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New.net and ICANNI wonder, what is ICANN official position towards New.net and their 'alternate gTLDs'? Looks like anyone can invent their 'private Internet', introducing their own root DNSes and any 'gTLDs' they only wish to create. If these 'private Internets' continue to grow and multiply, the very basics of Internet will be ruined. It is remarkable that many a registrar support both 'official' (ICANN-governed) and New.net's 'Internets'. That's weird, in my opinion. new netAs far as ICANN's position towards new net - it was clearly hostile and pejorative. On occassions ICANN executives said things about new net that could be construed as defamatory and an with an intent to drive customers away from new.net. As far as new.net technology went, it was a mix of mechanisms. One of the prime mechanisms was to use something that is in just about every end-user box today: a set of dns suffixes that the box software will append to a user-uttered name in an attempt to build a fully qualified domain name. There is nothing earth shaking about that, nor are any plugins required, as it is standard far in Windows and all versions of Linux and Unix (and thus the Mac). Sure, the appearance of new TLDs might cause a some issues for those who use domain names both from the providing and from the using ends. But is that sufficient reason to deny an applicant, such as myself with .ewe, the ability to try to innovate? Even the stodgy old telephone system added the * and # symbols to its address space. The population of telephone users at that time all had rotary dial phones and only the people who went out and got touch-pad phones had the ability to use those symbols to use the new services that became possible. ICANN has taken an anti-innovation stance that is not justified on any basis related to the technical stability of the internet. Still they aren't goneThanks, Kirien. I have not watched new.net for more than 3 years. First, I thought they will soon be gone. However, I visited their site recently - it doesn't look totally abandoned, even though it doesn't look too much alive. I wonder how many a domain names they have sold - just curious. 'And where are they now'... re: Still they aren't gonewe will be saying that for a long time |
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The new.net experiment
That's a blast from the past Sagari.
As far as I'm aware, New.net has effectively been in stasis for more than two years. The business model didn't pan out how they expected.
It was a bold experiment but one which appears not to have gained wide acceptance. The difficulty with it was that it required everyone wanting to visit your website to either have a plugin installed in their browser or be using an ISP that had signed up with New.net.
As such, it was necessary for New.net's approach to snowball. The more ISPs that signed up, the more the domains New.net sold were viable because the more people could access them. It seems that the company never managed to get over that hill though.
There is also the issue that you are running a huge number of domains effectively through one domain - something that I know ICANN had stability concerns about.
You only have to look at the trouble caused by one registrar stopping working recently to imagine the problems that could be caused if New.net had taken off and then there was a problem with its domain.
Anyway, this is not an official ICANN response, just some reflections from someone that closely followed New.net for a bit.
Kieren