ICANN’s new TLD plan a betrayal of the public trust

Domain Name Wire has an extremely interesting post on Tim Berners-Lee’s Thoughts on New Top Level Domain Names that clearly shows that the original inventor of the world wide web opposed the introduction of the new TLDs for profiteering by ICANN even before to the approval and release of the .mobi top level domain name

Tim Berners-Lee wrote a paper explaining the dangers of the introduction of new top level domain names.

I particularly agree with his following observation:

The root of the domain name system is a single public resource, by design. Its control must be for and, indirectly, by the people as a whole. To give away a large chunk of this to a private group would be simply a betrayal of the public trust put in ICANN.

I don’t like any of this myself at all.

In fact, I hate this new plan of ICANN so much that I’d have tried going to courts over the “betrayal of the public trust” had I been in the US. Is there no way people outside USA can contribute to pursue ICANN and make this clear to them that this is not a wise move and must not be pursued at all?

Free .mp domains as Chi.mp goes LIVE!

Chi.mp has opened up registration and is giving away free .mp domains, which are otherwise available for $20 per year at get.mp.

.mp is an interesting domain extension and could produce a number of domain hacks. I, myself tried the names of a few cities in Madhya Pradesh (MP), one of the largest states in India and wasn’t able to find a single one unregistered! Found out that all of these redirect to the Chi.mp home page! So, the guys had already thought of that and want to keep it personalized and not commercialized! Well, in that case at least these should be available as paid domains.

Would have been great to get some of those if I could but looks like it ain’t gonna be. Never mind!

Anyway, Chi.mp not only allows users to select a personalized .mp domain name, but also link it  to their online social networking profiles and RSS feeds etc. Would create some interesting kinda’ sites.

Hope this wouldn’t turn out to be a fibber as the .tel domain extension seems to be. So much for storing your contact details IN a domain name! Bah!