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Government Finishes Internet Study -- 7 years late

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the they-started-about-the-same-time-as-slashdot dept.

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""

33 of 444 comments (clear)

  1. The results are in: by Neil+Blender · · Score: 5, Funny

    This internet thing is just a fad.

    1. Re:The results are in: by Tribbin · · Score: 5, Funny

      We... have... agreed, ...

      That... you... are... not... orks...

      --
      If you mod this up, your slashdot background will turn into a beautiful sunset!
    2. Re:The results are in: by xstonedogx · · Score: 4, Funny

      You're right. Make that "i0x2004F200696d".

  2. no more TLDs, please by suso · · Score: 4, Informative

    "We should probably have some more TLDs"

    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. I feel that online commerce has bent themselves on destroying the usefulness of DNS. Nearly one quarter if not more of ccTLDs can be purchased by the public and used for any purpose. What will happen when countries like Tuvalu (.tv) reach technological savyness and find that their entire TLD has been used up by TV networks, domain brokers and companies that felt they needed to register theirname.com, .net, .org, .cc, .mx, .name, .info, and .tv just in case someone actually thought of typing one of those instead.

    On top of that, some ccTLDs are being sold for crazy prices. I found one regist
    rar that was trying to sell .ro extensions for over $500/year. What?!? Why? D
    oes 'ro' mean something in the same way that 'tv' does?

    People need to learn to properly use what they have before we can move on. Unfortunately, this has rarely happened in our society and in the end sadly, money rules the day.

    1. Re:no more TLDs, please by kevin_conaway · · Score: 5, Funny

      Unfortunately, this has rarely happened in our society and in the end sadly, money rules the day.

      --
      Need better website hosting or email? Visit suso.org [suso.org] and sign up for an account. Thanks!

      Your statement is kind of ironic with a link in your sig trying to get people to sign up for your pay service.

    2. Re:no more TLDs, please by cmburns69 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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!
    3. Re:no more TLDs, please by FrankSchwab · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

      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.

      /frank

      --
      And the worms ate into his brain.
    4. Re:no more TLDs, please by breon.halling · · Score: 5, Interesting
      ...countries like Tuvalu (.tv) reach technological savyness and find that their entire TLD has been used up by TV networks...

      According to Wikipedia:

      "In 2000, Tuvalu negotiated a contract leasing its Internet domain name '.tv' for $50 million in royalties over the next dozen years."

      They seemed to have profitted from having the .TV TLD, so it's not all bad.

      --
      "Yeah, well, Dracula called and he's coming over tonight for you and I said okay."
    5. Re:no more TLDs, please by an_mo · · Score: 4, Interesting

      More, unlimited TLD, please. There is no technical reason why we should restrict addresses to .com, .org, etc... just free up the whole thing and let people choose the name they want to associate to their ip.

    6. Re:no more TLDs, please by fossa · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

  3. Typical government study... by stlhawkeye · · Score: 5, Funny
    ...after spending 10 years and 13 billion dollars of tax payer money, we are proud to announce to the US Department of Bureaucracy has determined that the Internet is:
    • Big
    • Complicated
    • Busy
    • Using Electrons
    • Full of pornography
    We won't be able to really relax our collective guard until they add unregulatable to this list.
    --
    "I have never won a debate with an ignorant person." -Ali ibn Abi Talib
    1. Re:Typical government study... by Tackhead · · Score: 5, Funny
      > We won't be able to really relax our collective guard until they add unregulatable to this list.

      "Anything that isn't nailed down is ours."
      "Anything we can pry loose, isn't nailed down."

      "Nothing is impossible to the man who doesn't have to pay for it himself."

    2. Re:Typical government study... by ZerocarboN · · Score: 5, Funny

      It's the pronography that caused the big delay.

      "Dude look, a booby!"

      "That's hot! They're paying us how much to do this?"

  4. $1 million by wils0n · · Score: 5, Informative

    FTA

    "Lawmakers had demanded the $1 million federal study, ultimately called "Signposts in Cyberspace," under a 1998 federal law, the Next Generation Internet Research Act."

    1. Re:$1 million by Infinityis · · Score: 5, Funny

      I think maybe they took "next generation" a bit too literallly...

    2. Re:$1 million by hackstraw · · Score: 5, Funny

      "Lawmakers had demanded the $1 million federal study, ultimately called "Signposts in Cyberspace," under a 1998 federal law, the Next Generation Internet Research Act."

      Thats a bargain. It took between $6 and $10 million to figure out Clinton got head from a fat girl.

    3. Re:$1 million by rs79 · · Score: 4, Informative

      The study was used as a tactic by the trademark lobby to impede deplyment of new tlds. "We must assess the effect on stability of the internet by doing such a thing". NTIA nodded its pointy little head and commissioned the report. You'll notice all new tlds added by ICANN todate are considered and declared "experimental". Never mind that 100 new cctlds were quietly added in the past decade.

      And now the report says "dozens of new tlds should be added each year".

