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Government Finishes Internet Study -- 7 years late
djp928 writes "A study commisioned by Congress in 1998 to report on internet traffic has finally been published -- 7 years, two presidents, and one internet boom/bust later.
Some of their findings include "DNS is good" and "We should probably have some more TLDs""
You've got to be kidding me.. How much did this cost us?
.....anything about terror orgs using the 'net?
.....anything about how something called "broadband" would be "all the rage" in a few years?
.....anything about what this new-fangled thing called "SPAM" is?
Seriously, you would think that even the GOVERNMENT would be able to react more quickly than that in a tech market that changes by the month. If they planned this thing back in 1998 to take this long the planning committee and folks who approved the money should be brought up on criminal neglegance charges!
Was this study done by domain resellers?
During the course of the study many new trends (like P2P) have been created/gained major popularity, making an up-to-date report hard to publish.
Maybe it would have been better for them to release it in small chunks.
From a quick google, .ro is for romania, not sure why it would be 500/year, unless its a differant currency.
No smoking sigs indoors.
I have a hard enough time getting people to use .net instead of .com on my email address. Too bad someone already took the .com version of my domain else I'd just have that too so people who didn't "get" it could still send me email.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
maybe if they had a .blog for blogs, .xxx for the porn and and so on it would be much easyer than making .tk and .tv and .ro (what is that?). The .xxx would cut google time in half.
The problem is that nobody thinks "The company I'm looking for is an aerospace company, so I'll try name.aero". Everybody tries name.com, name.net and finally name.org (generally in that order).
It is the classic chicken and egg problem. Until the general population knows how to use TLD's properly, companies will not start using them properly. But companies will not start using them properly until the general population knows how.
Online Starcraft RPG? At
Dietary fiber is like asynchronous IO-- Non-blocking!
Quote from the article: "To be honest, most people forgot it was ever going to happen" [end quote]. I'm still counting on that every time a deadline arrives...
"Never trust a computer you can not throw out of a window..."
Gotta agree. More TLDs just mean more domain names that Microsoft, Walmart, Sears, etc., have to buy up, and don't really expand the number of names available.
/frank
Do you really expect Walmart to be happy with Walmart.com, and not also snap up Walmart.biz, Walmart.org, Walmart.biz, Walmart.us, and anything else that comes up?
Junk the TLDs. They were a good idea that has fatally flopped in the real world.
And the worms ate into his brain.
"I don't think we need any more TLDs. Especially since silly TLDs like .museum and .aero are created which are either too long, or aren't restricted in use to just museums and aerospace companies."
You're restricting yourself to a view that has no technical value, and ultimately, almost no social value.
Top level domains are meaningless. Secondary level domains are meaningless.
They are keys into a database which is distributed around the world, and nothing more. The primary reason that we use them is that most humans can remember a string of phoneme-representing-glyphs much more easily than a string of numbers.
It's all nice and vanity-platish for IBM to own ibm.com, but there's no real value there. People who need to know IBM's domain name would find it even if it were example.mil.
DNS isn't a context-sensitive search engine, and as soon as people get over thinking of it that way, we'll all be quite a lot better off. In fact, I'd be happy if you were NOT allowed to own the name of your company as a domain name... it would force some thought behind the trade-offs involved (like the likelyhood that your really long domain name can actually be transcribed off of a business card without error).
Lighten up. It's just a joke that people like to make over and over. We all like to laugh at politicians and really, if this is all they have, big deal. This joke has just become part of pop culture. I do admit though, it doesn't take great wit to make this joke and it's sad to see professional comedians still make reference to it. So, to you: Lighten up. To Others: Get over it and give us some new material.
"If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer
Why would anyone try .com, .aero or .net? Just enter the name in Google and you'll have your site MUCH faster.
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
Exactly! Until the egg hatches, the chicken will never be born. But the chicken will never be born until the egg hatches!
It also offers a handy solution to trademark issues and disposable domain names. Why not "matrix.movie" instead of "matrixmovie.com"? Do you actually think, if this were common, people would have more trouble with the former than the latter? It seems to me that if we had a ton of TLDs, and their usage actually made sense in terms of contributing useful information, people would probably learn to use them properly. As long as we leave things as they stand--with, as you say, companies buying up every TLD version of their name--the population at large is still going to keep using ".com" on everything, because it will always work.
Yes, there are too many TLDs already. If you want to fix DNS, why not fix DNS.
Things I like about the telephone directory:
Allows names with spaces
Allows names with punctuation (O'Malley)
Allows entries with identical names
Corporations still have trademark law
I think the only thing ".com" is good for is making it obvious that you're talking about a website.
Actually, it's a lot more like a Catch-22 than the Chicken and Egg as the latter is a problem of causality, while the former is dependence.
:)
Maybe the distinction is somewhat foggy and I'm being absurd, but Catch-22 is a good book and references to it should be increased, while the chicken and egg problem is hackneyed and overused
A conclusion one might draw from the article is that one can only study things that don't change:)...Seriously, though.
The main problem that this incident shows to me is how difficult it is to kill a government program of any kind once it has been started. Since the study was driven by an act of Congress, it would have taken another bill passed through the entire legislative process to kill the study. Since the people contracted to do the study and the congressmen of whatever state the study was done in had every incentive to keep the thing going, some other group would have had to notice and start a push to get rid of this.
Since it was a small budget item buried in the massive federal budget, nobody noticed it. If it had been noticed and some representative had brought the issue up in the House, the reps from the state involved would have thrown a fit. So it sticks around.
It's important to know that once something is authorized by Congress, it is budgeted for every year unless it is specifically killed in a budget bill.
