> They could do this because they controlled those from the registry side of things, and it was trivial to slam something that would make it resolve.
Was this legal?
If so what stopped them there, they could just hijack any domain?
Was this legal?
If so what stopped them there, they could just hijack any domain?
Details here:
https://www.computerworld.com/article/2560283/icann-revises-...
https://archive.icann.org/en/topics/wildcard-history.html
In the end it resulted in what ICANN now calls the RSEP process.
Collision and needing to "divine" the domain seem inherent to having a name system. Both this and the need for a TLD-insensitive lookup were solved by making the address bar also the search bar so people can use search engines to find new things instead of DNS.
For one thing, changing how domains work like this would massively drive up the cost of any one domain to the point where hobbyists and open-source projects would be priced out. I have a few domains, none of which are duplicated across different TLDs, and each of which serves a different purpose. It would have been pretty much impossible for me to do this if everything was under one namespace.
In addition to the price aspect, it would pretty much force the system into being a much more restrictive version of the already-existing trademark system - except that there wouldn't even be any exceptions for different fields, as there is in the current trademark system. For example, one of my domains coincidentally (and unknowingly at the time I registered it over 20 years ago) collides with the name of a movie. It's in a completely different field (actually, it's a personal, non-commercial site for me and not much is public on it) but I almost certainly wouldn't have been able to get it if TLDs didn't exist.