      Duh. Double duh. This what Jon Postel said in 1996.

      We now return you to your regularly schedulred ICANN who will do as close to nothing as possible in the area of new tld creation as they can get away with and still pretend to represent the consensus of the Internet community.

      Saaaaaaaay, notice how many lawyers and IP guys are on the ICANN board now? Just a coincidence I'm sure, I'm certain we'll see lots of new tlds RSN.

      --
      Need Mercedes parts ?
    4. Re:$1 million by Bob_Robertson · · Score: 4, Insightful

      John Postel was wrong. I was at the IETF BOF that discussed the issue. So was Postel. It was nice meeting him.

      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, .US, .UK &etc. to differentiate the physical top servers.

      At some point, the .earth TLD will be appended to them, but I doubt I'll have to worry about that.

      Bob-

      --
      The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics
  5. New Study by klatty · · Score: 5, Funny

    I hear that they also just finished their study on electricity.

    Findings include: "AC good for long distance" and that "devices that use this new technology may sometime exist throughout a common home"

  6. They should have... by DaFitzMan · · Score: 4, Funny

    just asked Al Gore. He could have filled them in a lot quicker.

  7. DNS is good? by vidarlo · · Score: 4, Funny

    Without DNS, domain spoofing would've been kinda impossible...

    --
    Assembling etherkillers for fun an profit
  8. more tie-ins by justforaday · · Score: 4, Funny

    Ahhh. Good to see another tie-in story...

    --
    I'll turn into a supernova and burn up everything. Well I'll turn into a black little hole and you'll turn into string.
  9. We should probably have some more TLDs? by Omega · · Score: 4, Insightful
    "We should probably have some more TLDs"
    Yes because we haven't dilluted the overall TLD structure enough already. It used to be that .org, .edu, .com, .net and .gov had distinct, unique purposes. Now we have .biz, .info and .name? Please, someone tell me what these new TLD's add to the overall namespace (aside from ongoing legal battles over trademarks).

    Was this study done by domain resellers?

  10. Fewer TLDs are needed by OrangeTide · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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
  11. tdl... by bird603568 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  12. Conspiracy theory! by Underholdning · · Score: 4, Funny

    Coincidence? I think not!

    --
    Underholdning.info
  13. Sorry, it's my fault. by The+Lurker+King · · Score: 5, Funny

    Sorry everyone, it's my fault. You know how you get some directive from management and you just throw it on your desk and forget about it? Well, eventually it gets buried under everything else I was working and quickly forgotten about. (Didn't we just have a previous post about how 95% of software projects are late?) Anyway, I was doing some spring cleaning last week and found it.

    Again, my apologies. It won't happen again.

  14. Dejavu! by Orangez · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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..."
  15. Re:What's a TLD? by The-Perl-CD-Bookshel · · Score: 4, Informative

    *sigh* A TLD is a Top Level Domain. Examples of Top Level Domains are .com .net and .org.

    --
    I don't keep a lid on my coffee so when I walk around I look busy -me
  16. The most needed TLD by Nom+du+Keyboard · · Score: 5, Interesting
    We should probably have some more TLDs

    The TLD we all need most of all: .sux

    A place where no coropration is ever allowed to register their own trademark!

    --
    "It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
  17. In other news by UnknowingFool · · Score: 4, Funny
    After a 15 year study, NASA confirms Douglas Adams' ground breaking insight:
    Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space...
    --
    Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
  18. Obligatory SNL commercial by mattmentecky · · Score: 5, Funny

    The "need for more TLDs" reminds me of an old SNL fake commercial:

    [Scene of father helping son ride a bicycle for the first time, then, cut to the living room of their house]

    Father: Trust, an important part of building a family, and an important part of building his future. That's why I rely on Dillon/Edwards and Company. For nearly a century, investors on Wall Street have trusted Dillon and Edwards with their financial future. And now all of the resources from America's oldest investment firm are available on-line. [Father is at the computer as the website appears, along with web address] Dillon and Edwards on the Internet, at www.clownpenis.fart. A lot of investment companies rushed onto the Internet, but Dillon and Edwards took their time. Sure, when they were ready, there was one web address left, but it's one you can count on.

    Announcer #1: For mutual funds, count on...

    Announcer #2: ...clownpenis.fart.

    Announcer #1: Online brokerage...

    Announcer #2: ...clownpenis.fart.

    Announcer #1: Retirement and tuition planning...

    Announcer #2: ...clownpenis.fart.

    [Caption: Dillon/Edwards Investments-www.clownpenis.fart]

    Announcer #1: Dillon and Edwards Investments...

    Announcer #2: ...at www.clownpenis.fart.

  19. Just another lawsuit by BancBoy · · Score: 4, Funny

    Then NBC would have to sue the guys that squat on clownpenis.fart once the domain is available. And yes, I did say "squat on clownpenis." Better post this anonymousl...whoops.

    --
    [UID-HeinzIntel]