Slashdot Mirror
Dotless Top Level Domains?
nodnarb1978 writes "As reported on Yahoo, a Dutch company called UnifiedRoot wants to offer top level domains without extensions. For instance, just typing slashdot would bring up this site, instead of slashdot.org. UnifiedRoot is careful to differentiate itself from New.net, but it seems their similar business tactics leave plenty of room for comparison. Another bone of contention is the price: UnifiedRoot wants $1000USD up front for a registration, with an additional $240 yearly renewal. With domain abandonments higher than ever, is this a solution looking for a problem? And would anybody really want to place control of entire TLDs in the hands of one private company?"
Many web browsers will (by default) submit a domainless word to a search engine like Google unless the domain is covered by your hosts file. How will this work if we don't get direct access to the root DNS' collective hosts files? How will your browser know the difference between typing in "slashdot" to mean the URL "http://slashdot/" or that you want to search for slashdot, thus the URL being "http://www.google.com/search?q=slashdot"?
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
they dont even know that you can type into the address line of the web browser. their homepage usually has a 'search' box, they type in 'ebay.com' into the search bar or 'cnn.com' and thats how they get to the website they are looking for.
if they type in 'cnn' instead to the search bar it wont matter much if the tld is changed.
although i guess some people would love this feature, especially people trying to run scams ('http://disney' goes to a porn site or someones ebay toy store for example).. which means the major corporations will then pay money to get their TLDs before a scammer can.
maybe.
"And would anybody really want to place control of entire TLDs in the hands of one private company?"
.slashdot TLD. By the same token, I could claim the .msmercenary TLD and it wouldn't bother google in the least. Does anybody take up arms that one private company owns the rights to the novell.com 2LD?
Why not? Under this new system, TLDs would hardly be in short supply. I would argue that nobody but this site would have a claim to the
The only reason there would be any kind of problem with one private company owning an entire TLD is if they were in artificially short supply (such as the current system), which is not the case when you open it up to the nearly infinite permutations of all alphabetic strings.
This has already been tried http://searchenginewatch.com/sereport/article.php/ 2164841 by Realnames
You can, in some browsers, already use keywords as a sort of domain.
Take Firefox for example. I no longer type "slashdot.org" or "teknews.net" into the address bar. I simply type "slashdot" or "teknews". Firefox realizes the domain doesn't exist, and does a Google "I'm Feeling Lucky" search. In most case it sends me to the site whose name ends in that domain.
What about domains where the keyword doesn't link to the domain? Well, if I type "firefox" into the address bar and hit enter, I'm not going to go to firefox.com, but http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/. Now, chances are that that is actually where I want to go.
So, maybe this might make sense from a business perspective, but from a consumer perspective, it is already here.
This is why it's best to use internal names like "whatever.mycompany.com", even if they're not resolvable from outside the local network. You control mycompany.com; you don't control the top-level namespace, and occasionally stuff will get added to it that you didn't expect.
(If you really want to distinguish between internal and external names at a glance, you can always use the form "whatever.internal.mycompany.com".)
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It wouldn't work. localhost is looked up in the hosts files before DNS.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
not really,
at my company we use something.ourdomain.com
the dhcp server supply the ourdomain.com suffix to everyone that asks. the dns resolver is bright enough to look up something.ourdomain.com before asking for "something" alone if you type it as such.
It's not like there's a difference between text and numbers to computers anyway.
... Maybe I missed your point, but it sounds like you want the FQDN as "target" in each packet, rather than a "fixed-length address". If that's what you want, then the internet will slow down, as each router must now do a string compare instead of a simple bitmask compare before passing the packet along.
Except that comparisons are faster for numbers than for strings