The thing I wonder now is that, if we have essentially unlimited scalability of the DNS both technically and administratively, should ISPs even _care_ about what names people choose to use?

People usually run out of brain cells before computers run out of memory. So it is in this case; recall the longish message I sent to the IETF list last year when .COM was getting a lot of air time, wherein I said:

Who can tell the difference between ACTIVELIFE.COM and ACTIVELIFESTYLE.COM? Why is there an INTERNETMCI.COM and an MCI.COM? Will I ever get a piece of mail from TAMPAX.COM? Are AFTERMIDNIGHT.COM and AFTERMIDNITE.COM the same company? What about AFTERMARKET.COM and AFTMKT.COM?

(I'll include the full text at the end for those who missed it the first time.)

Moreover, if time needs buying for you development wizard(s), how much do you need and what should we be telling people in the interim?

This battle has essentially been lost. .COM will not come back to usefulness no matter what we do. The YMBK proposal from the second NSF workshop will almost certainly be the way of the future, and we will see a lot more TLD's and hopefully no one of them will ever be as ugly as .COM is now. What ISP's can do is stop registering trash domains. Tell your users to put their WWW pages in a domain park of some kind, rather than allocating a TLD for every one-person "company" whose scope of operations is a local city or neighborhood. Anyway, here's the full text of my IETF article from last year: Path: vixie!ietf.nri.reston.va.us!ietf-request From: paul@vix.com (Paul A Vixie) Newsgroups: local.mail.net.ietf Subject: Re: draft-isoc-dns-role-00.txt Date: 25 Nov 1995 01:10:29 -0800 Organization: Vixie Enterprises Lines: 295 Sender: daemon@vix.com Distribution: local Message-ID: <9511250849.AA11703@wisdom.home.vix.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: gw.home.vix.com X-Received: by gw.home.vix.com id AA23854; Sat, 25 Nov 95 01:10:26 -0800 X-Received: from ietf.nri.reston.va.us by IETF.CNRI.Reston.VA.US id aa07057; 25 Nov 95 3:49 EST X-Received: from [132.151.1.1] by IETF.CNRI.Reston.VA.US id aa07001; 25 Nov 95 3:49 EST X-Received: from gw.home.vix.com by CNRI.Reston.VA.US id aa04311; 25 Nov 95 3:49 EST X-Received: by gw.home.vix.com id AA22525; Sat, 25 Nov 95 00:49:00 -0800 X-Btw: vix.com is also gw.home.vix.com and vixie.sf.ca.us X-Received: by wisdom.home.vix.com id AA11703; Sat, 25 Nov 1995 00:49:00 -0800 X-To: ietf@CNRI.Reston.VA.US X-In-Reply-To: Your message of "Fri, 24 Nov 1995 09:08:00 PST." <m0tJ1cJ-00050gC@roam.psg.com> I promised that I'd answer Randy's question before I dropped out of this discussion. A few more messages have come in that make a good backdrop, so I'll answer in a batch. [randy]

[vixie]

...

.COM was full a year ago.

Uh, could you point me to the meter?

