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Brad Templeton On New Mobile Domains
nfocus writes "CircleID has an opinion piece by Brad Templeton, Chairman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, offering an interesting follow up to the previous discussions here on Slashdot: New Net Battle Over ".mobile" Looming. Brad suggests that 'the only way to get a competitive innovative space is to slowly get rid of the generics and allow a competitive space of branded TLDs for resale. .yahoo, .dunn, .yellowpages, .google, .wipo, and a hundred other branded resellers competing on even footing to create value in their brand and win customers with innovative designs, better service, lower prices and all the usual things. I presume .wipo would offer trademark holders powerful protections within their domain. Let them. ...Let them all innovate, let them all compete.' Also in the article 'The domain will not actually be named .mobile, rumours are they are hoping for a coveted one-letter TLD like .m to make it easier to type on a mobile phone.'"
Call it ".mob"
:)
I call dibs on "smart.mob".
VOS/Interreality project: www.interreality.org
As long as any typos i happen to make on my mobile get redirected to the correct domain, I'm happy.
All errors in this comment are mine. Corrections are considered a derivative work, and punishable under copyright law.
Not having TLD at all... Like http://slashdot
That would be cooler because most modern browser may omit the http:// part. Lots of business would covet those!
--
Error 500: Internal sig error
This sounds like a good idea. It would be really handy for, say, .wipo to be the "official" site address, and cease the lawsuit problems that have occurred with .com
.sex domain?
And, really, the more competition the better. And extra domains would be nice too.
Wouldn't it be handy to have a
Is it me or does this just look like an attempt by the mobile service providers and hardware manufacturers to screw more money out of domain owners?
.mob domain over my .com or .uk etc domain? Simple - to ensure that someone else doesn't. There will be a huge land grab and expensive litigation to follow.
Why would I want to get a
Stop the madness and stop creating new domains without a radical overhaul of the existing ones.
Matt Thompson - Actuality - Insert product here.
I am probably not in the know as I'm in Canada, and I really only have those impressions (along with what I've seen in the US) that I've seen up here... but boy does it suck. Rogers, for instance, tries to charge you by the kilobyte - and then ads useless colour banners with big file sizes to their so-called mobile sites... and then they disable the image-blocking feature on the T68i they sell. Nice huh?
When I can just get some basic info quickly on a mobile phone without hassle - movie times, directions, etc - then I'll be interested. Frankly its a development problem, and a design problem... a new TLD isn't going to help there...
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
he only way to get a competitive innovative space is to slowly get rid of the generics and allow a competitive space of branded TLDs for resale. .yahoo, .dunn, .yellowpages, .google, .wipo, and a hundred other branded resellers
Excuse me, but isn't that exactly what the domain names are for? I want yahoo in my country, I go to yahoo.dk. With a yahoo TLD I'd go to dk.yahoo. This just doesn't make sense. Can anyone think of a good application for a liberated TLD marked where everybody and his dog has their own TLD?
Underholdning.info
if you think a domain extension is key to a successful service
When will people understand that the top level domain is supposed to indicate the type of organisation that holds the domain. They are not supposed to be a tool to classify content of servers, that's the job of search engines and directories.
.com situation.
Allowing companies to create new top level domains will just result in a confused and crowded tld namespace similar to
Seems to me that I could block a large percentage of spam merely by blocking anything with a FROM or REPLY TO of *.biz & *.info. I'm seriously considering it too. More TLD's would just add to the list that needs blocking.
I have yet to use (or find a useful)* website on one of the new(er) TLD's, and they want to add more?
*That's not to say there aren't any, I just don't frequent them.
I don't really see why we need corporate TLDs. www.google.google? It really doesn't make any sense.
.per domain name reserved exclusively for personal, non-profit websites. .com has lost its original purpose (and .net has lost it, even more so.) Users of .org tend to be of more of a non-profit nature than other domain names, but rarely are they actual organizations. We need a return to strictly descriptive TLDs.
Most of all, I'd like to see a
Allowing arbitrary 'branded' TLDs would solve nothing, it's more likely to cause confusion amongst net users and organisations alike.
