For a smaller company, or one with less offices, it might make sense for their domain name to be geographical, for example cisco.sf.ca.us or nytimes.ny.us.
Excuse me, but both companies mentioned are multinational...even "small" companies are geographically disparate. I think we all agree heirarchy==good. The thing we haven't figured out yet is how to apply that heirarchy in an inoffensive way. Geography is not a good choice, it has the pungent smell of europe in the 1800's (aka ISO). ISP would be a good choice if it were constant and there was a true heirarchy there. Just to be obnoxious, let me state the ugly obvious programatic mapping... use the first 2 or 3 letters in the 2nd layer domain name. cisco.com = cisco.ci.com nytimes.com = nytimes.ny.com real-routers.com = real-routers.re.com Since this is a purely implied and programatic mapping, the particularly -cute- thing we can do is automagicly map this crud so no user ever has to see the abomonation "cisco.ci.com". We have certainly taken a solid whack at the root DNS server overload "problem". The disadvantage is we haven't solved the namespace collision problem, but I see that as one for the lawyers to solve, not us bit twiddlers.