ICANN And The Domain Game

MSNBC has a nice summary of the applications for new top-level domains recently filed with ICANN, which ICANN has just completed placing online. As you contemplate the applications, and perhaps consider commenting on them in ICANN's comment forum, this piece by Brock Meeks may come in handy for placing things in perspective. (Our last ICANN story explores this same topic.)

Comments

Lobby for the support of BIND maintainers...

[Ami Ganguli]

I don't really know who maintains BIND nowadays, but whoever it has has the power to fix all this.

Just start an alternative domain name system and incorporate it into new versions of BIND. Most admins will leave the alternative in their install (why not?) and voila - instant acceptance.

Re:Lobby for the support of BIND maintainers...

[wowbagger]

There's no need to modify BIND: all that is needed is to modify the data on the root name servers. The problem is that ICANN won't allow new TLDs to be added to the root name servers. There are two possible solutions to this:

1. The US government forces ICANN to accept new root server entries from anybody with a specified level of support (I wouldn't want JethroBillyBob's Internet and Oil Change to be able to create a new TLD, unless Jethro has several big servers).
2. Somebody creates a new set of root name servers, and people start pointing their name servers at them instead.

The former offends my Libertarian views, the latter has been tried with some success. However, as Metcalf's law states, the value of a network varies as the square of the number of nodes in the network: as second heirarchy of name servers is useful only if it has a significant number of users. Perhaps if a consortium of the larger ISPs got together, and made it their default, it might work.

However, do we wish to trade ICANN for AOL/UUNet/Qwest/Microsoft?

DNS is misused

[knuffelbeer]

The current problems with toplevel domains are nog problems of DNS. DNS was meant to be used to give organisations a name on a global network. The problem with domain names today is that they are used to label content of a specific service on a network, namely HTTP.

HTTP uses hostnames as a basis to describe infomation and are now allmost part of the content. This sceme does not scale very well since you cannot possibly determin by a hostname what content may be on it or vice versa. The problem is not with DNS, it still works for the purpose intended. It is with URL's. They are based on hostnames and that is showing it's limitations. A scheme used in NNTP (news) is better (but by no means perfect).

New toplevel domains will not fix this problem, because the problem is not DNS, it is HTTP and that is what should be fixed.

Re:Evolution

[Tet]

Introducing new TLDs as a short term solution won't work any better in the long run than just maintaining the .com, .org, .net, .** system.

Indeed. All it will do is force companies to register more domains to supposedly protect their trademarks. What's needed is stricter enforcement of domain allocations, like the system in the UK. You cannot register a .net.uk domain unless you can prove an entitlement to it (i.e., you're company/organisation is related to network infrastructure), and you can't register a .ac.uk domain unless you can prove you're part of the academic community. As it stands, too many people grab .com, .org and .net just because they can. If this practice was forcibly stopped, we'd all be better off.

Less is better.

[mindstrm]

They shoudl go back to geographic. Period.
Ditch ALL generic TLDs.

Leave it regional.