Bill Manning says that the bigz mailing list answered this question and I hope that any interested parties will follow up the reference he gave. I've my own metrics and therefore my own thresholds, which I'll try to explain. Giving an entity or object a name is better than not giving it one, since the name is useful in quite a lot more circumstances than the object itself would be. Without being able to call Randy "Randy" I would be limited to attribute-based specifications ("That guy up in the Pacific Northwest who runs part of RAINnet and is the DNSIND chairman" is quite a mouthful, eh?) or pointing and grunting (which is impossible except when Randy and I are in the same place at the same time, like an IETF meeting or some such.) If we must assign names, how then shall we recognize a good one as being better than a bad or mediocre one? We could argue from aesthetics and say simply that Randy is a "prettier" name than Mxtlplk (though readers of classic Superman comics will probably come forward to debate me on this point); however, aesthetics are usually held and practiced subjectively, and I dispair of setting forth an objective system of aesthetics in this crowd. We could argue instead from utility but we would have to discard "Randy" since I often become confused as to which "Randy" I'm hearing about. With human objects, there are usually additional qualifiers that can be used when and only when ambiguity would otherwise result -- thus "Randy Bush" vs. "Randy Conrad." In DNS this "occasional qualification" isn't possible since the various members of the class whose name would make a good second level name don't want to share a domain and use subdomains. People want their own domain names "so they can be as good as everybody else who has their own domain." It's a problem in sociology and it's one we're not equipped to deal with, partly because we are mostly not sociologists here and partly because the die is cast and the culture set: we will not get folks to go along with longer domain names unless we leave them no option. (I call this "domain envy" and it's inversely proportional to the length of one's, um, thing.) A name is good if it has uniqueness in the context where it is used, and a name is better if it also conveys some information about the object being named. DNS names almost always map to real world objects and those real world objects almost always had their own names before the domain was created. The ability to encode the real world name into the domain name is seen as "good" because it allows the DNS name to convey some information about the object being named. But herein lies the rub: real world objects whose names are identical to other real world object names and who experience no collisions in the real world due to being in different industries or different locations or both, have to fight it out for the right to own the DNS name that maps the "collision name." Is PAULS.COM "Paul's Cafe" or is it "Paul's Auto Repair"? Surely we don't want PAULSAUTOREPAIR.COM but that's where things are headed -- which is doubly sad since there are probably 75 auto repair businesses named "Paul's Auto Repair" but since they are in different cities nobody has ever cared before. The relationship between real world names and DNS names is crucial to the understanding of why .COM is full. DNS names are not "proper nouns", except in cases like HOME.NET where the company name actually is a domain name. A DNS name is a second-level "handle" on a real world object's name. That is, a DNS name describes not a real world object, but rather the name of a real world object -- a name the real world object had before the DNS name was created. I'll come back to this in a minute. Right now let's all take a breather and take in some humour from Andrew: [asp]

[vixie]

...

continuing to find meaningful names in .COM is increasingly impossible.

No kidding.

Some real domains follow...

ASIANWORLD-MARTIALARTS.COM BANKOFTHEINTERNET.COM COPERNICUSMARKETING.COM DEFENSETECHNOLOGY.COM GOURMETCOLLECTION.COM GREATAMERICANMALL.COM HILTONINTERNATIONAL.COM INSURANCESERVICES.COM INTERACTIVEFUTURES.COM INTERNATIONALIMAGING.COM INTERNETPERSONALS.COM KNIGHTSBRIDGEADVISERS.COM MEDIALINKVIDEONEWS.COM NATIONALGEOGRAPHIC.COM RAINBOWBARANDGRILL.COM SPORTSILLUSTRATED.COM TRIBUNEENTERTAINMENT.COM WORLDWIDEREGISTRY.COM

The reason these names are so ugly is that there are too many trademark attorneys in the world and they have created demand for their own services by hiring out to companies who then sue each other over things which don't matter to anyone but the trademark attorneys themselves. It turns out that if you use your trademarked company or product name with incorrect punctuation then it weakens your hold on the name. Punctuation creates what the trademark weenies call "distinction" and you want to be very careful not to have any distinction among your uses of your own marks. Gag me. There oughta be a law. [perry]

[vixie]

...

many domain names have zero people using them.

Many, if not most, corporations are shells, too. There still aren't even one for every 20 U.S. inhabitants, and we are one of the most densely packed nests of pro forma incorporations in the world. My gut is that the experience is going to be identical -- that is, that most domain names will be dummies, but that most people won't have domains.

Let's use a smaller number since my point is as valid with 20,000,000 names as it is with 250,000,000. I think the 250,000,000 number is reasonable since we have so many companies registering tripe like BATMANFOREVER.COM or MOPAR.COM or whatever. But we've gotten sidetracked arguing about the total number and that wasn't my intention at all. When there are 20,000,000 or even 2,000,000 names in .COM, then statistically speaking none of them would have any "name value," a term I'll come back to.

You forget that people like us getting personal domains are ultra-eccentric hacker types who actually know how to run and use them. I also happen to have a bunch of corporate personae. In both respects I'm an oddity. Most people living in this country or worldwide aren't going to do that sort of thing because its a pain and they won't care, just as most people don't get vanity license plates.

My experience differs significantly. PIERMONT.COM (and PSG.COM and VIX.COM) all have some A RR's in them. Not so the average. Having a personal vanity domain with just an MX RR pointing at a service provider is now _far_ more common in my personal experience than technogeeks with a handful of hosts. (Last week I refused to do business with someone simply because they were polluting .COM with a vanity name that didn't need to be there -- and if anyone with a stronger stomach would like a consulting lead, ask me for it.)

