I like this idea. (Note that VIXIE.SF.CA.US has moved many times since its creation, and though I've always been in the Bay Area I've not lived in San Francisco since 1988.)
This would seem to indicate that geographical domains are a bad idea and that domain names should be based on some characteristic that is less likely to change over time.
VIXIE.BIND.HACKER ?
Given the tremendous demand for short, "sexy" domain names, and that we only have 70,000 companies in .COM out of 25,000,000 mid-to-large-sized businesses in the United States, we are indeed fast approaching the point where domain names will no longer map meaningfully to the objects they identify. Something like .US which is currently for individuals will have an even tougher time growing to 200,000,000+ individuals. I've been kicking around VIXIE.FAM et al, on the assumption that the first use of a name under .FAM (family) would be responsible for setting up the tree for the rest of the folks using that name. On the other hand, SMITH.FAM would be a pretty huge undertaking and I'm leaning more toward something that service providers could do as a third-party. I don't know what that is yet. I wish that Padlipski had not retired - we collectively need his wisdom. "The map is not the territory." No hierarchy will map easily to all registrants -- the goal is to find something that will work, no matter how painful it is, and let the directory services people handle the mapping of real-world object names like countries and cities and families and companies, into funny-world objects like host names and URLs and so forth. Assigning hexadecimal strings at random would be better than what we have now -- in terms of scalability to the next order of magnitude in network size -- just so long as the strings were unique. Sort of the "social security number" concept only on a wider scale. That said, ".HACKER" would probably not be a useful top level domain given that the majority of DNS registrants will not be computer or network professionals for very much longer. So far I'm headed toward "Label.Hash.COM.US" where Label is something like SUN or IBM or VIX, Hash is a variable sized token generated from Label and intended to keep the single .COM.US domain from growing into a monster. "Label.Hash.COM.State.US" is also a possibility, that's up to the USDOMREG. Closing .COM and moving to this new structure is going to be a huge undertaking, of course.