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?"

Comments

I wouldn't

[xaoslaad]

I wouldn't

Re:I wouldn't

[0123456]

Indeed. The whole idea of a centralised DNS system is the problem because it introduces a single point of stupidity into the Internet, but I'm not sure what the solution is.

Re:I wouldn't

[dmomo]

I may be okay with this. Distributed stupidity could be a lot more troublesome.
It's much easier to keep your house in order if you only have to keep your eye on one drunken uncle at Christmas time.

Re:I wouldn't

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

The trouble is(unless you abandon this 'inter-network' nonsense entirely) you can either have a single point of stupidity with URLs that are at least unique, or you can have multiple points of stupidity, with URLs that need an additional field to specify which domain name hierarchy you are speaking relative to(ie. since foo.com could resolve in multiple different ways depending on the nameserver you talk to, you'd basically have to specify "foo.com(DNS_ORG bar)" to have a meaningful URL).

After all, there isn't anything stopping you from having your very own DNS system, on any scale(and, indeed, most decent-size internal DNS servers have a mixture of private hostnames and assorted lies about public hostnames, for various convenience and security purposes), except for the fact that being able to treat URLs as unique is pretty convenient...

If memory serves, there were a bunch of alt-root DNS outfits during the .com days that tried to get people to install their nameservers so that they could peddle various ghastly TLDs that hadn't made it through ICANN(Now ICANN is ready to rubber-stamp those same TLDs, progress!); but they never got enough adoption to be of much use.

Re:I wouldn't

[garbut]

I'd say .edu, .gov and .mil need to be moved under .us to be fair or else every country would have to have the same battery of tld's.

Re:I wouldn't

[paraax]

Why not just have those TLDs resolve within the us, but require .gov.us to resolve outside the us? Likewise Australia could have .edu resolve to educational institutions within the country but require .edu.au outside. Of course that breaks the universality of the link, but the same could be said for phone numbers... once you leave the nation you need to tack on additional numbers to get to the same phone number. Internally the site would have to reference itself as the fully qualified name, of course.

Re:I wouldn't

[nullchar]

It would be nice if hostnames resolved "backwards" than they do today - just like the Java package naming scheme: org.apache.project.class

Just like local DNS resolvers "search" a certain namespace for non-fully-qualified hostnames by appending the domain name as a suffix, TLD then domain name would be applied as a prefix. Fully qualified hostnames would be prefixed with a "." instead of suffixed.

Moving from left to right, you move from general to specific. (In this alternate universe, /. uses 4 digit date years in the URL) Then this page would look like:
http://org.slashdot.ask/story/2012/06/19/1336210/how-would-you-redesign-the-tld-hierarchy

Re:I wouldn't

[SecretPerson]

Then I'm going to register the "sucks" TLD and create domains like http://coke.sucks/ http://microsoft.sucks/ http://stevejobs.sucks./ Somehow I think companies would still want control over the use of their names even in higher level domains.

Re:I wouldn't

[unrtst]

Therefore no other solution.

More like I haven't spent enough time to think of one.

A lot depends on whether the address has to be human-readable. For example, you could have an alternate system where sites are addressed by a public key hash, and you could ask numerous independent name-servers for any IP address signed by a key with that hash. But typing in 64-character hex strings to connect to Google or your bank would be troublesome, to say the least.

That sounds so great. Then we'll just have to add some sort of networked naming system so people could type in something human readable and find some response that identifies the service and where to find it. It should probably provide the same names to everyone, so people can tell each other about names and get to those neat things, but we'll have to have some way to distribute that load and cache it close to the user. And, maybe instead of that extra useless overhead of some hash of... well, what the hell are you making that hash from anyway?... we could use a really big number, like a 64bit integer (*cough* ipv6 *cough*). Maybe we could just re-purpose this DNS thing to find those big numbers? It sounds like that could do exactly what you want.

Remind me again what is "broken"? If you can't name what's broken, then you're just coming up with solutions looking for a problem. DNS works, and works very well.

Re:I wouldn't

[arose]

Just hand phishers all your passwords outright, no need to go through a system of local domain resolution.

Re:I wouldn't

[Imagix]

You've never heard of name-based virtual hosting for websites? There could be many, many domain names all behind the single IP....

Re:I wouldn't

[White Flame]

The "problem" with DNS is the artificial global scarcity of human-desirable strings, the inevitable IP claims on strings used within DNS names, and national jurisdiction and revocation of those names from use under stupid legislation. None of those are technical issues, they're all social & political.

Re:I wouldn't

[Phat_Tony]

You nailed it in pointing out that the current TLD system is already a "point of stupidity." The point of having different TLD's would be to allow otherwise identical URL's to be usefully differentiated by a TLD. In practice, this is very rarely the case. Most domain owners do not want otherwise identical domains at other TLD's, so they feel they need to register their domain at a bunch of TLD's and forward them. The nearly ubiquitous need to do this among major websites demonstrates that the whole idea is flawed. Most of the public only knows about ".com" and basically think that means "on the internet." Only a few geeks are even aware of what the TLD system was intended to accomplish.

