Paul A Vixie previously wrote:
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".
One doesn't need a two-level domain name to help make a small business look bigger.
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.
What sort of horseshit is this? Listen, domain names _have_ value. You can't avoid it. But there's the problem of crowded name spaces, which is not an impossible challenge technically speaking, but which limits the choices of names that those who don't have one yet can get. The solution? Create various domains at various levels, make contracts for the right to register a name under one of these domains, and sell the contracts in the open market. The larger companies are the ones that will be able to _afford_ the two-level names; there's no need to verify money! [Well, ok, you have to make sure the money ain't fake, but that's easy :)] Think about it: if IBM wants IBM.COM, rather than IBM.COM.NY.US, then let them buy the right to register a name in the .COM hierarchy, but they should pay more for that than for a name in the COM.NY.US. Seriously, in the long run, many services will be tradeable as comodities in futures markets; I know people who are trying to do this now with bandwidth, and hell, there are people making small fortunes by charging to register and "hold" domain names for others. Yet we still have a lousy excuse for a NIC that _DOES NOT_ charge for its services!!! Get with it. Capitalism, it'll fix the problem at hand. Anyways, yes, what I propose does have one sticky point: who should charge for the registration services and what is to be done with that money; any ideas? [...]
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.
The damn governments haven't even gotten into any of this folks! And there's nothing wrong with two-level names so long as people can still come up with unique two-level names; it is quite feasible to have domain name servers for hundreds of thousands of names in one hierarchy, those who say it isn't are either lazy or incompetent or don't know what they are talking about (and I'm talking about good, reliable, fast servers here). It is the fact that it gets hard to find the name you want not taken when you have hundreds of thousands of names in one hierarchy that will force us away from the current system. And BTW, me and my business partner were looking for a domain name for a soon to be business we want to start, and quickly found that our first four choices of a name were already taken. That is the future unless we do something about it.
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.)
Anyways, there aren't that many businesses, and not a significant fraction of the 260e6 + people in the US are likely to try to register domains of their own: the vast majority will be happy enough with a mailbox on someone else's domain (like, their ISP's, as they do now; we may have 30e6 users on the net, but the number of domains registered to American individuals + American companies is orders of magnitude smaller). There's no need to introduce some sort of communism of the net and talk about "anihilating" the value of names. Please, the thought turns my stomach. Nick