On Thu, 13 Jul 2006, Mark Jeftovic wrote:
Larry Smith wrote:
In school if you spell the word tree as tre - hopefully your teacher corrects this.
Yes, hopefully a correction is made in a safe manner. As opposed to the teacher smothering your face with a pornographic magazine or shoving a lit firecracker up your ass.
Cause when you spell a word incorrectly on the internet, that's what frequently occurs.
That's a tad over dramatic isn't it? Typosquatting is a problem, sure, some of it is annoying, sure. Never has my derrier exploded though from it...
I don't really think it is entirely appropriate that a child who is looking for information on the White House could land somewhere obscene through entering a web address that appears obvious and logical. What I could see happening, down the road, if this service is successful, would be the creation of a nameserver service company that would be targetted at creating a safer (note: not _safe_, merely safe_r_) Internet where requests for certain names could be redirected to the search engine instead. Yes, there are lots of political, legal, ethical, and moral questions associated with that. I am not advocating it, I am just saying I could see the case for it happening.
Perhaps part of the 'safe manner' is actually teaching people that using their favorite search engine to locate 'fobar tool enterprises' is often more productive than 'www.fobartools.com' placement in the 'location bar' is?
Boy, at that point, I think you've got the basis of an argument against additional top level domains. 2LD domain names have some value: I can see the value in "ibm.com" and "apple.com", due to the geographic scope of those companies and their overall size. However, I do not see "martyspizza.com" as the ideal candidate for a .com: why should that resolve to a Santa Barbara pizzeria and not our local one? The value of a 2LD domain name is obviousness, and when the obviousness is no longer present or not valid to begin with, the search engine methodology is more likely to be valid and useful than simply choosing to name your business "martyspizzaofbrookfield.com" or "martyspizza.biz". In Marty's case, they don't even have a domain name, but you can find their web page easily enough via search engines. Of course, this leaves some questions, such as what happens for e-mail purposes (3LD? works) or when the business model of the search engines change, and search engines start charging for listings, etc. But in general, I agree that search engines may be safer. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net "We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.