Especially when you're talking on the phone.
"www dot my site, one word, dot m"
"Was that M for Mary or N for Nellie?"
"mng"
"?!"
All you've done is shifted .com up one level so it's chaos at the top level. Fubaring oooh lots of nameservers.
Commercial organisations have shown themselves to be capable only of managing flat namespaces, they appear simply unable to manage heirarchical naming systems in a coherent manner. Whatever you give them becomes flat.
Hmm, where's my DNS rant?
Ooh here it is:
http://www.archeus.plus.com/colin/dns/
Hmm, my stylesheet needs a little work and the email address is old so don't bother trying to mail me.
Deleted
Correct me if I'm wrong but a few years ago a few intelligent computer geek-types came up with a pretty neat way of ensuring that nobody has to remember computers by their IP addresses but by much easier to remember names. It works pretty well and they called it the Domain Name System.
But as usual, because it's a good idea, someone's got to make money from it so in walk the regiment of marketing types with their buzzwords like "product branding", "innovation" and "customer" and try to hijack it.
"Windows - an operating system designed by marketeers" - enough said.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
I think his comment is a little off base.
... a nice, but flawed idea
He says Rather, generics must be shared. Ownership rights can accrue to them only in specific contexts that are not generic. Because the word "Apple" has no generic meaning when it comes to computers, we allow a company to get rights in that name when applied to computers. A different company has those rights when it applies to records.
But with domain names it is impossible to say "take me to www.apple.com for records" so we either allow someone to use a generic name or no-one...which would have caused legal problems with what is defined as generic.
Besides which at the time i would say it was looked on as a technical issue and not a decision with far reaching economical and political effects.
Branding the toplevel would be nice but i know if i am well established at an address (generic or otherwise) I am not going to be happy to restart just so we can level the playing field. Kind of like poor people asking rich people to go socialist for a while untill we all have the same amount of money and then we'll give that capitalism thing another go, nice idea, not going to happen.
All in all i think thats all this is
The Borg assimilated my race & all I got was this lousy T-shirt
stupid idea, but at least it would give control back to ICANN/IANA unless ... Arrrrggggghhhhhhhh!
Let us make a new internet without companies, whiners, spammers and haX0rz.
:-) = I am happy
:^) = I am happy with my big nose
C:\> = I am happy with my OS
Currenty, TLDs tell you nothing about the reputability of the domain owner -- anyone can get a domain at any TLD. Competition between TLDs could be a good thing in this regard. Some TLDs might become very selective of members -- creating TLDs with high reputations. This is in contrast to some domains, like .biz, that appear to be the lairs for so many spammer ecommerce sites (as far as I have seen).
It would be nice to be able to trust organizations that have a particular TLD -- knowing that the could not get and retain that TLD unless they adhered to a strict ethical code and had the organizational resources to support whatever products/services/info they were providing.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Okay, *I* don't like people polluting the TLD namespace. *He* wants more names.
.l (for "L"ame) TLD added, and anything this guy wants to add as a tld can go under there, making him happy, since he gets all his wacky TLDs and the registrars can have their "you just bought blargh.com! Do you also want to buy blarg.wipo.l?" messages. If people get crabby about having to type two extra letters "It's not a *real* TLD!" they can add .l to their search domains and bump up ndots in resolv.conf. Furthermore, the conventional generics can be aliased into the .l domain (.com.l) if people *really* don't want to do another lookup.
How about this -- there be a
Christ, I can't believe there are people attacking the DNS structure again. We have to put up with Verisign and their wildcards, the registrars and their ".aero" TLD, and now more crap.
May we never see th
Wouldn't Microsoft want it then?
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
This has nothing to do with lower prices or competitive services. It's called marketing people, and it *will not* be stopped by common sense or logical thinking. Although I agree that the monopolized status quo is not ideal, the EFF just lost a bunch of credibilty by release that bollocks. What I find particularly disappointing is the emphasis on providers, companies, and resale. Clearly this wasn't designed to help the average Joe manage his own domain at a realistic price... Why should the domain name infrastructure be a market anyway? How about having it simply maintained by a non-profit orginisation and provide services to folks that need them, instead of selling vast tracts of it to the megacorps that can afford it.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
I want a special TLD called ".idiot", with a special discount for politicians of all sorts and anyone involved in ICANN getting a free account.
