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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.'"
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!
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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
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.
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"
"?!"
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.
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.
It makes more sense than yahoo.dk. The rightmost components have authority over everything to the left of them. What makes more sense: the dk domain having authority over Yahoo's website tailored to a specific country, or Yahoo having authority over Yahoo's website tailored to a specific country?
I see the Internet as the one great leveler in the world today. American Society has been totally bought out by large corporation and other groups of people with special agendas, the economy is measured by the well being of big businesses and not the family that can barely make a payment on their debt, etc... The current Internet DNS system is the ONLY place where a large corp., a small business, and a private individual bascially have the same footing. www.smith.com can be a large manufacturing venture, a small supply store, or a family website just depending on who gets there first and who will pay the $35 (or whatever) per year.
.something after their name will be seen as second class sites... I can the "tips and tricks" FAQs at to corporate sites now... "Don't buy from or trust sites with generic domains like .com, .org, or .net. Top level domains are a sign of quality!"
Giving large corporations top level domains will KILL this. You know it will be expensive and only open to a "select" group of people, and all of sudden anyone that has to put a
We don't need the corps. to dominate the Internet any more than they do with their advantages of huge marketing budgets and default web pages that automatically go to "msn.com". We need the DNS to stay blind to organization size if we are going to keep any hope of having a platform to speak out that is not totally dominated by a corporate gatekeepers.
Why don't you embrace your slashbotness instead of living in a dreamworld?
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.
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
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