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John Gilmore and Maddog Hall discuss .ORG bids
TreyHarris writes "Over on SAGEwire, we have posted an email exchange between John Gilmore (EFF cofounder) and Jon "maddog" Hall (Executive Director, Linux International) about the .ORG bids. It's a fascinating read, and goes much further into depth about the issues than I've seen on any news site thus far."
Come on, folks, who's kidding who? If the price of .org goes down, it won't mean more nonprofits could afford domains...it'd mean more bandwagon domain prospectors and more work for ICANN, who obviously CANN'T handle the load they have now.
.org domain names. I bought them at $15 each per year. If .org dropped to $6, I would have about a hundred -- every possible abbreviation and misspelling I could think of. And I'm just one guy, running what used to be a web hosting co-op.
.org. Organizations are not starving so much that they can't afford $15...hell, a single mailing costs more than ten times that, and it's about the price of two hours of one guy telemarketing. What .org needs is something to cause it to rise above commercial domains. If the price was more like $100 per domain, it would give more credibility to the domain holder as there would be less impetus to snipe these expensive domains.
;).
I have about six
If anything, we need to jack up the price on
Oh, and while we're at it, the profits from the additional price shouldn't go to a company. They should go to a serious of non profits, selected by the members when they register. EFF and FSF could be on the top of the list
Hey freaks: now you're ju
The problem with the whole domain name system is that it has been abused to no end. URLs aren't supposed to make sense; the address box in your web browser is not supposed to be a substitute for a search engine. A good analogy could be made to email addresses. No one expects to be able to email my_neighbor_john@wholived.nextdoor.tome.whenIwas6. com and have it work. Instead, we all have address books so we don't have to remember everyone's email address. Likewise, in the web world, we have bookmarks or Favorites.
.org domain name is priced as under a monopoly (since it is controlled by one). But you do not need a domain name to have a website. Get a subdomain wherever your site is hosted, and you'll be fine.
So what should domains be? Well, just what they sound like, "domains" of servers. Go.com does this right. They have a web server for espn.go.com and another for abcnews.go.com. Don't want to remember those? Fine, then bookmark espn.go.com and call it "sportz."
Registering names for domains that will only ever have websites is also extremely stupid. What is at ftp.hotornot.com? Are there any groups at news.onion.com?
In conclusion, I will concede that the
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
I've had my ".org" domain name for a decade now. That's well before Dupont and all of the other idiots jumped in and tried to turn the DNS into a second branch of the PTO, and registered 500 domains in a day, and we all had to start paying for something which used to be free.
.com, .net, .edu, and .mil were such that .org was the only place where a private individual was *allowed* to get a domain name at all!
.org were changed at this late date, so that I could no longer keep my domain name. I'm pretty sure that "slashdot.org" would be pretty pissed, as well.
.org, then limit two character domain names based on country codes to *citizens* of those countries, and limit .net to network infractructure (ISPs, NSPs, etc.), and .com to incorporated entities. Nobody else gets domain names, thanks!
When I got this domain, the rules on
I, for one, would be extremely pissed if the rules on
If you are going to do that to
Ut-oh... I guess it's now obvious that limiting domains by lexicography is a stupid thing. If you want to be a lexicographer, and you think you know better than the rest of us, by all means, start a search engine company or a portal site, and let people who agree with you use it and validate your judgement... or ignore you, if that's what their tastes dictate.
-- Terry
The problem, as some other posters have noted, is that DNS is couplng static legal identifiers with dynamic physical addresses while at the same time people are trying to use the legal identifiers as conceptual addresses.
This cannot work.
While directory services function moderately well at locating references to concepts, they don't do it REAL well. I went looking for HTMLView a few days ago and had to slog through pages of results that pointed to the wrong product that happened to have the same name. And most people are not experts at using search engines.
Maybe we need to consider Ted Nelson's Xanadu Project all over again. ie., we need something to allow entities on the Net to be conceptually identified and categorized so that people can put a name or concept in a search engine and find an INTELLIGENTLY ORGANIZED (unlike Google where the results are a hodgepodge of whatever the Web server operator put in his HTML) list that describes the entity in sufficient terms to determine WHAT KIND of entity it is and WHICH entity of that kind it is.
Then you hit the button and you get the legal address which has no more importance than "1055 Market Street" does (or wouldn't if we didn't live on a physical street) and IT takes you to 455.622.012.5 which only the routers care about.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!