Slashdot Mirror
ICANN Considers Single Letter Domains
* * Beatles-Beatles writes "...as the Internet's key oversight agency considers lifting restrictions on the simplest of names. In response to requests by companies seeking to extend their brands, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers will chart a course for single-letter Web addresses as early as this weekend, when the ICANN board meets in Vancouver, British Columbia. Those names could start to appear next year."
With only 26 available they should fetch a hefty price and be accessible to only the wealthy. Great.
Bradley Holt
I don't get why single letter domain names are so wonderful.
...
Nor do I see why they had to get held back (mostly -- just check the list) until now.
Does anybody really want the letter 'j'? What does that mean? Is it really worth big bucks?
I would guess that at some point you won't have domains, but some sort of searching facility -- e.g. a bunch of tags. At that point, the name won't really matter, and you probably won't want to remember most of them.
E.g. your microwave will have the IP: 123.223.3.123.43....
But you'll look it up on your keychain device, or do a search for "Me" "microwave" to get the magic number.
And your living rooms light switches address will be
and so on -- everything will have an IP, but you won't be able to name all that stuff anyway.
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
Does anyone actually respect ICANN anymore?
there's more than one way to do me.
When they started pushing .mobi as the mobile TLD, I thought they were joking. Type MORE letters on my phone? A .m TLD (and really, any of the other single letter TLDs) is a much better choice.
Your points all have merit, but people and companies still want something to put in their email, on business cards, and in commercials, which uniquely identifies them and is hopefully memorable and comprehensible. Saying "just type Sony into Google" doesn't really cut it for that purpose.
Your idea is absolutely terrible from the perspective of people who run websites. What if I want to link to a particular document at a particular site? Do I like to a google search query and just hope that it's the first result?
Search engines are better than nothing, but by and large they are not great.
This defeats the entire point of hypertext, and you are taking the power away from the people and placing it squarely in the hands of the corporations (like Yahoo and Google).
I admit DNS is not that great, but it's so much better than what you're suggesting.
C17H21NO4
(Assuming he isn't already on the payroll, that is)
I think you mean, assuming Slashdot isn't already on his payroll.
AFAIK, the standard for representing international characters in a hostname is via IDNA encoding (see RFC3490) which maps international characters to ascii characters. It looks like name components in this spec have to begin with ascii "xn--", so a single international character domain name would be at least a 5 character ascii domain name which may already be allowed.
That said, I'm really not too familiar with this subject at all (I just looked up the RFC) so please someone correct me if I'm wrong...
I mean, this isn't like Roland who linked to the story on his ad supported blog rather than directly to the article. At least this guy has the common curtesy link directly.
And people have said that he changes his homepage a lot, I've just seen the George Harrison one, can someone please post some evidence to the contrary?
I mean, I love a good old-fashioned pitchfork and torch rally on Slashdot as good as the next guy, but I'm wondering if this guy is the right target for it.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
OK, I'm not really sure whether you're being sarcastic or just doing a Dvorak on the whole current DNS debate.
You're suggesting we all dump DNS and just use search engines for everything. Let me ask you this. When everyone has done this, How the hell will search engines work?!
Consider Google pagerank. It searches you page, finds links to other pages.... but wait! These links are now not direct links. They are search engine terms which may or may not return the desired site, and by clicking on the link, you change its value on the search engines rank.
You'd turn the whole internet in some kind of quantum mechanical system where you're never quite sure where a link points to until you click on it, and once you've done so you've changed the state of the link. I'm sure we'll all get around just fine.
Not to mention the increased bandwidth and overhead. The net would quickly become primarily a system of passing around search engine queries rather than actual end user data.
Your idea sucks. Turn back on your DNS and svae the world some extra bandwidth.
May the Maths Be with you!
The point of domain name hierarchy, as ICANN has forgotten, was to organize information into identifyable categories to make it easier for people to find what they want. . . . It's about organizing the ip space into human-readable and human-understandable segments.
All due respect to our founding coders, but the notion that we could classify all human endeavor according to a taxomonmy based on the categories educational, government, military, commercial, network, organization, or country was naive and arrogant in the extreme. As has been demonstrated, large numbers of people don't care about those categories and many of those who do care don't like them.
Of course, classifying things according to the branding whims of corporations with money will be much, much worse, but let's not pretend that the old taxonomy has any special legitimacy. It's nothing more than "the way we used to do it".
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
there are many alternative dns systems but none of them get much support and any that did take a stand against icann rather than just adding thier own tlds would almost certainly lose most of thier existing users.
managing the top level of a unique nameing system is a natural monopoly.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Why not go to http://cocacola/ and be done with it?
Because it would be confusing if you wanted to tell someone to go to that site, e.g.
You: "Go to aitch tee tee pee colon slash slash cocacola"
Them: "Sorry, I fell asleep halfway through that. Hmm?"
as opposed to current usage,
You: "Go to cocacola dot com"
It's the "dot com" bit that tells everyone that you are talking about a website, because no-one I know uses the redundant "aitch tee tee pee colon slash slash" bit in normal chat. Of course you could say "visit our website, it's cocacola" but you'd have to do that everytime you refer to the cocacola website rather than the soft drink. Imagine business meetings in the soft drink industry.
Q: "Have you seen cocacola recently?"
A: "What, the website or the company?"
Something needs to distinguish the brand from the domain, because until now, the context has been quite clear whether you are referring to a name, a brand, a site, or the product. Drop the "dot com" and it starts to get confusing.
Ceci n'est pas un sig.