All Things Digital

You think Internet domain namespace is an unwieldy, unnavigable mess now? Just wait. ICANN, the Internet’s body for domain-name management–and I use that term loosely–today approved a domain-name system that permits an unlimited number of top-level domains.

Under the new system, anyone can register as a TLD any combination of letters and numbers they like, their range limited only by the breadth of their own imaginations and the $100,000 and $500,000 fee ICANN plans to charge. So, ICANN’s domain, for example, could become MassiveTechnical.Problems, Total.Chaos, Utter.Confusion or Cluster.F … well, you see my point.

“We are opening up a new world, and I think this cannot be underestimated,” said ICANN member Roberto Gaetano. And that’s an understatement if I ever heard one. Because, when the adult-entertainment industry catches wind of this … well, let’s just hope .xxx will be the least of our worries. How many slang terms for sexual anatomy can you think of?

When the transparency group Wikileaks was censored in China last year, no one was too surprised. After all, the Chinese government also censors the Paris-based Reporters Sans Frontieres and New York-based Human Rights Watch. And when Wikileaks published the secret censorship lists of Thailand’s military junta, no one was too surprised when people in that country had to go to extra lengths to read the site. But on Friday … in the home of the free and the land of the brave, and a constitution which states ‘Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press,’ the Wikileaks.org press was shut down.”

–Excerpt from Wikileaks’ press release

Talk about slamming the barn door shut on a long-ago departed horse. A U.S. district court in Northern California has ordered whistle-blower site Wikileaks.org shut down after Switzerland’s Bank Julius Baer complained that the site had posted bank documents that allegedly link it to money laundering and tax-evasion schemes in the Cayman Islands.

The court ordered Wikileaks’ Web host, Dynadot, to “immediately clear and remove all DNS hosting records for the wikileaks.org domain name and prevent the domain name from resolving to the wikileaks.org Web site or any other Web site or server other than a blank park page.”

Dynadot was quick to oblige, not that it mattered much. Wikileaks remains available from a number of so-called cover names and its content has already been widely mirrored and torrented. As “NewsRadio” ’s Joe Rogan once said, “Dude, you can’t take something off the Internet. … That’s like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.”