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

.tel Me Something I Don't Know

[Doc Ruby]

It's stupid to go through the TLD process, domain name auctions and everything else. That's why DNS already lets companyname.com have tel.companyname.com without any bureaucracy other than the internal bureaucracy.

Could you imagine how much more contorted the Web bubble would have been if we had to go through this for "companyname.www"?

The existence of this stupid debate shows that ICANN is a worthless extra bureaucracy with zero knowledge or consideration of Internet design. They're just a gang of fatcats carving off their slice of global power by perverting the good work of engineers.

Re:Unforseen problems

[TubeSteak]

Samir: No one in this country can ever pronounce my name right. It's not that hard: Samir Na-gheen-an-a-jar. Nagheenanajar.
Michael Bolton: Yeah, well at least your name isn't Michael Bolton.
Samir: You know there's nothing wrong with that name.
Michael Bolton: There was nothing wrong with it... until I was about 12 years old and that no-talent ass clown became famous and started winning Grammys.
Samir: Hmm... well why don't you just go by Mike instead of Michael?
Michael Bolton: No way. Why should I change? He's the one who sucks.