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The Worldwide Domain Battle
pledibus writes "The New York Times's Sunday magazine contains an interesting article, Get Out of My Namespace, about the spate of conflicts over website names. The author synthesizes ideas from computer technology, law, history, onomastics, cultural anthropology, and probably a few other areas, and does a pretty nice job of it."
If you get a website, it's yours. What's the conflict? Squatters are just playing on names, misspelling. So you type in google.com wrong or something... and you see a stupid ad for domains. Big deal. Just type it in right next time. I find that too much resource is going towards fighting the natural expansion of the net; look at mikeroesoft... My thoughts are that the whole system does need real scrutiny, but even after all that, exploits to any system always come through. Pynchon always said you couldn't do away with anything more than %50 of waste because waste is always there... it's inherrent in everything. Make more law, you're still fighting a ghost.
The only difference now is the Arena. In a time where branding is everything, the value of one's name, and its association with one's web presence is tremendous.
However, the current domain name registration system is haphazard to say the least. On the one hand you get the country specific top level domains, which applies to all the countries except US (Thought the .US does exist). There's .com and .org to differentiate between commercial and non-commercial organisations, but nobody takes that distinction seriously. .net (not the MS platfrom) is yet another completely different story.
I think the first task of the day is to get this anarchical hierarchy into some order. We must get US to use it's TLD, and get rid of .com, .org, .net etc completely.
Then, there should be clear guidelines as to who gets .com.?? and .net.?? etc. PEople have made these disticntions for tax purpose, why not do it for domain name purposes?
Then there should be a new second level domain, such as .ind.?? for individuals to register their names. It should follow the first name surname pattern. Of course mary.brown.ind.uk is going to be a problem, and a resolution scheme must be found.
The first-come first-server free for all messy domain registration system does not bode well for making the internet any less complicated.
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>I may be a fan of ManufactuerProduct.com for names (e.g. DodgeViper, ChevyLumina) rather than product.com. However, I am MORE in favor of viper.dodge.com and lumina.chevy.com, if we want to stick with heirarchy.
One bad decision in the design of DNS was that the toplevel name appears to the right.
It should have been com.dodge.chevy instead of the other way around.
The UK computer scientists tried to set it up that way, but they lost.
This is a bit strange, because most hierarchical directory systems already operated left-to-right instead of right-to-left.
The consequence is that there is a break between the hostname and directory path in a URL, where the direction changes. Most people don't understand that.
So instead of having http://com.dodge.viper/ or http://com.dodge/viper as alternatives, they want to register the composite name because otherwise nobody would be able to find it.