<sigh>
The downside of opening up the TLD system is the potential for gated communities that fragment the internet. Some TLDs might decide to only accept conections from particular other TLDs. They might do this to weed out spam, viruses, or objectionable material from other countries.
Some countries, like the US, could legislate that all pron and violent materials be relegated to particular TLDs that let parents easily filter out this material. Other countries might have similar rules or use content-category TLDs for censorship purposes.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
But will every new TLD have significant value? I can see .biz as one of the newer TLD's with a bad reputation. .biz looked like a good idea on the surface, away from the over-populated .com space, but it's been ridden with spammers.
.com space, but for spammers, it's just the case on the victums end of "oh, this guy trying to sell me something has this really k3wl .biz address".
:(
These new TLD's are just going to add more ammo to spammers. They have legit uses, especially for those companies unfortunate enough to have their name taken in the
If we create TLD's for just anything, how do we police the damn things? I bet any spammer could come along wanting one of these, and bang, they just made themselves their own abuse contact
Come on, folks. There should be a moratorium on new TLDs until they can fix the ones they have. My domain is a good example (we'll call it Fubar):
.name domain specifically for this purpose now. You should have (for the US) a registered corporation (INC/PC/LLC/etc.) registered with a FEIN which justifies the .com being given to you.
.org site. I'm probably borderline here, as you should have your organization set up as a (name your favorite federal paragraph) non-profit/charitable organization or corporate not-for-profit to qualify.
.biz and .ws, it just makes the .com TLD more valuable to squatters. Oh, that too.
Fubar.com - owned by namespace, a company who rents email addresses for an outrageous sum. Clearly they should lose their domain, as there is a
Fubar.net - owned by a the Fubar lawfirm. Clearly NOT a network provider of any sort. You should be have a FEIN and corporate papers (they're cheap) indicating that your business is set of for the purpose of providing network services.
Fubar.org - owned by me, Mr. Fubar. Used for personal wmail space and for my political campaign organization. Yes, I ran for elected office last year. I lost. I may run again...eventually. I have also considered hosting the Fubar family genealogy from the
Of course, I'd like Fubar.com for my business, Fubar Engineering, Inc, but I've setteled for FubarEngineering.com. It's a bit cumbersome, especially since I spell Fubar with nine letters.
My point is - until the clean up the process, they shouln't go complicating it any more than it already is. A free-for-all at the top would be disasterous. Not to mention the fact that, like
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
You know, "competition increases quality".
I already hate TV. What am I supposed to do if the internet gets as trashy as TV ? Go to the library and read Plato, Sokrates and Aristoteles ?
Rainer
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
Well then, you may as well make it a new protocol:
slashdot://
Here's what I do: Bitty Browser & Andromeda
You know, I've seen press about these new TLD's several times before... There was .bis (or was it .biz?) for businesses...and .tv for television...and something like .info for informational sites.... I don't know how many of these actually went live or not, but I've never seen them in use. All I typically see is .com and .edu these days...and precious few .org or .net - people really don't seem terribly interested in having a variety of TLDs.
yrs,
Ephemeriis
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
DNS is an easily spoofed protocol (and mapping *anything* to an IP address to do authentication is also a bad idea). Using it as an authentication system is an extremely bad idea from a security standpoint. Use certs with SSL if you want server-side authorization.
This sort of thing can be provided by many other mechanisms, but "the existence of a DNS record in a TLD" is *not* what you want.
Oh, and it also isn't hierarchical, which is a fundamental element of DNS.
May we never see th
If microsoft wanted to, they could probably set up an "alternet" where code in IE would check a microsoft dns first and then go on to whatever your isp dns is. Then they could run around with .microsoft or .ms or whatever.
With respect, Brad, that's a terrible idea. To prevent cyber-squatting, companies are going to have to buy all the TLDs relating to their name or their line of business. This is going to cost hundreds of dollars each year for no real benefit.
