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How Would You Redesign the TLD Hierarchy?
First time accepted submitter at.drinian writes "Last week, we heard about the many applications for new top-level domains that have been put forth by various businesses and organizations. ICANN, of course, has come under heavy criticism for its process. If you didn't have the accumulated baggage of 30 years of DNS, how would you redesign things? .public and .private TLDs only? No TLD control? Country-level domains?"
Seriously, what does it accomplish? ... People don't organize domain names in a hierarchy like they did with Usenet groups,...
We did, in the old days. Back in 91 when I first got on the net, the original goal was caching with a secondary of segregating traffic.
The hope is that 99% of traffic to .us would be from inside .us therefore limiting expensive high latency international traffic. Doesn't map so well with massive multinational corp traffic to .com
In the ancient days of "no commercial traffic on the ARPA-net" anything .com over the ARPA was verboten.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
There's lots of stuff connected to the internet that isn't HTTP. The www nomenclature makes sense in that respect. And there's absolutely nothing stopping a system admin from also making domain.com point to a web server - in fact, doing so is pretty common these days.
non-Uniform Resource Locators?
These disparate groups may never communicate, but if you divide the network in any place, geographic or not, you are going to end up with a border somewhere. Across this border, it will be impossible to exchange a hyperlink with the expectation that it consistently identifies a single resource.