Re: US Domain -- County Delegations
Someone asked me privately...
One thing to keep in mind is that when thinking about appropriate domain names for a big business, say AT&T, it makes very little sense to force someone to connect to somemachine.att.nj.us, especially when that machine could be anywhere in the US or even outside the country. For a company that large, it would be better to hide geographic info behind a .com, than to force the geographic location of the company's US headquarters to influence the domain names of the rest of the company. I'm sure the folks at IBM would feel the same way. So would all the companies that are incorporated in Delaware for tax reasons, but have their HQs in other states.
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.
When it comes down to it, I'm agreeing with you, but for a slightly different reason. It seems a little impractical for the internet to be the great equalizer between Joe's Garage and Ford Motor Company, especially when there may be twenty different Joe's Garages but there is only one FMC.
i do not believe any more that a company's (or organization's or person's) domain name ought to map differently based on their geographic domain. if we allow that binding, every midsized company who wants to look like a big one will find some way to bend the rules. my current thinking is to match costs and values. folks seem to value having their name directly under .COM, and lo and behold it costs the 'net more to have those names there than if they were all delegated to smaller registries. ergo, the folks who want to live in .COM should probably pay more -- a lot more -- than the folks who don't. extending this model upward, it should be poss- ible to register directly in the root, for US$1M a year or so. the idea here is, let the company categorize themselves. no rules to bend. but: if they want to live in a place that's expensive for the 'net to maintain, they should pay for the overhead they are generating. as for all those deleware corporations, i'd expect each company to choose the local registry that makes the most sense -- to them, not to me or to the NIC or the IANA. if they are incorporated in deleware but have their main offices in virginia and want to register their domain under alaska, that's noone's business but their own. the alaskan registry would be within its rights to charge more for out of state registrations.
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.
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.
we bit twiddlers have set up the current system in which for small values of N, it is possible to use the naming service as a location service. as others have pointed out, it used to be a fair bet that WWW.mumble.COM was Mumble's WWW page -- but that's not true for a lot of domains (EXAMINER.COM among them) and for increasing values of N it won't be true, statistically speaking, at all. i'm not concerned (here, anyway) about the legal aspects of name collision. what i'm worried about is the "all the good names are taken" problem as well as the "which EXAMINER do you mean?" problem. i don't intend to solve the directory services problem off the cuff -- X.500 tried that and came up with something Truly Dismal. whois++ is an attempt and i for one am satisfied to wait and see where that goes. the new invariant i want to introduce is that "domain names don't have to be intuitive anymore" -- this will put the pressure on the directory services problem, where it belongs.
But there are two orthoganal problems here, and they should be treated separately. I know you understand this, but that doesn't seem to be the consensus of the group. (a) root DNS overloading (.com is big) (b) all the good names are taken As long as we can get people to understand there are two different problems here, we have a hope in hell of solving one or both. If people continue to lump them together, we are doomed.
But there are two orthoganal problems here, and they should be treated separately. I know you understand this, but that doesn't seem to be the consensus of the group. (a) root DNS overloading (.com is big) (b) all the good names are taken
As long as we can get people to understand there are two different problems here, we have a hope in hell of solving one or both. If people continue to lump them together, we are doomed.
And I thought that most people understood that there were two problems. I think there have been a number of interesting proposals to deal with the first. I tend to agree that the second is not, per se. a technical problem. --bill
My thinking has evolved away from geographically based names... yes I know that trademarks, DBAs and so forth are registered by political jurisdiction which currently means geography, but the Internet is erasing geography, and I think that we would be living in the past if we relied too much on geography in naming. It might make sense for "joes-garage" to be a geographically-qualified domain since the market for automobile repair is likely to be within a few miles of the business, but my little one-man consulting corporation is located in Salt Lake City with it's biggest customer in St. Louis. For a business with essentially no geographic barriers, such as mine, it doesn't make much sense to include geography in the name regardless of where the corporation is registered. Just my $0.02 worth... -- Walt
no geographic barriers, such as mine, it doesn't make much sense to include geography in the name regardless of where the corporation is registered.
the goal of the domain name is not to be an intuitive locator of your internet objects. that's the job of a directory service (like whois or whois++ or x.500.) your domain names are meant to uniquely identify you in a semi-permanent way -- as long as they are unique and are more permanent than your IP address, they are doing their job. within that context, anything that deepens the tree will give us more opportunities for uniqueness. if someone else who wants to do business on the internet has named their company "xmission" (let's say they are in the auto parts business, specializing in transmissions, but they do a lot of mail order business and thus like you, have no obvious geographic limitations), they should be able to register a domain name that looks a little like yours (has "xmission." near the front of it.) if we deepen the tree by inserting industry codes or geography names, you can both have "xmission." in your name. onlookers will have trouble telling the differ- ence, and may find the wrong "xmission." but at least they will have the opportunity to find both.
participants (4)
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bmanning＠ISI.EDU -
Paul A Vixie -
Paul Traina -
Walter O. Haas