Tim Berners-Lee: we don't need arbitrary new TLDs
wired.co.uk
wired.co.uk
We will never again be able to create new top level domains that have special restricted meanings, such as .arpa, .gov and the concept of country TLDs[1]. Any sensible name that we want to use will probably already be taken. Even it is not taken, a new special purpose name would never be able to differentiate from squatters using the same level of the namespace.
Not only that, but the special casing of existing TLDs such as .gov could get diluted to the point that the majority will not recognise them as official any more.
There is a place for free-for-all on domain name registrations, and it is .com.
[1] I presume that they will reserve two letter registrations for the specific case of new countries coming into existence, but my point is about the concept of new uses, rather than this specific case.
Then browser TLD defaulting would have handled most cases and we could have had additional conventions (such as *.store). (The "www." subdomain is basically useless.)
The web has no hierarchy so it doesn't make sense for domain names to have one. It would have been nicer to ditch the TLDs, use a sane protocol name and have implicit slashes. Like web:disney/some-path.
Actually, the "web" does have lots of hierarchy.
For example, Disney has hierarchy that the current scheme makes it inconveient to express. That's why we have disneystore.com, disneycruise.com, etc. instead of com.disney.store, com,disney.cruise, etc.
www.group.department.university.edu.country/person/topic/page
Instead of the more logical
country.edu.university.department.group.person.topic.page
Tanguy Ortolo answers 'Why www?' better than me.
The same as today.
In www.disney.com, disney controls that www. In com.disney.wwww, disney controls that www.
However, in the latter, disney could do com.disney.store . And, with browser defaulting the tld, disney.store would work.
Disney isn't going to use store.disney. However, they might well use disney.store if they controlled it. With the current order, they don't. They would with the reverse order.
*http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/feds-seize-foreign-...
"If you just add one character to the length of the domain name you have 26 times as many names you can choose from. There's no shortage."
True, but TLD's like .pepsi and .HTC are a lot easier to remember than random combinations of letter.
At best, it would be pepsi@pepsi. (note trailing dot).
My buddy used to be root@ws. but only a few MUAs and MTAs could handle delivering mail there, and always with the trailing dot.
But if new TLDs become common I guess that will change with time.
For example how would the Google Chrome browser work (and search to a degree), does a user who types "pepsi" into their omnibar want to go to http://pepsi/ or search for pepsi?
It also adds confusion for webmasters trying to parses URLs on their website. When a user types pepsi.com/coke into their blog for example that link can be made clickable to http://pepsi.com/coke/ where it can't for pepsi/coke
When ICANN introduced .cat, .aero, .museum, .coop, and others many years ago, adoption has since approached zero.
When you place "pepsi.com" in a can , people know it's a web address. Now, if pepsi has its own TLD, how should they refer to their web site? Just "pepsi"? "www.pepsi"? "web: pepsi"?
I suspect they will reserve their TLD, and then continue to use "pepsi.com" as before, thus rendering these new TLDs useless at best, and noise at worst.
if there's one thing i took away from my time doing front line support, it's that users don't enter URLs. if you tell them to find the address bar, they're lost. if you give them a URL to enter, they have no idea what to do regardless of whether the TLD is .com or .pepsi. people get to where they want to go by searching, whether they're searching google for a website or searching facebook for a page. the domain name system may have technical meaning, but for most users pepsi.com is just as obscure a code as 199.187.226.158
If you register a .com, you have to be safe and pick up the .net, .org, .info, .biz, etc.
This is a rookie mistake. Nobody in the history of the internet has accidentally typed ".biz" instead of ".com" and gotten to the wrong website as a result.
The bar for getting a new TLD should be that you're doing something new and different, not just opening up a new namespace. .name is one example where they're at least trying to innovate.
A new TLD like .arpa that's used for some kind of underpinning would be a good idea if there was a technical requirement for it.
Otherwise you're just cluttering up the root zone with garbage and making it even more complicated for people to know what a legitimate domain is.
The public suffix list (http://publicsuffix.org/) is already full of garbage if you want to see how bad it is.
It is not my idea, but really, should't we abolish the TLD in general? Instead of http://google.com, http://google.de, http://google.tv .... we would get just http://google .
The reason why we have geographical TLD is just political anyway.
