NNSquad - Network Neutrality Squad
[ NNSquad ] Re: The People Respond: How to Deal with ICANN's TLDs Mess!
Lauren -
It seems that the primary concern about gTLDs is related to some notion
that each new TLD is going to require paying lots of money to the TLD
registrar who controls it. While I understand why, for example, a
company like "Xerox" might want to register Xerox.xxx, or Xerox.info as
their own, there does seem to be an equal and opposite argument in many
cases, as I've discovered since I've had "reed.com" for quite some time
now - there are lots of people and companies who might really want to
have their own "reed" domain tree.
I have never personally felt I needed to control "reed.ru" or "reed.cn"
or "reed.tv" for my purposes, and it doesn't seem to be that big a
deal. The most irritating thing is that when email systems didn't have
good error messages about non-delivery, many parents got quite confused
trying to send email to their children at Reed College (reed.edu),
enough so that for a few years in the 1990's I modified my email engine
to send a nice note back to people who sent mail to folks other than the
names registered on reed.com (before spambots started interpreting such
notes as evidence of existence of someone willing to fall victim to
Nigerian scams).
It doesn't help that domain names are conflated with websites. I use
the reed.com name for many services other than HTML-based content serving.
Consequently, perhaps the answer is that we should encourage the folks
who implement the 5-6 major browsers to accept a new kind of simplified
URL for web pages only (rather than naming physical hosts) that has the
right sort of properties, both legal and business wise. It need not be
administered by ICANN at all, and has nothing to do with host naming or
routing.
That would take the problem out of the domain of ICANN entirely, and
create a more pleasant and meaningful web browsing experience. Such
URLs might look like:
name:[Ford Motor Company]/foo.html
[ David, without getting into the nitty-gritty here, I'll
just note that a primary concept of my IDONS proposal is
the concept that naming would not have any centralized
roots, and -- in essence -- there could be multiple
"reed" constructs (to use your example) that would be
meaningful in different ways to different users, depending
on their own contexts. The individualized mapping or
aliasing functions would be pushed down below the typical
browser address level much as you suggest, with users indeed
seeing and using higher-level constructs -- which well might
be [Ford Motor Company], or [Google], or whatever -- but
typically not server235.blastoff.ford.usautos.cars.
It is the centralization of Internet naming that itself
has created the TLD wars, and ICANN's moves to create more
gTLDs only exacerbates the associated problems.
-- Lauren Weinstein
NNSquad Moderator ]