[...] I wouldn't have bothered to bring this up, but someone mentioned using an intermediate hash on *all* .com's (ibm.49.com), which is a waste of time. Every extra level of address hurts a bit, and it makes sense that "really big" companies should have simple .com addresses.
That's sensible engineering practice and in other circumstances I would applaud it. However, we are not in a sensible engineering situation or any other kind of sensible situation -- people, and especially lawyers and marketeers are involved. People currently worry about and choose domain names with the same kind of intensity they experience when worrying about and choosing trademarks, product names, company names, and logos. The domain name is the "service mark" of the 90's -- people "do business under it" and its easy recognition by customers is considered valuable by the folks who steer multinational companies. Currently it is possible for a little company to look "just like" a big company. They all appear with the same .COM suffix, in the same whois registries, and just as noone knows you are a dog, noone knows when they see e-mail from you that you're just a one-person consulting shop or whatever. Witness the MTV.COM debacle, or find out which of the hundreds of daily newspapers with "Examiner" in their name is registered as "examiner.com". We have _got_ to anhililate the value of these names. There is no way on god's green earth that a small company is going to allow themselves to be put way down in a backwater while the more visible namespaces are available to bigger companies. These people will lie on their applications, they will find out what the categorization criteria is and pretend to be something they are not, they will cause the NIC and any other registries to spend a great deal of time trying to verify this information, and ultimately when all is said and done and they don't get what they want, they will _sue_ for restraint of trade. Everyone, large and small, has to be treated as equally as possible. And the domain names have to be quite a lot uglier than they are now, such that the tendancy to register under .NET,.COM,.ORG,etc just to protect the company name or trademark(s) will no longer bear useful fruit for those who do it. That said, I am not in favour of making these names so long that they are not usable. Larger organizations tend to have deeper interior DNS trees, and it would be Really Bad if we end up with four labels just to get from the root to the organization, and another four levels to get from the root of the organization to some host within the organization. Perhaps this indicates a need to make RFC1535 a _requirement_ for Internet hosts, so that organizations can use search lists and partially qualified interior names, thus isolating them from the organization's depth in the external namespaces. This feels like a slippery slope and I'm not sure I want to pursue it just yet. Two-label names don't scale. Three-label names can be made to do so -- and I would give in on the ".Hash." component of my previous proposal if I had a good idea for a second-label that would cause full and healthy looking trees. ".State.US" has the advantage that the USDOMREG could ask the various state governments to take responsibility for third-level registration, much as they do for corporation names now. I agree that once you're down into .City.State.US or .County.State.US, it is no longer feasible for an organization with even a moderately deep interior tree to register. Six-label fully qualified names aren't usable since they are no longer a syntactic improvement over raw addresses. (They are a slight semantic improvement, since they'll change less often. I don't know yet whether that matters enough.)