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Comment by deelowe | Hacker News Reader

"Come over to my house, the address is 2245 Azure Bluff."

"You mean 2245 Azure St."

"No 2245 Azure Bluff"

I don't see a different here. There's nothing special about .com. Plus, it's not going to scale anyways. Why not have arbitrary TLDs? There's no technical reason why this is an issue.

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"There's no technical reason why this is an issue."

This is beside OP's point. This is a human problem; not a technical one.

There's a big difference there.

Your comment is written like you've never ventured outside of the tech industry.

More like "2245 Azure Bluff, or 2245 Azure Bluff Street?"

There's a road in Melbourne called "High Street Road" - as opposed to High Street.

If you allow arbitrary TLDs, you have to have some reasonable rules governing registration of secondary and maybe tertiary subdomains. Otherwise, the namespace will be saturated and the prices for new domains will be obscene.

How is this remotely more of a concern than .com saturation that already exists?

Uh, it's not--yet.

The state of .com today is the future of other TLDs in the future.

That problem will be made much worse much sooner if the owners of TLDs like .shop or .phone aren't required to allow second-level registration.

Agree, they're not a finite resource that should be miserly handed down every few years by ICANN. Register whateveryouwant.whoopdedoo for all it matters.

The difference is that most cities won't have both Azure Street and Azure Bluff, and if you address mail to 2245 Azure Street, it'll probably arrive at 2245 Azure Bluff.

Tell that to NYC. We have numbered streets. We have the same numbered street in a Street, Road, Drive, Terrace, and Avenue designation. Sometimes within a block of each other. Here in Queens, you can drive north along 23rd St and cross 23rd Terrace, 23rd Dr, 23rd Rd, and then 23rd Ave.

No idea about most cities, but my city (Veliky Novgorod, a relatively small town in Russia with mere 200K population and 90 km.sq. in size) has lots of such cases. Voskresenskii lane and Voskresenskii boulevard; Orlovsakya street, Orlovskii lane and Orvovskii passage and so on - all are distinct addresses, some located in very different parts of the city.

Out of 300 ways extracted from address database I see about 40 entries (counted by hand, too lazy to build a proper query) being very alike. Luckily, most names decline and "street" and, say, "boulevard" have different grammatical gender, so it's harder to make a mistake.

Round Greenwich way, we have Vanbrugh Park, Vanbrugh Park Road, and Vanbrugh Park Road West all within about 400yds.

Why yes, Mr Vanbrugh[1] did live in the castle on the corner...

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Vanbrugh

Falsehoods programmers believe about addressess: http://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-ab...

I said "most" intentionally; my point was that street addresses and street address matching are significantly fuzzier than domain names.

Try doing some geoprocessing once in a while: this is not an unusual quirk out IRL, and is one big PITA for delivery:

address says "Sokolska 20". Okay, let's guess from the other metadata that the city is actually "Prague" and not "Ostrava". No such house number at this address, perhaps should have been "sokolOVska 20, Prague"? Wonderful, that exists, solv- oh wait, do we have two different houses with the same house number? We do, multiple clicks apart, and both are legally correct.

In other words, that's a very good example you've used, exactly because it shows the underlying assumptions as faulty.

And then there's the concept of 'vanity addressing', though usually negated by postcodes/zipcodes - where affluent/"good" suburb is adjacent to a "less desirable" one - I'm not familiar with the geography, but for example where someone might say Beverley Hills, but give/live in Culver City's ZIP. Or in Melbourne, when I worked for a utility we'd get a lot of people who'd quote their address as Mont Albert, with a Box Hill South post code.

I've seen and experience variations on exactly that problems countless times in several different countries.

I'd like to have no tlds, except possibly .<isocountrycode> for governments. But that ship has already sailed and made side trips.

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