In message <199507272214.AA07015@mail.crl.com>, George Herbert writes:
One thing to keep in mind is that not all of .com is broken; major country and world wide companies should sensibly have a short address, we just need an adaptive mechanism to allow more local companies to come along without losing all usability within the existing .com structure...
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.
We don't have to retrofit the new mechanism to everyone for consistency's sake.
george william herbert gherbert@crl.com KD6WUQ Unix / Internet Consultant http://www.crl.com/~gherbert
Is ibm.nyse.com, dec.nyse, mci.nasdaq.com a problem? This takes the arbitrary decision out of accepting or denying someone access to the .com hierarchy and enforces and already strict naming. US citizens would have to remember country codes for Germany to get Seimens, Holland to get Phillips, etc. Not a terrible side effect. Some US citizens may even come to startling revelations like that Denmark, Hollans, Norway, and Sweeden are separate countries. :-) For US companies everyone would need to know the exchange and trading symbol for US companies or what state the company was in if privately held. For most big US corporations nyse.com is a good bet, although some of the trading symbols are less cute than what we see in .com. There are too many proposals already, but having a non-arbitrary means of denying access to a small set of top levels (nyse.com, amex.com, nasdac.com) is a handy feature. Curtis