Re: ICANN Approves Non-Latin Domain Name Characters

[Rich Kulawiec <rsk () gsp org>]

On Sat, Oct 31, 2009 at 12:15:00PM -0400, Dan Kaminsky wrote:
> Forseen what?

Lemme 'splain.

Whenever a new TLD is opened up -- like, let's say, .mobi to pick
a spectacularly superfluous one -- there's a goldrush of registrations.

Most of that goldrush consists of spammers, phishers and abusers
who are eager to lay their hands on as many useful domain names
as possible at minimal cost.  So they'll go for google.mobi and
and g00gle.mobi and citibank.mobi and cit1bank.mobi and so on.

Right behind them (or perhaps in front of them) will come Google
and Citibank, trying to snatch these us before the bad guys can.
They don't actually WANT these domains: they're fine with ones
they have.  They just don't want the bad guys to have them, and
the quickest, cheapest way to prevent that is to get there first.

The registrars, for their part, will happily sell anything to
anybody as long as the cash register keeps ringing. 5,000 domains
consisting of nonsensical names at a bulk rate to snowshoe spammers?
Suuuuure.  Another 300 typosquatted variations on mercantilebank
to phishers?  Suuuuuure.  They simply don't care.

So of course they're in favor of .mobi and .info and .pro and
as many more variations as possible, because every time another
one is launched, they get to do this all over again.

And this is before we even get into the registrars that ARE
spammers/phishers/etc.

So I think this little cycle is about to play itself out again.

---Rsk
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