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

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?

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.