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Open-Source Pioneers Make Bid for .org
wdb writes: "A NY Times article (free subscription required) describes the competition surrounding control of the .org domain, which Verisign coughed up in order to keep .com and .net from going to the highest bidder. Open source and Internet pioneers Paul Vixie and Carl Malamud have entered the fray; central to their bid is their announced intent to place all the software necessary to manage a TLD in the public domain. 'This shouldn't be a dot-com opportunity,' Mr. Malamud said. 'There has been a lot of smoke and mirrors, but what we need is actually a public utility that is well managed in the public interest.'"
An infinite number of TLDs pretty makes TLDs meaningless. The system only has value if it fosters a useful hierarchical system for resolving hostnames. (This says nothing at all about the system and politics for creating and administering that hierarchy, just the functionality.) As the number of TLDs increases, the extension becomes less a pointer to where to look for the domain, and more an arbitrary few letters tacked on the name because it looks cool. By the time DNS finds the root for the exotic TLD, it might as well have looked directly for the domain without bothering with that root at all.
An analogy: File folders are useful to organize large amounts of paper. One can look for the folder first, then in that folder for a specific document. Why bother using file folders if every piece of paper gets a separate folder? Such a large number of folders no longer helps organize the data; they just take up space in the drawer.
A few more well thought out and well discussed TLDs won't hurt, but an unmonitored flood of them from everyone and everywhere defeats the entire purpose of the system.
You're just jealous 'cuz the voices talk to *me*
Paul Vixie already runs a number of root servers. Therefore "only if they're best qualified to do the job" is a specious argument. Paul already meets that criteria in spades.