And WTF is .dunn? In Britain Dunn & Co. is a rather dull gentleman's outfitter. Suits you, Sir ;-)
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
Call it .mobile in the UK .gsm in Europe .cell in the US .whatever in other parts of the world
Call it
Call it
Call it
I don't see why allowing registration of top level domains would change anything. What could Google do with *.google which they can't do with *.google.com? .com for you. (If you think that typing four extra characters would be harder then remembering hundreds of new names.) .com, .net, .org etc. except that the fight over names has mostly finished and we don't really want to rekindle it. (I suppose you could just remove the .com from the current registrations, but the .org and .net registrants would probably complain).
This is especially true as most browsers can add the
Obviously this argument works in reverse and so there is no reason to require all domains to end with
However, I do think that the article raised some very good suggestions for valuable services. I would love to see a *.wipo.org or *.typo.com but they don't need to wait for their own TLDs.
Btw. Setting up new TLDs is already possible; the Internet is built on open standards you don't have to use the official TLDs: opennic.org
Oh I can see this: "too many connections on Port xcyc8749, cannot handle your request"
All that pressure for nutjobs that can't handle a two or three letter suffix on the domain name. Immense investment, two keystroke savings for things we rarely ever type by hand. What for?
Never change a running.. ah you know the deal
DNS is completely inappropriate for use as a "marketing space" to begin with. This is why we have all of these idiotic lawsuits (and squatting) under the existing TLDs: the domains themselves have been *given* intellectual property status when they do not deserve it. Who deserves apple.com? Apple Supermarkets or Apple Computers? Why?
New TLDs isn't the answer, it's just going to flatten the namespace and give an order of magnitude more traffic to the root servers. Who's going to pay for that? You want to charge new TLD owners $500 a year to register? Who's going to manage that namespace? Is ICANN going to become a registrar, or are we going to start having independent registrars managing the root namespace? Nothing about this looks like a good idea. It might be technically feasible, but it's stretching DNS further than it was intended to go.
A proper solution needs to involve a *proper* directory service. DNS is not a search engine. I shouldn't have to know or guess that apple.com is Apple Computers. Today's search engines search on content and only the quality of their algorithm, the user's ability to research and a bit of luck allow it to point you to authoritative places.
It seems like an X.500 or LDAP directory service does exactly what you'd need here (and conveniently integrates with X.509-style SSL certificates), but it isn't the only solution either. Give users the ability to do a real-world name lookup through a proper directory service, and DNS domains lose their IP value entirely and can end up doing what they were originally intended to do: provide a hierarchial namespace for hosts and services. SSL can be used to start validating this real-world identity instead of just connecting the session with a DNS hostname (which is also part of the problem).
I could query this new directory for "Apple", get back a few matches including the obvious one I wanted, Apple Computers, get a mapping to their DNS domain apple.com, do an SRV lookup against apple.com for an HTTP service, and boom, I have Apple Computer's home page. I don't have to guess the DNS domain and my browser doesn't need to correct my invalid URL.
I really don't see how this is a good idea at all. Making up unlimited top levels is a huge pain in the ass. For anyone out there with an original (not common) domain name and matching company name this makes securing legit traffic and users to your own site very difficult. Used to be you could get the .com.net.org wrapped up. This will be a nightmare for comanies that are trying to keep people from spoofing domains. This is stuff that should be managed in house, like yro.slashdot.org mac.slashdot.org etc.
Post: Sigged, for your pleasure.
why are we changing the internet to make money?
In the early days of the web, everyone had homepages with their chosen host that went something like http://www.hostname.com/users/mysite/ or for the lucky ones http://mysite.hostname.com/
.yahoo, .google, .whateverelse, and suddenly we'll be back to those old days. Domains on some of the new TLDs will be given away, and those ones will get exactly the same reputation as the current Geocities/Tripod type sites.
.tv). Most of the others will be snapped up by porn/spam/fraud operators, and once they get associated with them, no-one else will touch them with a bargepole (.biz anyone?).
