Adding global dotless domains would be really flaky.

Typical example:

http://blah/

means a local host called blah, not the .blah domain.

The GAC objected to Google's having .search as a private domain, so Google concocted a dotless hack and sent it to ICANN, who are currently scratching their heads.  There are several other applicants for .search so even if ICANN were to decide Google's application was OK, they'd still have to slug it out with the other applicants.

Regards,
John Levine, johnl at iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. http://jl.ly