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:Intended purposes

[Haeleth]

Thankfully, we in the UK have a relatively sensible system of second level domains. .net.uk, for example, is ISPs only.

Yes, but that doesn't stop plenty of people in the UK, like me, (ab)using the global .net TLD for personal sites.

And why not? I'm no more a "com"pany or an "org"anisation than I am a "net"work provider. I'm not a "biz"ness, and I'm not dedicated to providing "info"rmation, and the domain is not my real "name". But nor do I want a country-specific domain -- my site is of very limited interest to the vast majority of people, but the tiny community it interests is spread right across the globe. My site isn't aimed particularly at people in the UK, so why should it have a misleading .uk on the end?

What it comes down to is, there is no point whatsoever in trying to force an artificial hierarchy onto something like the internet, which is an interconnected network, not a neat and nicely categorised tree. It doesn't work. It's pointless and confusing. Let's just give it up already, okay?