It’s time to place the web in safer hands
kernelmag.com
kernelmag.com
I claim the problem with the first big expansion - .pro, .info, etc - is that it WASN'T wholesale. Yes, if half the Internet thinks that only .com exists, and you add .biz, every corporation has to go register .biz as well.
If you add a thousand real, active, well-used TLDs, they don't, simply because that is no longer how the Internet works. We already see the start of this with ccTLDs; Apple (a pretty aggressive trademark defender) does not own http://www.apple.fm, and nobody expects them to, and nobody is confused that they don't. I'm sure my grandmother sometimes confused Elvis Costello with Elvis Presley, but nobody thought the one was impersonating the other, because people have last names, and that's how it works, and that's normal.
Five years ago, the average American non-technologist's mental model of the Internet was "you type the company name and .com, except sometimes it's .net and I don't know why". Now it's probably a little more nuanced - but only a little, because .com is still Where Everything Is.
If you change that, you've changed that. Because you changed it. So it's not the same.
> Five years ago, the average American non-technologist's mental model of the Internet was "you type the company name and .com, except sometimes it's .net and I don't know why". Now it's probably a little more nuanced - but only a little, because .com is still Where Everything Is.
I would say it's even worse now. Many people's mental model is "I type it into Google and they take me there" or "I share this clickable text around and don't have to type anything".
Then again, I set up an alias called "gwssh" that goes to our EC2 gateway machine and then to the target machine, and more than once I've typed "gwssh gate" because I'm too "lazy" to type "ssh gate".
People don't really know what an URL is. During ealry days of WWW and broadcasting presenters would read the whole thing; aitch tee tee pee colon forward slash forward slash double you double you double you etc etc. There's still not much awareness of what the bits of an url breakdown to; you still see even the BBC make mistakes about domain names and TLDs.
And I'm always gently disappointed to see URLs delimited by () and not RFC compliant <>.
Choosing a bracket character that resembles a tag, for use in the case when you are definitively trying NOT to create an HTML tag, seems a misguided choice in the RFC.
Whatever entity is given control of the global name or number spaces has extraordinary power. Any such organization will be subject to corruption, both from within (the subject of the article) and without (e.g. SOPA). Moving governance up to higher levels of government (like the U.N.) isn't any better. Do we really want France or the WIPO to have any input, much less China or Russia? That's a rhetorical question for anyone concerned about censorship.
I think it inevitable that the Internet will continue to splinter along national boundaries. Ultimately, the internet will consist of national networks, separate and insular to varying degrees. The challenge for hackers will be how to connect to the networks outside of our own respective countries.
That's where it's heading indeed, maybe it will even come to mimick real boundaries and require visas from those that want to cross them.
It doesn't offer a solution to the complaint in the article that organizations will have to register 'apple', 'mcdonalds', or 'cocacola' in each new TLD, but I'm less sympathetic to that concern.
Whose hands should DNS oversight be in? What alternative solutions are out there?
The junk that's out there now is embarrassing. .aero? .museum? Are these jokes? It took more than ten years to establish the blindingly obvious .xxx domain while they were flirting with the idea of a .store or .shop domain instead.
Domains are growing increasingly irrelevant when search-engines are the only reliable method for channelling people to what they want, but the namespace pollution we have to endure forever will be a constant source of irritation.
I have almost no idea what the current TLDs are, and even Mozilla, which needs to know this for security reasons, is having trouble keeping up. Regional registrars seem to change their mind as to how they will assign domains without any sort of official notification, no paperwork at all, which seems reckless for a TLD.
Also the ANA complains that it hasn't been listened to. This is obviously false; this process has been ongoing for more than 6 years. Anyone can attend ICANN meetings and become involved in policy making processes. A number of ANA members have been involved in the process for some time, their public comments have been received, they have been on IP working groups. This is all public record and can be found on the ICANN website. Issues with respect to various trademark and copyright issues have been debated multiple times, and almost every time trademark holders are not satisfied with protections that exceed those they normally have in the rest of the business / legal world. And when they don't get these egregious demands they complain that they haven't been listened to and try to hold up the process yet again.
Hopefully several years from now there will be greater competition in the market and 85% of the primary domain name market sales won't go to just one company; Verisign.
Disclaimer: I work for a company that intends to apply.