i-DNS.net launches another set of bogus IDN's.

[Drewbert]

http://www.uninet.bg/en/

"Association Uninet was created in June 2007 in order to become the registry for the Cyrillic TLDs .бг, .инфо and .име through its registrars.

Association Uninet will launch soon the service "domain registration in TLDs .бг, .инфо and .име", but they will be temporary active in the networks of our partners.

Association Uninet will apply at ICANN in order to become the TLD registry for the chosen IDN TLDs. You could find more information about international top level domain at the ICANN website."

If ICANN give .бг to these guys instead of theoperator of the .bg ccTLD, I'll eat my hat.

[jose]

.бг is .bg, .инфо is .info, but how about .име ?!

Too good they didn't request for .com and .net, lol

[IDNCowboy]

Originally Posted by Drewbert

http://www.uninet.bg/en/

"Association Uninet was created in June 2007 in order to become the registry for the Cyrillic TLDs .бг, .инфо and .име through its registrars.

Association Uninet will launch soon the service "domain registration in TLDs .бг, .инфо and .име", but they will be temporary active in the networks of our partners.

Association Uninet will apply at ICANN in order to become the TLD registry for the chosen IDN TLDs. You could find more information about international top level domain at the ICANN website."

If ICANN give .бг to these guys instead of theoperator of the .bg ccTLD, I'll eat my hat.

knowing how ICANN is all about money they will give the finger to those that helped the IDN testbed and give it to i-dns.

[touchring]

Originally Posted by jose

.бг is .bg, .инфо is .info, but how about .име ?!

Too good they didn't request for .com and .net, lol

So no dname or alias for Russian .info?

[rkae]

hmm. how did I miss that thread? I was going to start a thread asking if the i-DNS thing is BS. after a little bit research the answer seems yes.

.име means .name

otherwise I don't see a reason that IDN wouldn't give the rights for .бг to the present official .bg register - Register.bg. yes they've always been these corrupted asses and there were numerous compliants and petitions against them but ICANN doesn't seem to care at all about that. I don't see any indications that they will legitimate the i-DNS initiative. but who knows? they may have changed their mind about Register.bg and are going to take some action but I really, really doubt it.

I checked their site - it was really simple. not much work put into it. checked for some domain - it wasn't regged. so I felt like making an experiment. bought the domain, sent the money. it's been almost 3 days and I didn't get a confirmation email for the regged domain. also they don't seem to have any sort of control panel. you can't even login. there is no whois service. they have contracts with 2-3 hosting companies which can resolve their IDN names, and promises that they are going to make contracts with more ISPs. they are also making it look like they are somehow related to ICANN, like it's an official thing, like their domains may have some sort of connection to the "official" ICANN IDN domains. "we're giving you the opportunity to register domains in Bulgarian and we're aiming to get ahead of ICANN before they launch the domains in cyrilic!". sending some sort of "register now before eveyone else, before the official launch!" message.

it all seems like a scheme to make some quick bucks before the official IDN.IDN launch.

[Rubber Duck]

Why is that reasonably intelligent people cannot understand that the only organisation that has the authority to hand out extensions that will resolve on the World Wide Web is ICANN?

Of course you can create virtual parallel universes with other protocols, but nobody else is ever going to find their way there.

[261275]

We that are working in the 'internet' as they say it forget millions dont have a clue...and will be a long time before even an intelligent guy that has nothing to do with the 'internet' will be able to tell whos doing what , when and why.

someone named eric called me today..asked if i can reg eric.com for him...(ascii)
just to show where some are...amazing

How is this JUNK legal?

[rkae]

well obvious answer is.. people are too lazy to research, or think they don't need to, because those sites are convincing and on the surface there isn't anything visibly wrong with them, people aren't educated about those things so once they stumble upon such scams they don't have a clue and go ahead and buy things. also I-DNS have some articles about them and the launch in some bulgarian news sites making it look legitimate. that's how I found them.

[Rubber Duck]

These domains are legitimate and could be used widely if you can persuade the World to dump the WWW. protocol for an alternative. It i s a tall order, it would be like trying persuade the World to exchange their dot Com for dot CM.

[jacksonm]

Originally Posted by Rubber Duck

Why is that reasonably intelligent people cannot understand that the only organisation that has the authority to hand out extensions that will resolve on the World Wide Web is ICANN?

It depends on how you define the "World Wide Web". Also, the internet existed long before the WWW, and HTTP is simply one of the access protocols.

Simply put, the "Internet" as you know it, is nothing more than a collection of computers which have IP addresses and are routed together. This can happen independently of any ICANN style body. We like to have DNS service, though, so we can use names instead of IP addresses. A DNS service needs "Root DNS servers" at the top. ICANN does nothing of substantial importance other than control the first set of "Root DNS servers" which were deployed, along with adding new entries into that root. The only thing they really have keeping them in business is momentum. Another organization can and has form a competing set of "Root DNS servers". If ICANN dicks around long enough, they risk losing their momentum and "the Internet" will begin to fragment. ISPs can easily do redirection to an alternative root, based on political direction, etc.

Originally Posted by Rubber Duck

Of course you can create virtual parallel universes with other protocols, but nobody else is ever going to find their way there.

While using the internet under the influence of an alternative root certainly can be viewed as being in a virtual parallel universe, the protocols are exactly the same. People won't even have to try to find their way there if ISPs / Countries start doing redirection because they ran out of patience with ICANN. People won't even know the difference.

Just my 2 cents, purely from a technical perspective.

.

[Rubber Duck]

When I mean World Wide Web, I mean it in the narrow sense of the www. protocol which is currently nearly everyone's default.

You are correct in as much as countries can orchestrate the moving away from this protocol within their own boundaries. However, if ICANN were not seen as being important they would not all be heading to LA on mass to fight over their IDN extensions.

It should also be noted that that this is not an purely an IDN issue. If you turn the lights out on IDN.com you also turn the light out on all the ASCII.com and all the other gTLDs. You could end up in a very lonely webspace indeed. But getting back to the point, it is perfectly legal and perfectly feasible. It is really a question of whether i-DNS can persuade more than a handful of people to travel this route. No pun intended.

[jacksonm]

Originally Posted by Rubber Duck

When I mean World Wide Web, I mean it in the narrow sense of the www. protocol which is currently nearly everyone's default.

You are correct in as much as countries can orchestrate the moving away from this protocol within their own boundaries.

The "www protocol" is known as HTTP. HTTP and your web browser functions just fine in DNS roots other than ICANN's, no changes required.

Absolutely nothing needs to be changed on an end-user's computer to continue to access websites should their ISP or country switch to a DNS root other than ICANN's. It really is just as simple as the ISP changing the IP addresses of the root DNS servers which they consult. We are talking about something that only involves editing a 12 line text file at the ISP's DNS resolver service.

Of course, this is the simplistic and totalitarian approach. There are other approaches in between, i.e. what China is doing with it's "split root".

.