Dr Paul Vixie, a pioneer of the internet’s domain name system (DNS), has lashed out at the creation of hundreds of new top-level domains, ranging from .dog to .horse, and .cool to .porn, labelling them a money grab and a mistake.
Vixie, who is now the chief executive officer of Farsight Security, was speaking at the Ruxcon information security conference in Melbourne on Sunday about the importance of securing the internet’s DNS infrastructure.
In response to an audience question about the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) decision to create some 1900 new top-level domains in this first round alone, Vixie was blunt.
I think it is a money grab. My own view is that ICANN functions as a regulator, and that as a regulator it has been captured by the industry that they are regulating. I think that there was no end-user demand whatsoever for more so-called DNS extensions, [or] global generic top-level domains (gTLDs),
he said.
Vixie sees the demand for the new domains as having come from the people who have the budget to send a lot of people to every ICANN meeting, and participate in every debate
, that is, the domain name registrars who simply want more names to sell, so they can make more money. But these new domains don’t seem to be working.
They’re gradually rolling out, and they are all commercial failures,
Vixie said — via redwolf.newsvine.com
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