Re: what problem are we solving? (was Re: ICANN opens up Pandora'sBox

[Joe Greco <jgreco () ns sol net>]

> On Mon, 30 Jun 2008, Joe Greco wrote:
> > I see usefulness in having scopes that are local (city/village/etc),
> > state, country, and global.  There's no reason that you couldn't start
> > out local, and as you grew, get a state level domain (martyspizza.wi.us),
> > and if you went national (martyspizza.us), etc.  In many (most!) cases,
> > businesses do not make significant growth in a rapid fashion.
>
>   The selfish will abuse the lack of RFC1480 management and go straight to
>   martyspizza.us, even though they have one store, because it's available at
>   the time.

That's probably a reasonable reason to do a modest amount of research on
registrants.  Of course, the idea that a registrar has any duty other than
to take money and "make it so" is heretical, I know.

> > Actually, that has to do with what I was talking about in continuing to
> > develop a reasonable system.  Quite frankly, if I was in that school
> > district, I see no reason why my computer couldn't be aware of that
> > domain, and actually have "http://john-muir"; or some similar mechanism
> > actually work.  The ideal is probably more complex in implementation,
> > but does not need to be more complex in use.
>
>   Does the DNS provider or ISP decide that?  Or are you just referring to a
>   bookmarking feature in your browser?  Which then makes moot any RFC1480
>   friendly URL.  Namespaces in DNS that are globally recognized are
>   different than your example above.

I would actually like to have seen a continued evolution of DNS towards
something slightly more useful.  Implementation as a bookmark in a browser
would not make any sense; the Internet is not just the World Wide Web.
The search feature within a resolver is one reasonable starting point for
considering how you might go about this sort of thing, but I expect that
the solution might not really resemble anything currently existing.

> > I would agree that we don't need more TLD's.  But the namespace, as it
> > exists, is messy, and it's nasty to expect that people will always have
> > to use a browser and a search engine to find their destination's domain
> > name.
>
>   Nobody can or will cleanup the existing namespaces.  New TLDs will
>   continue to make them more messy.  More court battles over new TLDs will
>   come up.  The wealthy will get their own TLDs (I can't afford .beckman,
>   but I'm sure Beckman Instruments can, who already own beckman.com, and
>   I'll just be screwed again), and small guys will not.
>
>   Search engines and browser tools will render the value of domain names
>   to approaching zero, .com will remain the namespace of choice, and that
>   new TLDs will be for the wealthy i.e. http://google/ and http://coke/ and
>   there will be more court battles for those trademarks.

It may go that way, but should we let it do so without comment?

... JG
-- 
Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net
"We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I
won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN)
With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.