(I like that we have both "restricted" and "unrestricted" zones; I can go register beiberloveskittens.com, for example, but know that beiberloveskittens.com.au won't go polluting the .com.au namespace without at least someone going to the effort of setting up a business for it to be attached to.)
But when I try all the possible TLD's as a separate addresses, none works ( http://com , http://org , even http://xxx or http://museum , nothing works).
What is the reason... is it DNS servers that don't like this type of nslookup?
Try ending with a period.
Certainly http://dk. works. I'm sure there are others.
I don't think we do. I think 1 global namespace would be enough.
Say we ditched TLD's and limited domain names to 10 alphanumeric characters. That would still be enough domains to give 450,000 to every person on the planet.
That's with just alphanumeric characters capped at a length of 10. Allow unicode and remove the cap and we would have plenty of domains to go around.
All in 1 namespace.
Edit: yes I understand that the vast majority of those domains would be nonsensical, however even eliminating 99.99999% of them would still leave enough meaningful domains to go around the world many times over.
I dont think you have thought this through who would rember that the local doctors surgery is XDFE123456!
People don't recognize the difference between pepsi.com and pepsi.org and pepsi.com.hackers-taking-your-credit-card.tt
.org is interesting meta-data, but why not transport that data as part of a meta-data record and let browsers display it to users in a consistent way they recognize and understand?
The point of DNS is to map a human-knowable name to a network or provider. We not only don't need new TLDs, we frankly don't much need the ones we have. dot-com/net/country codes/etc and even 'www' and 'mail' are of dubious benefit to the average user these days.
Sure, it's useful for engineers. And we can keep that in a diagnostic window. But for user-facing concerns, simplifying DNS is the only conversation worth having.
What we really need is a single new TLD that is distributed so that it cannot be controlled by any particular government or corporation. Something like dot-bit.org, but with more momentum behind it.
And all controlled by a company whose income mostly comes from making up new ones of these?
New or newly popularized TLDs represent new business and cultural territory. Without this new territory, the consumer "domain name memoryscape" inhibits the adoption of new business and artistic ideas.
It might even be a good idea to make it as arbitrary as possible: every year, choose one random two letter and several three-letter domains. Then let creativity decide how to make use of .kfi and .iz.
At the very least, you get 26 new url shortening companies, and a stack of people with cool email addresses...
Those would be logical TLDs to have, but somehow I don't see ICANN encouraging their creation.
This is simply false. There is no requirement whatsoever for .org domains and there are countless examples of .org domains owned by for-profit companies.
Perhaps the analogy is unnecessary, or even harmful, to make. But typically I have been taught, or rather I have learned by direct method, that some Christians believe BIBLE is an abbreviation, albeit a cheeky one, for "Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth".
Often I wonder what the "imperative mood" of this document is supposed to be. Obviously it is not descriptive qua scientific authorship. We shouldn't assume this, surely, since a sophisticated method of science had not been yielded to the Hebrews of that time, etc. But yet it struggles, and seemingly succeeds, at preserving its descriptive weight, as vacuous as it is, in a time of reason and science. So we claim that it is allegory and tale. And so what if is? What is it describing? Like Aristotle, I believe, it describes a cycle of civilization: humanity's response to itself.
Obviously "God" in the story of the Tower of Babel is nothing more than the height of political force of Shinar. It responds to what they have built. So here we see the "confounding" of their language; like in our time, a confounding of the DNS system. What motivates this story? To what end does it serve?
Surely the U.S. government seeks to bolster the economy through its will, by "securing" our economic creativity. For "now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do."
As we can clearly see this is a response to Otto Neurath, the Logical Positivists, the adoption of ideal, scientific and pragmatic languages, etc. Neurath sought to liberate the proletariat of his time through a technological mode of thought applied to language: complex symbols efficiently characterized such that they might contain chains of propositions. The illiterate worker thus might be informed through a proximity of symbol to nature. Today, we see this with technology: big-face-hypermodern-informational-UIs-with-geriatric-buttons, usability research, cognitive-neuroscience centered on atypical neuropathologies, the mobile web, Helvetica, etc.
The U.S. will respond as it should, and I play this card because, in the end, the only argument we face from politicians is an uncritical one: _what we've been doing works, so it must work_. How much influence these governments have on ICANN is unclear to me, but given the list of possible TLDs; e.g., pepsi, etc., it isn't tough to reach for the assumption.