Then we all realised that the only way for our sites to be taken seriously was to buy a domain name for them, so we changed to http://mysite.com/
Now this proposal comes along with
Others will be sold for extortionate prices, and there will hardly be any of them sold (like
If we're really lucky, there might be a handful of companies that get themselves a unique-sounding domain out of it, but I don't see how that's going to be worth all the wasted time and effort that this whole saga will cause.
The only reall effect of this will be to devalue the domain levels. And the only people who will benefit will be the registrars for the new TLDs.
(Spudley Strikes Again!)
I'd then be able to have my website at http://bork.bork.bork/
That's what I get for giving sysadmin advice before coffee.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I don't understand the need for constant new TLDs .us, .tv, .mobile). What is the purpose of these other than to generate more revenue for the people that help us all register ? I am pretty sure there is no great technical advantage for me to go to slashdot.m vs. slashdot.org !
"Action is the thing that escapes most people. Great ideas are a dime a dozen. Great actions are few and far in between.
... .mob, for the "family" business
It is better to be the hammer than the anvil.
If you pay for proprietary TLDs then it's no different than just dropping them entirely, but then we couldn't differentiate .org .edu type domains. I think the registrars just want more money. This whole .m thing reminds me of when some company paid Tuvalu (sp?) a boatload of money and was planning to sell .tv domains to broadcasters. Didn't work - not even a little bit.
imagine... a system (not unlike freenet) that you control, besides the keyword to which you are server, the ones to which you are client, and the "popularity" of the link keyword->address is taken into account when a person who never accessed that link use that keyword.
:= XX.YY.ZZ.WW:80 "CarCompanyX Official Website"
:= XX.YY.ZZ.WW:80 "CarCompanyX Official Website" := TT.QQ.RR.PP:8080 "CarCompanyX sucks"
:= AA.BB.CC.DD:8080 "CarCompanyX Official Website"
:= TRUSTED:SIGNED(xxxx-signature) AA.BB.CC.DD:8080 Motive:Misrepresentation
:= XX.YY.ZZ.WW:80 "CarCompanyX Official Website" := TT.QQ.RR.PP:8080 "CarCompanyX sucks" := AA.BB.CC.DD:8080 "CarCompanyX Official Website" WARNING:seems to be misreprestation VOTE:12pro/2con/6abs
:= TAG:Wants-to-judge PUBLIC-KEY:xsdfdsfsdf
Trying to explain myself:
Imagine you are CarCompanyX. You create your page and put in its NuDNS record:
CarCompanyX
You are Joe Bloe. You want to buy a car from CarCompanyX. Your NuDNS server returns <NONE?>; it goes to your peers NuDNS, and returns two options:
CarCompanyX
CarCompanyX
your browser can use the most popular of them or give you a choice.
Now, you are Mary Hates CompanyX and you want to hack the system. so you set up a NuDNS record:
CarCompanyX
CarCompanyX sees this, reclaims to a "court" of trusted (as in cryptographically), show its docs and says "this is not the official". Each member of the "court" makes its judgement, and sets up a trusted entry in its NuDNS records:
CarCompanyX
Now, this board/court must have, like, 10 to 20 members, so when Joe Bloe tries to access keyword "CarCompanyX", his browser can show him the options:
CarCompanyX
CarCompanyX
CarCompanyX
his browser/resolver can (at his option) sort these entries, use only the "official", use the last one, use
other options:
* use special "tags", like:
TAG: Trademark-owner
TAG: Denouncing (or criticism?)
TAG: Personal
in the NuDNS records, let the system and the "court"/board sort it out. The "court"/board does not even has to be appointed/elected. People can put in their personal NuDNS servers:
JoeBloeJr
The system could gather everyone who wants to judge, their last votes, and each person could choose who to trust in his system.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
Ugh, I am so disgusted by the new TLDs that we have .coop and .biz was bad, but .yahoo? no way! TLDs are meant to have legal meanings. If you look back at when
.gov in .com -- what a mess!
