Is It Time For .tel?

Vitaly Friedman writes "ICANN, the body responsible for creating top-level domains, is considering a new one. Conceived as a way to easily manage contact information in an age where many people have numerous contact numbers, the proposed .tel TLD would allow individuals and companies to keep all of their contact information in an easily accessible location. Companies would get companyname.tel while individuals would be able to register firstnamelastname.tel." This idea has been kicked around for quite a while; one of the question is the whole name-space collision issue. For instance, there's me and then there's other me. Lemme tell how strange it is getting fan mail for country music stars.

Comments

Re:eliminate top-level domains ?

[a_nonamiss]

Actually, it's a function of how the current heirarchical domain system works. I'm not saying that it's absolutely required, but we would have to change quite a bit of the fundamental nature of the Internet if we eliminated all TLD's. I'm going to grossly oversimplify here, but basically, when I submit a query for foo.com, the very first thing queried is the top level domain, in this case, .com. If I were to submit a query to foo.org, the query would take a different path in resolving the name. Same with foo.net, foo.us, foo.biz, etc. The bottom line is that something needs to provide the first basic direction as to how the query is resolved. foo.com is a sub-domain of .com. support.foo.com is a subdomain of foo.com. us.support.foo.com is a subdomain of support.foo.com, etcerera. Without top level domains, we would basically make every DNS query a top-level query, and we would have to change the basic structure for how the Internet works. Note: for a more detailed definition of how DNS queries work, I highly recommend googling the subject. Makes for good nerd reading, and I'm sure the thousands of pages you get will do a better explanation than my single paragraph.

Re:An idiotic idea that shows domain names are bro

[Anonymous Coward]

There already is a service that allows you to use keywords instead of URLs.

http://www.aol.com/

Enjoy!

Back to the future

[metamatic]

What you describe is, in fact, the original way the web was supposed to work. URLs were supposed to be a hidden layer of server-specific information; users would refer to pages via URIs, Uniform Resource Identifiers, and there would be a mapping layer from URI to the current URL.

Unfortunately, URLs and DNS hacks turned out to be "good enough", nobody saw the need for a global location-independent naming system for web pages, and we ended up with today's system.

Re:Unforseen problems

[Rekolitus]

I'm not quite sure if there's a difference, but I think with .ip it's already been done -- .arpa.

But of course with DNS it's the other way round, so you actually have 1.0.0.127.in-addr.arpa

Bad analogy, BadAnalogyGuy

[wowbagger]

We can put it to good use like .coop, .cat, .biz, .arpa, .aero, .info, .jobs, .mobi, .museum, .name, .pro, .travel, and .int.

Excuse me, but while I agree with 92% of your examples, .arpa is used any time you do a reverse DNS lookup - so it is VERY useful.

Re:Unforseen problems

[Idimmu Xul]

Oh man, good think you dont need a "social security number" or anything for getting a job or paying taxes or that 95% would be *SCREWED*!

Being British, I dont have a "social security number" you small minded wanker

Re:Surname is Last Name, not Family Name

[clarkcox3]

Used a dictionary much?

From www.m-w.com: "the name borne in common by members of a family". That sure seems to indicate that a "surname" is a "family name."

From dictionary.cambridge.org: "the name that you share with other members of your family."

According to www.etymonline.com: "Meaning 'family name' is first found 1375."