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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?"
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.
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.
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.
I read the internet for the articles.
My OCD says it should be http://org.slashdot.ask/story...
Or is that not what you meant?
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
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.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
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.
Oh, should I have sugar-coated that?
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
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.
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.