.inc, .corp., .ltd, .gmbh would be most useful. They could be made available only to companies with the specified form, and the specified name. The problem is, there can still be two companies with the name name, but incorporated in different places. I guess geographical descriptions could be used to indicate the legal inforporation domain of the entity, i.e. sikorski.ct.us.inc, but that gets
.ham. Amateur radio operators already have globally unique identifiers (callsigns) a global organization (IARU) and national organizations (such as ARRL and RSGB) set up to handle the administration. They also have a need, it can be cumbersome to reach a specific ham over the Internet. There is already a whole /8 block of IP space for amateur packet radio use (44.0.0.0/8) and this would complement it as well.
;) -- oh well how about IANA as well, once you hear by arguments about how to fix that broken system ;)
had thrust on us the past couple of years, and now they want to create more? the rationality for
they were created, there were different usage policies for arpanet (.arpa) and milnet (.mil), and nato (.nato, now gone) in the military world. Commercial entities and non-commercial, extra-military organizations were also appropriately marked by their domain. Foreign jurisdictions were also appropriately marked. It made sense; you could make network policy decisions based on TLD.
Now, any organization can get com/tld/org, and I see an increating number of things that should be in
What would be useful is specific information, providid by TLD, telling you what kind of organization you are dealing with.
ugly. But it would be useful to at least have sikorski.inc, and know for a fact that is who you are dealing with.
What would also be great is a record other than NS that is in a given TLD's database. Things like public crypto keys, to enable secure email (dnssec?) and a field for legal identification of the entity, such as the specific domain of incorporation, and the secretary of state corporation number and/or federal tax id. Technically, this would be easy to implement, though there is some paperword in verification of the applying entity's entitlement to a domain, but that's what the registration fees are supposed to cover, right?
Other than that, the only new TLD I can see being worth a damn would be
OK, so does someone want to appoint me to ICANN?
The man who brought you copyright-controlled Usenet comes up with a plan to MAKE MONEY FAST selling the part of the URL you know you shouldn't even have to type.
Personally, I think they should make it longer - something like .mobilephone perhaps. With any luck, evolution will kick in as hundreds of idiots run themselves off the roads trying to text while driving. It's bad enough with people trying to drink coffee and hold a phone while driving - make it easier to send text messages and some idiots will. You know it'll happen...
I want to reserve .sex and .porn right away. Where do I sign??
I don't like a mobile TLD because companies have to register it so others won't take it and confuse their customers. It's also much cheaper for the company foo.com to make mob.foo.com instead of registering foo.mob. With the nice side effect that no cybersquatter can grab mob.foo.com.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
I'd argue that we don't, mobile content developer Tom Hume gives some very good reasons why we don't need a mobile phone specific top level domain in this Mobitopia article, and suggests a few reasons (mostly greed) as to why we're seeing this sort of proposal.
.trojan
"For her pleasure"
Oh yeah? My website is going to be at http://www.clownpenis.fart
I run a DNS server for my little LAN. Internally, machines are added to a ".lan" domain, because they are NAT'd anyway. Can't be accessed from outside, so they don't get the external domain name. Traffic inbound goes to the correct machines.
In the past, I had a guarantee that ".lan" would not be a valid TLD. It can't be a country code, and it's not a standard TLD.
So... now the assurance is going to go away. The price of progress, I guess. I do hope that some TLDs remain reserved for internal use (same as the unroutable IP addresses.)
Of course we need only one such private TLD (I sure hope it's ".lan" because that's easiest for *me*).
Maybe I should go and read the article now...
Ratboy.
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
The number of domain registrations is dropping steadily as the worthless registrations from the speculation boom expire. Pressure for new TLDs comes from registrars, especially Network Solutions, who see their once-loated revenue declining. All they want is to force real companies and trademark holders to re-register in each TLD.
It's not broken. Leave it alone.
Yes, I may be wrong, but I prefer generic '.com' or geographical '.**'. I don't want my web site to be .google/.ISP/.Earthlink/.WhateverMarketoidsThinkOf . Because I am not a part of those organizations and, hopefully, won't be. And I bet as soon this madness with a gazillion of zones happens, there will be no easy way to get domain in other company's zone. Each time hosting changes it will be "Sorry, Sir, but we only support our domains. We can offer you a discount on YourSire.Schmuk...".
