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]

MichaelBolton.Tel

[JeanBaptiste]

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

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: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.