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Vint Cerf Answering Questions on Top-Level Domains
penciling_in writes "Over at CircleID, Vint Cerf is taking question from the community Slashdot-style with regards to top level domains. 'As most readers are no doubt aware, when it comes to the topic of Top-Level
Domains (TLDs), Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)
takes center stage. From the existing .com and .net TLDs to the newly introduced and future releases, in the past years we witnessed the increasing level of discussions around Top-Level Domains painted -- ever so often -- with political, legal and technical debates. Vint Cerf, Google's VP and Chief Internet Evangelist, who has served as chairman of the board of ICANN since the November of 1999 has accepted CircleID's invitation to directly respond to your questions on the topic. This is your opportunity to have your Top-Level Domain related questions responded by Vint Cerf.'"
is there a real use for having TLDs anymore? no one follows the current rules to any reasonable extent, and it just seems more an artificial way of creating a market sphere, such as how a .com appears more legitimate than a .net for a business regardless of its position in network services. as of now, they provide no discernable organisational structure to speak of imho...
How about a .wiki TLD? It's just crazy enough to work, considering the countless wikis to be found out there. Wiki Wiki Wiki!
Don't sweat the petty things. Don't pet the sweaty things. --Stephen J. Simmons
Pretend that I am Jon Postel, still alive, and I have cornered you an the hallway at IETF.
.XXX domain.
Defend to me, on grounds that you know I (Jon Postel) would accept, the decision to kill the
Remember (and I am not reminding you, sir) that registration in that domain is not mandatory for ANYONE.
Yes, we've met (at IETF), and no, I will not tell you who I am.
--Red
As a student who is rather naive to the process of managing domains, what kind of process is involved when it comes to deciding a new top level domain? Also, aside from the given national domains, what is the life cycle of a potential domain that could possibly come to existance, and how do external groups affect the decision (i hate to be cliche, but for example: .xxx domains and the pressure from right wing groups to prevent the domain from allowing a general 'acceptance' of the genre .xxx assumes)?
-Blaine
sig: Playfully doing something difficult, whether useful or not
Why did you leave MCI just before its acquisition by Verizon was completed? What do you see the future holding for Verizon?
When considering any new TLDs, it's worth looking at how these TLDs, from ICANN's first wave of expansion, worked out.
Given that top level domains were initially created to give a sense of order to the internet, before user@schoolname was more the rule, it seem .com would ONLY be given to commercial groups, .net to networks, etc. I was reading RFC 1480 and it looks like even as late as 1993 a restructure of the US domain system could have been created along the lines of how foreign countries do it. bbc.co.uk would thus be a british site, and bbc.co.us could be bbc americas domain.
Instead we have a hodgepodge of international mixes.
Thus my question is, why all the chaos in how they were assigned?
As a fellow at MCI (please correct me if I'm wrong), what was your day-to-day activity like? I grok things as far up the technological chain as network engineering, but I never had insight into the work of a visionary at MCI.
BTW, it's great to be rid of the MCI name now that we're Verizon Business, and I wish you luck at Google.
With Firefox:
Step 1: Type "google" into URL bar. Watch as www.google.com appears (thanks to a Google I Feel Lucky search).
Step 2: Right click on the search text field, and choose "Add a Keyword for this Search".
Step 3: Enter "gg" into the Keyword field in the dialog that appears (and whatever you want in the Name field).
Step 4: You can now type "gg foobar" to Google for "foobar".
Konqueror does something similar with "gg:", not "gg ".
I believe that Firefox ships default with "google" as a Google search keyword (though it's been a long time since I've done a clean installation, so I'm not sure), and I believe that "wp foobar" now does a Wikipedia search for "foobar" by default.
If you want to have a quick search on Google Images with SafeSearch disabled (*without* having to log in -- yes, it is possible, even if Google makes it non-obvious how to do this), bookmark the following link and give it a keyword.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
I've got to think that, when purchased in bulk, it costs pennies, or perhaps tenths or even hundredths of pennies, in actual administrative costs to keep these domains registered each year.
Since costs of maintaining registration for expired domains can approach nothing, are we at risk of these re-registration companies eventually having permanent ownership of nearly every domain a person might think to register? Might it not be in the public interest to have a minimum annual registration fee per domain (say, three dollars), to help ensure that domains aren't held in perpetuity by speculators?
I'm generally "Interesting," "Insightful," and even "Funny" here. What the hell happens to me at parties?
IMHO, a ".blog" TLD makes so much more sense. There are millions of weblogs anyway, and they're only growing at an exponential rate. This categorization will also, in one fell swoop, largely alleviate the trackback link problem that so many search engines are facing, and allow spiders/bots to easily differentiate between a weblog and a regular content/news site.
I dunno. I know that you're thinking of a personal journal kept online by people, but consider that Slashdot could be considered a "blog", and that there is increasing use of corporate blogs. The DNS hierarchy is slow to adapt -- once we move to a new TLD, we're stuck with it for a while. The nature of what a blog even is, in the presence of new systems for social networking and so forth, is rapidly changing.
I'm not sure that search engines might be able to do a better job of identifying blogs than blog authors do, if there is indeed a link problem (for example, Groklaw is very different from a personal blog), then I would suggest that this is better addressed by the search engine maintainers.
For that matter, I'm not even certain that blogs are really over-weighted -- they seem to often be up-to-date and do a good job of spreading useful information.
Also, some sites are not dedicated blogs -- why stuff a blog in a different domain? I mean, sure, Verisign would love this (since they'd be able to rent additional domains), but ultimately I'm not sure that storing different content in different domains fits with the existing DNS scheme well.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.