The best answer to the TLD problem is to abandon it - grandfather it out. Stop adding new ones. They should do this by making the final period a non-special signifier in addresses. Anyone can pick anything they want and put any number of periods in their address they want. Every current address would still be unique and valid. But you can register new addresses with no TLD, just use whatever non-owned string makes the most sense for you. If you like TLD's and actually think they're useful, nothing's stopping you from registering new sites with a period followed by the three letters of any current TLD or any new one you want to make up. The process of handing out new addresses with no TLD fairly - you know, like "http://www.google," or "http://sex" would be a bit messy, but grandfathering out official TLD's would be the best system for the future internet.

This will never happen though, because there's too much money in selling new imaginary property with every new TLD they roll out. The majority of that money is not coming from people looking to take advantage of a new useful identifier, but from people looking to defend their identifier from others in the new domain - revealing the whole problem with the TLD sytem.

They're pointless anyway

[jandrese]

I would drop the whole TLD concept in a heartbeat. It just adds one more thing to remember that means very little anymore, and opens people up to confusion (wait, Whitehouse.com is a porn site!?!).

Seriously, what does it accomplish? The categories are so broad that they're nearly useless as an organizing tool, especially since many companies buy up the "lesser" TLDs for their domain just to prevent confusion. People don't organize domain names in a hierarchy like they did with Usenet groups, so appending a category label to each seems rather silly.

Country code TLDs are a symptom, not a feature. They come about because local governments want to exert their own control over some aspect of the internet, but really the whole point of the internet is to transcend borders and unite people in a single global network, even if that is a threat to entrenched interests.

Reverse the order.

[pushing-robot]

My OCD says it should be http://org.slashdot.ask/story...

Or is that not what you meant?

Redesign

[vlm]

Expunge all "field of interest" TLDs like .com, .gov, .net, .pr0n, and all the recent spammy TLDs
TLD by legal jurisdiction the domain is registered under. Country codes only, I suppose.
Underneath the country codes its fair game for each NIC.
I would "strongly encourage" the country NICs to not screw around with social engineering goals.

I would suspect you'd end up with multi-national corps registering a zillion domains in each country they buy or sell. So what. Cost of doing business.

I would only have a couple non-UN recognized as country domain names, for example, ".un" seems like a nice place to put the UN and maybe root DNS operators should have a .root TLD solely to host their own coordination related stuff.

No TLDs At All

[mentil]

I'd rather type in www.blah or ftp.blah instead of having to remember if it's blah.com, blah.co.uk etc.
The TLD indicating if the site is commercial, organization or a network stopped being accurate once they allowed anyone to get .net, .org or .com domains.
Country-code TLDs have been subverted, with sites like bit.ly using other country's TLDs than the country they're based out of. .gov/.edu seem to still have integrity, yet it's generally obvious what such an institution is given its name.

The main reason for TLDs to exist is so that different organizations around the world can manage their own little slice of the DNS system. Considering how much this is being abused (or about to be) with governments mandating DNS blocks, this suggests a peer-to-peer solution would be superior, or something managed by a central authority not beholden to any government which has the health of the internet as its primary concern (like the EFF).

Use .country-code for almost everything

[davidwr]

I would have a few "international" domains like the existing .int, .eu, and .un, and a country-like domains for organizations that already had country-codes issued to them by the U.N. or a similar organization.

I would then deprecate all other top-level domains like .com, .org, .mil, .edu, etc. and the like, with a decade-long timetable before they are removed. Current registrations would get a free ".com.us," ".org.us," etc. registration during the transition period. After the transition period, .org, .com, etc. would become invalid and the United States would be free to impose the same restrictions on "legacy" .com.us, .org.us, etc. domains as it imposes on "non-legacy" domains in the same namespace. For example, a year from now it might require that non-legacy domains in .us have a bona fide real-world presence in the United States or its possessions, but it could not impose this on "legacy" domains during the transition period.

It would be up to other countries as to how to govern their own namespaces.

Re:Not AOL Keywords, Facebook names

[Anonymous Coward]

close, but not quite. i think aol users back in its day were a tad smarter than [...]

And the award for "Phrase Most Likely To Be Laughed At Twenty Years Ago And Then Came True" goes to...

This is easy.

[jlv]

.edu for educational organizations
.com for companies
.org for organizations
.gov for US Federal Gov't
.mil for US military
2-letter TLD using ISO country codes

A clone of Jon Postel to run it all.

Oh, and a firing squad for anyone who tries to add cruft like .info, .name, .pepsi, .microsoft, etc.