In Bush's last budget request, the administration included a list of small programs like this one that they wanted to kill. Of course, every single item on the list had reps saying how critical it was to keep the funding.
Maybe we should be spending a little more time looking at what the government is actually doing rather than talking about tinfoil hats and berating George Lucas.
Cheers...
"Lack of technical competence coupled with the arrogance of power, as usual, leads to no good end."
No, you are. This is one of the worse Snopes articles, as it tries to gloss over these important facts:
Gore did claim to be the one to bring the Internet into being while in Congress. He used the word "Create". "Invent" means the same thing in this context.
Gore's claim was incorrect: the Internet had already existed, and was called the Internet for a few years before he was in Congress.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
This is a great point, and I'd hate to see .xxx legally required, but that doesn't make it useless. It simply becomes an easy flag that says "I would prefer that whoever you consider to be minors not have access to this material." The vast majority of porn sites aren't interested in underage users anyway, I bet -- they don't have credit cards and they cause trouble if the parents find out. Are there any problems with xxx as a voluntary tool?
.res[tricted]? .adult? .old? I kind of like that one ...
I guess the only one that comes to mind for me is that not every "adult only" site would want to be associated with hard core pornography, which is what xxx more typically means. What are the alternatives, given that long TLDs suck?
Kennedy did launch the Apollo program, actually. But the reason yout analogy is BAD is because the Internet existed before Gore claimed he created it. We did not put a man on the moon before Kennedy started Apollo. A matter of order of events that you are forgetting.
"And it turns out that these are all the same things that Gore did for the internet. Parts existed prior to Gore"
It existed, and it was called the Internet. Others created it before he was involved. Yes, we know he helped improve it greatly....after it was created by others.
"he's the one who put together the political support and money to take it to the next level and bring it public."
So? We all know that. However, this information of him helping it grow after the fact of its creation does not make his claim of "took the initiative in creating the Internet" any more true. There is an actual historic timeline here, and you seem to be ignoring that some events took place before others.
"Without him it might have remained a research project for another 5-10 years. Until someone else "invented" it, maybe someone more politically favorable to you."
Look at the history of the Internet and get back with us. It was "invented" before Gore, so "without him" it STILL would have been invented. The actual order of events, again. If event A occurs before event B, event A still occurs even if event B never did.
"Until someone else "invented" it, maybe someone more politically favorable to you."
So it is a matter of bias to you? It isn't to me. I'm just seeing whether his statement was true or not.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
John Postel was wrong. I was at the IETF BOF that discussed the issue. So was Postel. It was nice meeting him.
.US, .UK &etc. to differentiate the physical top servers.
.earth TLD will be appended to them, but I doubt I'll have to worry about that.
The guy from Dunn and Bradstreet was correct when he said that "we" were trying to use the registry like an index.
As other people have pointed out, CokaCola just has to buy coke.com, coke.net, coke.us, coke.biz, coke.firm, coke.soda, coke.etc.etc.etc. More top level domains does not increase the "name space", nor does it increase usability. In fact, it obfuscates.
Indexes and portals are in increasing use all the time. A new verb has entered the language, "to google". There is in fact no reason to use a domain name at all, because someone will find your page in Google regardless of what it's called. Even at the time of the BOF, I gave the examples of Yahoo and AltaVista making domain names obsolete.
I really thought that the success of Geocities (.com) was going to make it obvious to everyone. Instead of extra names, they had subdirectories. Numbered subdirectories and a search engine. The URL didn't relate to anything at all.
So what was the result of that BOF, where the brightest minds came together to discuss the issue? Even Postel agreed, it would be best to reduce the number of TLDs. They have outlived their usefulness, that was based on insufficient hardware size/speed at the time. "We" already have country codes,
At some point, the
Bob-
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics
What is so difficult about "Google or AOL Keyword: Frankincense And Murr" as opposed to "Be sure to visit our website at http://promotions.frankincenseandmurr1234.sj.ca.us "?
You're just coming up with all the same old reasons for trying to treat a registry like an index. They are fundamentally different functions.
"When the 'Net was small", DNS was indeed invented in order to make easily remembered names for machines. But the 'Net is not small, and continuing to try to use the registry like an index does not solve the problem. One TLD has exactly the same name-space as one hundred TLDs, they are simply harder to know which one is the right one.
The number of actually typed URLs is decreasing. To increase complexity in a system that is already decreasing in usability is not a rational act. Making indexes better is.
Bob-
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics
A few points to consider
For a PhD student to conduct research it takes not only the students salary and the associated overhead (i.e. health ins. Etc...) but also the associated professors time and his salary (and overhead) plus the equipment required to conduct the research (facility, power, computers, connections, etc...). No PhD student creates a substantial piece of work flying "solo", as you put it. There are a lot of people, infrastructure, etc.. involved to put the student in a position to conduct the research.
Using students in a study is certainly effective but the article stated that some of the best known professionals in the field were part of this report (i.e. not students). I'm not opposed to using students for research. I employ PhD students every year for exactly this reason as they can do the job for less money that I can.
The only point here is that 1 million spread over 10 years is nothing at all. It's way less than 1 person/year on average. Sure you could get a student to pump out his/her impression of the issue or you could outsource it to drop the costs.
Perhaps I took your last comment wrong:
"when funding is being appropriated, watch the researchers and scientists all line up and say how necessary and important it is:
That is exactly how researchers and scientists get funded. If you cannot make a case that the study you want do to is "necessary and important" than you don't have a job. I happen to think that Solar Physics is "necessary and important" but there are certainly folks who think this is a waste of money. You bet... If a funding source is applicable I'll line up and make my case.
"Truth is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations"