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Re: NAVYJOBS.COM
by Sean Doran 23 Apr '96

23 Apr '96

John Riordan gave a good probable reason behind the choice, hearsay or not, and it matches both MAP's and several other people's public and private speculations. (Though I did like the comments about military-industrial complex conspiracies, the military being privatized, and the Great Conspiracy by Yet Another Branch of the US Government to Put Money Into SAIC's Pockets $50 at a Time). I'd like to take a quick poll of feelings about this sort of thing. Many organizations (mine included) have in the past gone for numbers of domain-names, each reflecting some different operating unit or other. A number of these happen because of technical concerns on the part of the holder of a more generic domain, or because of concerns about bureaucratic such-and-so on the part of the people looking for a subdomain. Looking around a bit, completely unscientifically and without more than eyeballing things, it appears that this practice is continuing, despite the back-pressure of a registration fee levied by the InterNIC. I was wondering if, firstly, anybody else thinks that having many second-level domains per company is a real issue on any front, and whether it really needs fixing by perhaps us suggesting that subsequent domains be charged on an exponential scale, with proceeds going into the costs of maintaining the worldwide DNS, particularly with respect to user-and-administrator education. Note that I shall happily ignore the question of who we should suggest this to, or who "we" should be (NANOG or I*-something-or-other); I'm just wondering if I'm completely out-to-lunch on this one. Also I shall happily ignore the issue of how one decides which organizations are considered part of the same <splat> of operations/control/management/ownership, as there be ratholes lurking there. However, I'd like to see something that handles not only <eighty-product-names>.COM being registered by one party, but also <eighty-quasi-independent-orgs>.COM, all clearly able to fit (at least for the moment) into <eighty-subdomains>.BigCompany.COM. The "(for now)" is key; some of the interesting things seen in the past has included people rushing out and grabbing lots of similar-sounding domains prior to a naming decision of a new spin-off-company being made by its board of directors, and also lots of rushing out and acquiring domains by products which think that they _might_, some day, be spun off into completely independent entities. If people think this sort of thing is OK, I'll shut up now. If not, I'm interested in hearing about it. Sean.

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Re: NAVYJOBS.COM
by avg＠postman.ncube.com 23 Apr '96

23 Apr '96

>> Why not to restrict first-level domains to companies >> which can demonstrate that they have 1000+ hosts? >I have an idea :-) >Why not create more top level domains to reduce the congestion in >.com? Then let other companies run some of them so a free market can >decide what policies they like best. Because there's already a lot of them (i didn't count but it appears to be close to a hundred) and you'll have real hard time convincing root NS operators (who, FYI, provide that service free of charge) to add any more. And then, if you stopped to think for a minute before writing, it won't fix anything. O(N exp(M)) = O(exp(M)). In other words, if you throw in more TLDs you may (in the absolutely ideal case, when registration suddenly spread equally in all TLDs) it will delay the namespace collapse by 6 months for every doubling of number of TLDs. Since the real-world scenario would be far from the ideal case what you offered would cause a lot more problems and fix nothing. The only way to fix domain name service is to stop the insane flat-tree registration and start growing tree in depth. Which is -- if you want to start a registry ask NIC to allocate you something like MYREG.COM and register whoever you want *under it*. No negotiations with root NS operators. No additional load on root NSes. But, i guess, that solution does not appear to be as "sexy" as screaming bloody murder about InterNIC policies. The only problem i see with what InterNIC is doing now is that they encourage proliferation of the "first-level domains are sexy" hysteria. John et al -- how about stopping to register names under .com *NOW* and start registering them under .AA.COM (with understanding that later there will be .AB.COM etc, some of them delegated to other registries)? Name collisions could be resolved in that way, too, rendering the trademarked-domain wars unnecessary. (I won't say it'll make all lawyers to jump from the bridge, but still). It remains a mystery to me why so many supposedly intelligent people keep running in circles trying to argue against the trivial mathematics. --vadim

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Re: NAVYJOBS.COM
by Paul Ferguson 22 Apr '96

22 Apr '96

Sean, Personally, I like the <eighty-subdomains>.BigCompany.COM. approach; it just scales better. Less messy. Tastes great. - paul

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Re: NAVYJOBS.COM
by avg＠postman.ncube.com 22 Apr '96

22 Apr '96

Why not to restrict first-level domains to companies which can demonstrate that they have 1000+ hosts? Companies with 200+ hosts then should use .A.COM -- .Z.COM (i know, some of them are taken, but that can be fixed). Smaller companies should use .xx.COM (and xx is NOT choosen by the companies -- it is just the random seed and/or registry ID). What we should worry about is number of first-level domains/number of hosts ratio. It is the same problem as with routing. The solution is also the same -- aggregation, with subsequent Toxic Waste Dump (aka legacy allocation) cleanup. That kind of defeats the "menmonic" value of names but still beats telephone numbers (and then, what kind of mnemonic can be used to distinguish between thousands of nearly identical small businesses?) --vadim PS. Obviously if IBM registers 100 domain names it is still a lot less damage than a small ISP (with 1000 dial-up customers) which registers a domain name for every such customer. Big folks registering POISONOUS-BURGER.COM and SHIT-ON-TV.COM aren't really a problem. Zillion of MOM-AND-POP.COMs is.

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Re: NAVYJOBS.COM
by edfang＠visi.net 22 Apr '96

22 Apr '96

Why limit to companies with 200+ hosts. You open yourself to much more trouble (read legal) if this was the case. If you just said everybody had to take a domain under your balanced tree aa.com ab.com ac.com etc then you could project some sort of fairness to the whole idea. Nobody could really complain about getting unfair treatment, there are no openings for discussion. Names would be delegated in the slots that had openings. I don't think you could get this to fly with the current nameholders, but an interesting concept nonetheless. Ed > Why not to restrict first-level domains to companies > which can demonstrate that they have 1000+ hosts? > Companies with 200+ hosts then should use .A.COM -- .Z.COM > (i know, some of them are taken, but that can be fixed). > Smaller companies should use .xx.COM (and xx is NOT choosen > by the companies -- it is just the random seed and/or > registry ID). > <snip> > That kind of defeats the "menmonic" value of names but > still beats telephone numbers (and then, what kind of > mnemonic can be used to distinguish between thousands of > nearly identical small businesses?) > > --vadim >

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RE: NAVYJOBS.COM
by Jim Fleming 22 Apr '96

22 Apr '96

On Monday, April 22, 1996 11:47 AM, Michael A. Patton[SMTP:MAP@bbn.com] wrote: <snip> @the expression). The other possibility is the contract went to some @upstart that doesn't even _think_ about domains other than .COM ... @ I was told recently by a "DOS expert" that .COM comes from the file extensions used by Microsoft, as in COMMAND.COM. This person "educated" me that Microsoft uses the .COM extension for "popular" programs like COMMAND.COM and that .COM stands for "common" and also "command". I was informed that everyone registers in the .COM domain to make sure that they are compatible with the version of the Internet supported by DOS and Windows. Needless to say...I was surprised that the origin of .COM was sort of lost in the translation...I guess when you have a hammer like DOS, everything looks like a nail... I guess if companies like AOL, Prodigy and Compuserve can convince their subscribers that they are "on the Internet", maybe everyone else can now convince people that _are_ on the Internet...that they are really on DOS....or something else...:-) -- Jim Fleming UNETY Systems, Inc. Naperville, IL 60563 e-mail: JimFleming(a)unety.net

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NAVYJOBS.COM
by Sean Doran 22 Apr '96

22 Apr '96

I was happily watching the hockey playoffs just now (well, as happily as possible without Hockey Night in Canada), and noticed a commercial for U.S. Navy Recruiting. Why why why why why are they in .COM?! I think we should be told. Sean.

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Re: NAVYJOBS.COM
by Scott Bradner 22 Apr '96

22 Apr '96

> Why why why why why are they in .COM?! cuz the ad agency was clueless? Scott

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Re: NAVYJOBS.COM
by avg＠postman.ncube.com 22 Apr '96

22 Apr '96

exp(M) (shoul've been exp(t)) is the growth of Internet. Any sane policy will have to account for it (and, no, just doing three levels is not enough, there should be a way to go into more levels if needed later). The idea of using "randomizing" sub-domain is to get people used to the idea of randomization in domain names. Then it can be moved into protocol or implementations. It also fixes the name collision and transparent introduction of multiple registries. There is no other way to satisfy N users when every one of them wants to be named "Itty Bitty Machines". --vadim

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Re: NAVYJOBS.COM
by avg＠postman.ncube.com 22 Apr '96

22 Apr '96

Well, that solution have a problem not present in vanilla DNS -- nameservers no longer correspond to administrative boundaries. And it does not do anything to fix the name collision problem. --vadim >From nanog-owner(a)merit.edu Mon Apr 22 19:26 PDT 1996 Return-Path: <nanog-owner(a)merit.edu> Received: from postman.ncube.com by butler.ncube.com (5.0/SMI-SVR4) id AA16645; Mon, 22 Apr 1996 19:26:03 +0800 Received: from titan.sprintlink.net by postman.ncube.com (4.1/SMI-4.1) id AA28280; Mon, 22 Apr 96 19:27:42 PDT Received: from merit.edu (merit.edu [35.1.1.42]) by titan.sprintlink.net (8.6.9/8.6.9) with ESMTP id WAA01557 for <avg(a)titan.sprintlink.net>; Mon, 22 Apr 1996 22:27:31 -0400 Received: (from daemon@localhost) by merit.edu (8.7.5/merit-2.0) id VAA29036 for nanog-outgoing; Mon, 22 Apr 1996 21:38:51 -0400 (EDT) Received: from chops.icp.net (chops.icp.net [199.0.55.71]) by merit.edu (8.7.5/merit-2.0) with ESMTP id VAA29030 for <nanog(a)merit.edu>; Mon, 22 Apr 1996 21:38:48 -0400 (EDT) Received: by chops.icp.net id <20637>; Mon, 22 Apr 1996 21:38:40 +0100 From: Sean Doran <smd(a)icp.net> To: pferguso(a)cisco.com, smd(a)icp.net Subject: Re: NAVYJOBS.COM Cc: john(a)interport.net, nanog(a)merit.edu Message-Id: <96Apr22.213840+0100_edt.20637+44(a)chops.icp.net> Date: Mon, 22 Apr 1996 21:38:31 +0100 Sender: owner-nanog(a)merit.edu Precedence: bulk Content-Type: text Content-Length: 2174 Status: R | Personally, I like the <eighty-subdomains>.BigCompany.COM. approach; | it just scales better. Less messy. Tastes great. Me too. However, there appears to be some counterpressure to move towards what I perceive as some kind of system which lacks any real hierarchy in the sense of domains. Perhaps instead of trying to "fix" the DNS by creating huge new bunches of things to the right of the last normally-seen dot, we should move towards something completely different. Maybe instead of: <whatever>.COM being considered as three tokens and being looked up as: ask a ROOT nameserver for COM NSes ask a COM nameserver for <whatever> NSes ask a <whatever> nameserver for appropriate info (all modulo caching) instead we treat it as (leaving out the '<' '>' stuff out of laziness): <w><h><a><t><e><v><e><r><.><c><o><m> and look up like this: ask a ROOT nameserver for M NSes ask a M nameserver for O NSes ... ask a <w> nameserver for appropriate info that will scale to a huge number of generally unformatted labels for things. This strikes me as a practical way of moving towards ".Earth" and ".Alt" and thousands of other "top-level-domains". Other than technical scalability, the other general design goal for any changes to the status quo wouuld have to be administrative scalability. As a too-easy example, in this model that's essentially making sure an overworked or evil delegator for $origin ever.com won't break the ability of people wanting $origin whatever.com or $origin never.com from going about obtaining those names. Perhaps some form of automagic registration scheme should be available to allow for others to initiate any rightwards growth of names unless they involve certain charaters (like '.', perhaps, so as not to overly confuse people who are used to foo.bar.com being under the administration of whoever is in charge of bar.com) Again, I worry about being wasteful of other people's time here; this could be a non-issue for operators big and small for all I know, so I'll drop back into read-only mode for a bit, and let smarter DNS people and folks more in the trenches talk it out (or ignore it). Sean.

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