Competing Groups Press for a ‘.Gay’ Internet Suffix

[Kevin Slater]

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/23/competing-groups-press-for-a-gay-internet-suffix/?hp

 

So I wonder if many escorts would change their domains registries to .gay? LaterSlater.gay?

 

Kevin Slater

[+ deej]

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/23/competing-groups-press-for-a-gay-internet-suffix/?hp

 

So I wonder if many escorts would change their domains registries to .gay? LaterSlater.gay?

 

Kevin Slater

 

I'm not in favor.

 

Remember the purpose of the original three TLD's:

 

.com = commercial, for profit, selling shit

.org = non-profit, charities, societies, poofy shit

.net = misc. -- everything not fitting above

 

These three have been well-bended to other purposes.

 

Now we've added .TV, .INFO, and a few others. (.INFO is probably the only honest one!)

 

Personally, I don't see the purpose of .GAY other than establishing yet another way to segregate gays from the rest of the world. If approved, shall we take bets how long it takes Fred Phelps, Focus on Family, the "Save Marriage" groups, etc., to demand that .GAY domains are automatically flagged as "adult-only" sites? (Or to immediately campaign for outright banishment?)

 

Why on earth do we need specially flagged domains? Are we not good enough to use the ones everyone else can have?

 

As for escorts, I'd recommend .COM as a permanent home and .GAY as a DNS redirect to the original site. That puts you in the battleground, but not dependent on it.

[+ Charlie]

But wouldn't there be immediate protests for a .les, a .bi, a .trans? Maybe even a .str8?

[justaguy]

Well made points. The question of self-segregation is tricky. I understand the desire to say 'We exist. Get over it.' On the other hand, I don't want to say, 'We exist, and we're not you.'

[+ purplekow]

GeneralTsoe.chick UncleTom.blac PopeBenedict.cath LindsayLohan.fkup Purplekow.bull Is this where we want to go? At least .edu makes sense for universities et al. Unnecessarily exclusionary suffix.

[justaguy]

Except for the Lohan. It might be needed as a disclaimer/explanation.

[+ honcho]

I'm not in favor.

 

Remember the purpose of the original three TLD's:

 

.com = commercial, for profit, selling shit

.org = non-profit, charities, societies, poofy shit

.net = misc. -- everything not fitting above

 

These three have been well-bended to other purposes.

 

Deej is a good guy and clearly in the expert category on things computer related; but I beg to differ with him about this. I've been employed at a university since 1978 that was on the original arpa net.

 

There were more than 3 original Top Level Domains.

 

As noted before, he overlooked .EDU for Educational institutions.

 

There was also .GOV, .MIL, .ARPA (which survives this day for reverse lookups as in .in-addr.arpa), .BITNET and a pseudo TLD which gateways recognized for the purposes of forwarding email to a store-and-forward network, .UUCP.

 

I also believe that .COM was the catch-all, and .NET was really intended for communications providers, .e.g. Earthlink.NET, PacBell.NET.

 

Of course the categories were fuzzy and riddled with early exceptions. ISI.EDU (which participated heavily in the development of the internet), doesn't have classes or award degrees, but is a research laboratory associated with USC.EDU.

 

MERIT.EDU ran the first nationwide extension of the internet, per se, beyond the arpanet, and is a network provider (but is associated with the University of Michigan); and thus arguably ought to have been MERIT.NET .

 

[it was the convention that the official names were upper-case, but the University of California at Berkeley insisted on being Berkeley.EDU].

[+ deej]

I'll get a big rubber stamp for future use that says TONGUE IN CHEEK.

 

I'm still not in favor of .GAY for those that missed my point.