Unless, of course, one can get personal zone for, say, $15 a year...
Hyperom.com
Is that something like... /dev/random | grep `cat troll samples` :-)
cat
Awesome furniture, accessories and cabinetry in Santa Rosa, CA: http://humanity-home.com/
Because that's the logical endpoint of refusing to contain the potential explosion of TLDs: every company in the world has its own TLD. The namespace goes back to flat.
We need *more* structure, not less. If we're gonna rip up the current model, let's build a real global X.500 directory and put hosts and their organizations in it, so we have some chance of sorting through the mess.
Why do I get the feeling that this is driven by a bunch of guys each of whom never was able to grok any hierarchy which doesn't have him at the root?
If yahoo and google and the likes what to do this today, they can. At the third tier level. What wrong with yournamehere.yahoo.com or yournamehere.google.com.
How About...Not having TLD at all... Like http://slashdot
.com, .net, .edu, and .gov. And essentially everybody ended up competing for second-level domains in .com. And Network Solutions started charging for them ($50/year at first). And made a bundle by essentially recreating the original broken system one level down under .com and charging to do the administration.
That was ALREADY broken decades ago - which is why the dot.ist.domain.addressing was invented.
UUCP Mailnet (and others) used simple site names in a single namespace. Wile you could supply!an!explicit!route!to!somesite!joe, there were add-on tools that would examine the maps and let you mail joe@somesite.
But with all the sitenames in a common single namespace it was a BITCH to administer. After a short time all the "good" short names were taken. And as things other than mail needed naming (like sites with hundreds or thousands of desktops) it just got silly.
So the hierarchical namesystem was set up, with the three-pronged goals of automating the routing more generally, spreading the administrative load, and allowing the addition of machines at a site without further interaction with an outside authority.
Then it went commercial - with TLDs of
And it's evolved from there.
The commercial registries have no incentive to promote their own competition. ICANN is in their pocket and adding TLDs has implications netwide (since some customer systems, as well as the root servers, need tweaking for new TLDs). Thus addition of TLDs is glacial.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Someone should create a free software version of the CNRI's handle system instead. And set up a non-profit ethically oriented organization to back it, rather than allowing a perfectly sensible idea to be hijacked by Esther Dyson and her oligarch cronies at the International DOI Foundation.
.mobile etc. discussion is a move in exactly the wrong direction: away from a decentralized end-to-end architecture, to one where you pay for the priviledge of serving one feudal lord or another. There's absolutely no value in any of this, unless you're one of those dweebs who's every article of clothing is covered with branded slogans. Branding is something you do to cattle.
If you're not familiar, the idea is to assign objects persistent identifiers. URL's can also name things, but persistence is hard to guarantee, because the things they refer to may very well move around. E.G. - a researcher's published work might follow him/her from institution to institution. Keeping the identifier persistent means bibliographic references etc. remain viable.
This whole
If everyone followed your moronic thinking then cops would be pulling over every ryder truck thinking that there was a bomb on it!
I call dibs on registering the domain "butt.wipo".
Didn't you pay attention in Rosie's English class? She taught us to not split our infinitives like that.
Or were you too busy telling her about your invention of that stupid "word processor" program that never amounted to anything? Bah! Who ever heard of using a computing-machine to process words!
Once again, it is "slowly to get rid of the generics", or "to get slowly rid of the generics".
I blame that bloody Star Trek!
This was a blog entry about how another generic TLD is a bad idea, pointing to essays that explain things in much more detail that people wouldn't read.
.com problems at a higher level.
.yahoo is used because Yahoo is in the directory and naming business already. But it's a poor choice I guess because it confuses people.
.com registry will own commerce, and the .edu registry will own education, we had instead invited people to create TLDs with totally made-up names, names with no meaning -- in other words, brands.
.com companies after all the generics got quickly registered in .com) would all be on an even footing. None would be better than another inherently. (This would be the opposite of .edu or .museum, which have a strong inherent value for those in those spaces.)
.yahoo TLD would not be for Yahoo the company. It would be for Yahoo the brand, for resale to others, with only limited use (or perhaps none at all) for Yahoo the company. Thus it is simpler to think about newly made up names.
