All this strife over mere names
by
DLWormwood
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Why do we even need domain names anymore since it's clear there's too much vested interest in what organizations name themselves? The current namespace is too confused to have much underlying meaning for the companies and people who currently hold them. (Read: you can no longer guess the name of a website.) For years, companies were content to have numbers for faxes and phone calls, why not just use IP numbers for websites?
-- Those who complain about affect & effect on/. should be disemvoweled
Re:All this strife over mere names
by
mr_teem
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The vested interest is not going to go away. I think the more interesting question is how flexible ICANN and the registrars have to be in order to accomodate the vested interest in a certain domain name. It's an artifically valuable commodity. (And one which they really can't profit from in an ethical way.)
Even phone numbers can be vitally important to some companies because of their mnemonic value. There's a mattress company that floods drive-time news radio in my area with a jingle singing their mnemonic toll-free number. (I sat on a U.S. standards committee in the late 80s when it received an earnest request from a pizzeria to standardize the location of the "Z" key on the telephone keypad to "0" so that he could have advertisae his toll-free phone number as 800-##-PIZZA. I am NOT making this up.) The telephone companies can't really profit from assignment of phone numbers, either, but they can handle requests and wait-lists for neat ones without too much hassle.
Marketing telephone numbers is a game of mnemonics or repetition ("That's 555-3770. Remember: 555-3770.") What I think is missing is what you need when you somehow ("Don't forget: 555-3770") the telephone number: the telephone directory. If I somehow forget the phone number of the local automobile glass repair shop ("Call 555-3770" now!) I can look it up in the telephone book.
How do I get to the web site for my local automobile glass repair shop? I'm very likely to forget what it was called--unless it's nice and simple--without having to spend time looking it up with limited search tools or directories. This is why domain names are so valuable for web-enabled companies.
[I also think opening up the TLD space more quickly would help--but that's another topic.]
-- ---
"It annoyed me, so I fixed it." -- Tom's First Principle of Engineering
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Why do we even need domain names anymore since it's clear there's too much vested interest in what organizations name themselves? The current namespace is too confused to have much underlying meaning for the companies and people who currently hold them. (Read: you can no longer guess the name of a website.) For years, companies were content to have numbers for faxes and phone calls, why not just use IP numbers for websites?
Those who complain about affect & effect on