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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."
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Can't we somehow blame this on Verisign?
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.
Impossible to police, impossible to control, and totally against everything the Net was designed to be. Sorry, but no country will govern the net and if one should try to, they will have a huge problem on their hands. What is needed is not more regulation, but more insightful systems design. That's all.
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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...they should be unambiguous and consistent. It shouldn't be based on who has the biggest lawyers.
The desperation of company founders and marketing departments to find new names sometimes brings ludicrous results. To single out some of the worst, a California naming company has created the Shinola Awards; recent "winners" -- futuristic, forgettable, pseudo-Latinate, barely pronounceable -- include ACHIEVA, ALTRIA and CRUEX.
WOW, now I have something more to live for than the Darwin Awards. The name is very apt, and its about time.
to the Engineer, the glass is neither half full nor half empty. Its just two times too big.
Trademarks are not assigned to promote the creation of interesting individual names. Otherwise, they would fall under the "promote the useful arts and sciences" clause of the constitution, and thus would have limited duration.
Trademarks exist forever, as long as they are actively used -- because their enforcement puts MORE information at the public's finger tips, not LESS. The purpose of trademarks is not to defend some "property" of the long-dead guy who named Colt firearms, but to defend YOUR right to know who made the products you buy, right here, today.
As such, they can be as ugly or common place as you want. The point is to stop other people from confusingly marketing a similar product under a similar mark. Trademarks are actually a consumer-protection issue, not an "intellectual property" issue. It is the confusion of lumping very different aspects of law into one vague name that leads to mistakes such as this.
I don't think I am nit-picking here. This is a serious mistake. The misuse of trademarks for the purpose of censorship or harassment would be much less common if the general public had a sense that trademarks "belonged" to THE PUBLIC, as a truth-in-labeling concept.
There are many root servers, but there is only one primary database of domain data. It is in Reston. All root servers get their information from Reston.
Domains are mapped to nameservers in their domain record, not in DNS queries. This data is in the root servers (for the TLD, not for '.'), and changes do, in fact, propagate out to the other root servers when they ask the master for updates.
DNS data itself can be seen to propagate out, when you include the concept of TTL (time-to-live) for the data. You don't always query authoritative nameservers for an address -- it would overload them (and where would you stop? you'd have to go all the way up to the root servers to be sure you were getting good info). You ask your local cacheing nameserver, run by your ISP, who checks its cache to see if it already "knows" the answer, and whether the answer is "older" than its TTL. If it is older, it usually queries the authoritative nameserver for the domain. If it is younger, it just returns the same value as before.
So the data doesn't propagate per se, but the awareness of it does, and not instantly. Sometimes not even quickly.
And yes, your browser caches the response too, but that has nothing to do with DNS or TTL.
>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.