Slashdot Mirror
Inside the Rise of the Domain Name System
Greg Huang writes "Looking back, it's almost impossible to believe that for most of the 1990s, a single company, Network Solutions, had a government-issued monopoly on registering domain names on the Internet. And considering how central the company was to the growth of the Web, it's surprising how little of the company's back story — how it got into the domain name business, or who owned it — has been told. Xconomy has an in-depth interview with two former executives from SAIC, the secretive San Diego defense contractor that bought Network Solutions in 1995 for $5 million and sold off the domain registration business in 2000 for billions of dollars."
It's interesting that Network Solution was the only handler for domain registration back in 90's and while there are lots of registrars now, they still work under ICANN. Yeah the usual argument in slashdot is that you could always start your own tld, but nobody is going to support it unless you're high in chain, aka ICANN.
Interesting aspect was a few months ago when EU wanted more freedom from ICANN and its association with US. Currently the internet domain name system is pretty much controlled by one entity, which isn't really the purpose of internet, and its also why Network Solution was taken off the domain registration game as the single player. Monopoly is never good.
Fact is, currently DNS still relies entirely on *one entity*. It goes completely against the distributed structure of the internet.
There was a definite advantage in terms of ICANN enforcement of registrar responsibilities when there was only one registrar. Now that we have hundreds or thousands of registrars, we have all kinds of nonsense going on in blatant violation of registrar accreditation terms and ICANN can't keep up with the problems. Which apparently lead ICANN to their new strategy - nothing. Now we have unscrupulous registrars all over the world selling domains to bogus registration information, making it much more difficult to uncover who is really behind various nefarious acts on the internet (including but by no means limited to spam).
So in the end, the monopoly was indeed broken up, but the consumer lost, and lost big.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Get rid of all the top level domains except for the country ones. No more .com, .net, .edu, .org, and all the stupid new ones recently concocted.
Instead, you just have the country level domains, and allow each country to control their domains the way they see fit. In most countries a domain name would be handled like any other trademark issue.
In the U.S., you'd eliminate domain name squatting since you must show some sort of actual activity to retain a trademark. Buying "Sporf.com" and sitting on it in hopes that a company called "Sporf" will have to buy the domain from you will no longer be a good business model.
Will greedy capitalist evil corporations steal your domain? All you have to do is show that you've actively used the domain (and not just merely have a parking page), and that you've registered your trademark with the correct authorities (something that could be done by the domain registrar where you bought your domain).
In the U.S., domains can be done on a local basis (memphis.tn.us), on a state basis (state.tn.us), or on a national basis (com.us). This way, two local shops called "The Flowerpot" -- one in chicago and one in memphis -- could have the same domain: flowerpot.memphis.tn.us and flowerpot.chicago.il.us. National companies like Apple and Microsoft could get their domains registered as apple.com.us and microsoft.com.us.
The .com domain could become a virtual domain. You type in a company name with a .com suffix, and your browser will search your local area, then the state, and then nationally for a company with that domain prefix. Thus if I live in Memphis and type in "Flowerpot.com", I get flowerpot.memphis.tn.us. If I lived in Chicago, I get flowerpot.chicago.il.us.
This would allow us to get rid of TDL sprawl (.name, .info, .biz, .mobi, etc.) that isn't benefiting anyone but GoDaddym It would eliminate all the sniping the the U.S. controls domains because they'll only control the .us domain. And, it would greatly simplify the whole domain registration process.