Branded TLDs would be for brands in the directory business. It would be silly, of course, to give TLDs to ordinary companies for use for their own business, that would just repeat the
The example of
To understand things better, imagine that instead of saying that the
We would do this because trademark law has centuries of experience in how to divide up ownership of a namespace, and contains valuable lessons for us.
Anyway, these new branded TLDs, with names not unlike those chosen for
They would compete. On price, on terms, on policy, on
service, on quality. Some would become famous and more desireable. Some would remain small-time. Some would die and their escrowed records managed by the highest bidder.
Each would set their own policies, but there would be no fighting over domain names because no name would be inherently better than another. It's great to get your inhernetly best name but it means somebody else can't get it. We would all love to own generic terms instead of being required to establish non-generic brands, but there's a reason the rules are made that way.
So I name Yahoo as an example of a company that did just that, took a term with no meaning in the naming and dirctory space, and made it a brand.
The confusion is that the
Now it turns out I think you can solve the problem of use by Yahoo the company of their TLD brand, but to keep things simple don't think about that.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
freedom.gov
root.edu
'nuff said
-Isaac
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.
Certs and SSL do not address his concerns. He is not talking about authentication (ie, am I really giving my info to "Company X"? -- certs do a good job of that already); he is talking about certification (ie, is "Company X" ethical, standards-conforming, etc...)
I'm sorry, but I already have enough trouble remembering if it's freshmeat.org or freshmeat.net, nevermind remembering if it's freshmeat.google or freshmeat.wico or whatever.
I can't even imagine my mom trying to remember them.
IMO, the whole TLD thing needs to go right out the window unless it gets enforced meaning.
.gov and become .gov.us to match up with this.
.fack or .keke or .whatever. All of these special TLDs are crap because anyone who has a .com pretty much automatically owns other TLDs. If I bought apple.mobile, Apple would sue me and win. So they should only have .apple to use- then they can do powerbook.apple, ipod.apple, imac.apple, whatever.
Country code domains should be given to government departments, corporations incorporated there, and citizens (full names.) The US government, incidentally, should have to drop
Beyond that, ALL TLDs should be available, with any valid characters you like put in. I should be able to have
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
I have never been to a legitimate site based on a .biz domain.
.biz, that's like having your company's contact email as a hotmail account. The name even sounds goddamn sleazy.
In that regard, it's actually useful- if a site is in
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
and everything will be OK. It's not like somebody's going to hijack that domain and pretend to be a registrar for the nation of Tobango (or whoever .to was delegated to originally).
.su domain would also be cool just for the novelty of it... because in Soviet Russia, domain name registers YOU!
Most slashdotters should understand why I want to.us, but a
Oh my. I just combined two worn-out jokes in one post.
I'm going to stop now.
The domain will not actually be named .mobile, rumours are they are hoping for a coveted one-letter TLD like .m to make it easier to type on a mobile phone. There goes my chance to have an email address of batman@bat.mobile!!!
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
Imagine the possibilities:
t ://troll
slashdot://poll
slashdot://insightful
slashdo
slashdot://troll.gnaa
slashdot://funny
slashdot://teh.funnay
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
Why do we need more TLDs? Are the spammers already coming close to having run through all mathematically possible domain names in .info and .biz?
What's a spit-take?
:)
My pleasure
GENERAL PUBLIC SIGNATURE (GPS) Any replies (derivatives) of this post must also use the GPS
The problem with this is that most businesses, by virtue of putting a shopping cart on a web site, automatically go global. They may be based in some city somewhere, but through their web site, they're doing business everywhere in the world.
.com more value than the others.
.us has become what corporate America wants: a flat namespace. It used to be geographic (and I still have an old geographically-based DNS domain within it), but now anyone can get example.us with no problem. So it's as useless as the gTLDs.
The reality is that the gTLDs have no semantic value anymore. They might as well be "balloon", "cat" and "fast". Only the whole "dot com" phrase gives
Even
DNS needs to either be replaced, or supplemented with something that's more appropriate to be a legally-enforced (intellectual property-friendly) label.