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

Unforseen problems

[robyannetta]

Companies would get companyname.tel while individuals would be able to register firstnamelastname.tel.

This may pose a problem with the 526,000+ people sharing the name Michael Smith.

Re:Unforseen problems

[The Snowman]

This may pose a problem with the 526,000+ people sharing the name Michael Smith.

Or the people who share names with companies. Or the people who share names with each other. There will be collisions. This plan will not work for its stated purpose. However, its stated purpose and its real purpose most likely are not the same. Odds are, this is just another plan to make more money for the registrars by opening up a new land rush of domain name registrations.

Re:Unforseen problems

[kryten_nl]

Yes, perhaps we should add numbers to the back of the name. Come to think of it, maybe it would be better to define the name by numbers as well, then you wouldn't have to worry about typos and phonetic problems. Maybe this system should look something like:

2001:0db8:85a3:08d3:1319:8a2e:0370:7334
Or 8 groups of 4 hexadecimal digits.

[/sarcasm]

This is a really good idea

[BadAnalogyGuy]

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

God knows it's time for .tel.

Phone sex

[thewiz]

In the spirit of delicio.us, I can see a porn site called showand.tel being registered.

Re:Phone sex

[Hogwash McFly]

Apparently De Beers have their eye on www.car.tel

Intended purposes

[Rob T Firefly]

It's pretty fun to watch ICANN and the domain industry constantly come up with new "specific-purpose" domains, which upon release sell to absolutely anyone and everyone regardless of the actual category of the site. Apart from the actually restricted ones like .gov, .mil, and .edu, sites' categories have had little to nothing to do with their domain extensions for ages now.

Who still remembers when a .com actually meant a for-profit business, or when every .org was an organization of some kind?

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?

MichaelBolton.Tel

[JeanBaptiste]

No way. Why should I change? He's the one who sucks!

Another dumb idea

[Billosaur]

When is everyone going to stop assuming that issuing new TLDs is going to solve all their problems? What, is it impossible for people to update the contact information on their personal web sites now, or has their been some fundamental change to HTML/XML of which I am unaware?

This is a dumb idea. I won't even touch the personal namespace problem, which should be evident to anyone with a brain. The only way that would work is if everyone had five names. You know there are going to be squabbles over company names, as old and new companies jockey for the .tel names that offer them the best marketing bang for the buck.

Need a place to put your contact information? Try www.contact.your-web-site-name-here.whatever. ICANN needs to stop polluting the TLD pool.

Those who do not understand 'finger'

[Gothmolly]

Are doomed to reinvent it.

So lets see, we create a whole separate _TLD_ that people/companies must register, just so people can have www.foo.tel, which is essentially a directory of who's who at www.foo.com?

This is completely idiotic. How about "finger @foo.com | grep -i 'your name'" Obviously wrap it into some kind of GUI, or do something as simple as a web front end to an existing in-house address book?

Geesh. Next someone will invent the ".mail" TLD, which is the address for foo.com, that you use to send email to. what about ".web" ?

Re:.tel is ok

[wizrd_nml]

In the Middle East we find this hilarious. Biz in Arabic means breast.

This is a wonderful idea!

[Tim C]

companyname.tel is so much better than companyname.com/contact.html!

Man, I'm in the wrong business; if only I could get paid for coming up with ideas like this...

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:eliminate top-level domains ?

[The Snowman]

But imagine if the internet was just a vast wasteland of porn and spammers.

That doesn't require any imagination.

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.

Cynical churning of market

[NetSettler]

Odds are, this is just another plan to make more money for the registrars

I don't see how it could be otherwise.

First, the phone company already knows that the best way to index phone number is by soundex, to avoid massive problems caused by the fact that many people don't know the correct spellings of their friends' and associates' names. And they certainly aren't sounding like this will be the first domain indexed by soundex.

Second, it's unlikely that domain ownership will be a prerequisite to having a phone number. I don't think they could sell that. (In fact, they might realistically make more by saying they were going to give away the domain with your name and invent a service called ... hmmm, let's see... how about the "unlisted domain" where the customer pays money to keep from being locatable.)

Third, phone numbers have the virtue of being uncorrelated with a name. That's what makes them resolvable in ambiguity--they act as a cross-check to make sure you got it right. When you can't quite remember a number and think it's either 555-1234 or 555-1235 and then check information to find the first is for "Sam Smith" and the second for "Alex Jones", there's little doubt how to resolve things. But if you thought the number was 1387.Sam.Smith.com or 1386.Sam.Smith.com or maybe 1387.Samuel.Smith.com or maybe 1386.Samuel.Smith or 1387.Sam.Smythe.com or... Obviously finding out that the mis-remembered number matches a lot of same-named people won't help at all. (If you believe in correlating names with telephones this way, it's a short conceptual hop to believing that a .pw domain would help you remember your password.)

If you can't autogenerate good phone numbers (i.e., tell people what name they're supposed to use), as I and many others here have argued you can't, what's the alternative? Allow people to choose? Gads, with all the domain squatting it's clear that this would allow much choice to a rich few and little choice to most people. And so it would not be fair at all. The fairest thing I can imagine is to not involve ICANN at all.

And besides, back to the original point about this being a ploy to sell domain registries, if I wanted to have the domain system already remember my phone number, why wouldn't I just have people do nslookup on the names I already own? They already require domain owners to list their phone numbers.