...

many .COM domain names are not of incorporated entities, or even commercial entities. .COM is a cess pool and the sewage runneth over.

Again, I don't see it as a huge problem at the moment.

We may have to agree to disagree about this, but maybe not. You sent the above before Andrew sent his "ugly name" list, and it may be that the numbers below will help to change your mind. (I'm a little aghast, as it's hard to imagine anyone looking at .COM and thinking there's no problem, but this won't be the first time Perry and I will have seen things differently.) [bmanning]

[vixie]

...

.COM was full a year ago. And the 100,000 ugly names we have now are only a molecule in a bucket compared to the 250,000,000 names we'll need by 2005

Great! Someone willing to tell the rest of us the correct way to tell when a zone is "full". :-)

Yes. I hope that :-) doesn't indicate that your question was rhetorical, since I don't think it is at all.

I think that we can agree that from a technical perspective, its tough to "fill" a zone. After all, labels is just labels.

Right.

Its when we attach semantic meaning that things get dicey.

Doubly right. The trick to attaining "name goodness" in the form of "unique within the context where it is used" is designing your context properly. Having everything live in .COM (the other top levels are too small to be mathematically significant) is a sloppy context, and that's why we have so little uniqueness within that context. -------- Below "Name value" can work two ways. If you can often (more than half the time) deduce an object's name by knowing something about the object, you're winning. When the Internet was small this was easy. You took a company's name (or its initials if the name was really long) and added ".COM" to it and if you didn't win, it meant the company wasn't on the Internet at all. Thus "DEC.COM" or "APPLE.COM." Occasionally you'd get a false positive, like the poor sods who looked for Apple Records (UK) on the net some years back and got instead some computer company in Cupertino. But back in what I longingly think of as the good old days, false negatives and false positives made up an insignificant portion of the total results of "domain name guessing." These days the false results of guessing (positive and negative combined) are gaining on the other result categories (true negatives, true positives) and will soon be about even with them. This means names aren't as guessable as they used to be and soon won't be guessable at all. The other way "name value" can work is that if you can look at an object's name and deduce something about the object itself, you're winning. Again, things aren't as smooth as they used to be. Very few Internet folks have ever looked at APPLE.COM and thought of the record company in the UK -- but when most folks see EXAMINER.COM they think of the newspaper called "Examiner" in their own city, not the one called "Examiner" in San Francisco. And when I see "ASA.COM" I think of my computer hardware supplier (whose domain name is in fact ASACOMPUTERS.COM since ASA.COM was taken), not the American Sailing Association in Marina del Rey (who really ought to be in .ORG, anyway.) "Name value" in the New Internet (sort of like New Coke?) means camping onto a name that folks are likely to guess and hoping to get some business from those guesses. A "good name" in this scheme is one that users will associate with your product and which your competitors will wish they'd guessed first. 800-555-1212.COM comes to mind. Also 801-, 802-, etc all through 888-. Ick. I guess I don't want to talk about MICROS0FT.COM other than to mention it. Who can tell the difference between ACTIVELIFE.COM and ACTIVELIFESTYLE.COM? Why is there an INTERNETMCI.COM and an MCI.COM? Will I ever get a piece of mail from TAMPAX.COM? Are AFTERMIDNIGHT.COM and AFTERMIDNITE.COM the same company? What about AFTERMARKET.COM and AFTMKT.COM? .COM is being treated as "the stone tablets of the Internet" and it is being used (with suboptimal results) as a directory service. Whois++ is a directory service. God help us all, even whois and finger are directory services. And +1 xxx 555 1212 (or just "411" locally) on your telephone is a directory service. But DNS? DNS is _not_ a directory service, never was one, never will be one. The essence of my proposal (I've sent the URL around several times for those who want to see the PostScript(tm) file of my recent paper) is to _devalue_ these names, but to do it more quickly than evolution will otherwise do it, since I would like to move proactively toward a naming scheme ("name use context") that will not draw so many half baked marketroids and trademark attorneys to the conclusion that having a name under .COM is somehow the Internet equivilent of "official existence." -------- Numbers There are ~140,000 .COM names today. Laid end to end they take 2MB to store. The table below (produced with Perl on my lovely 64-bit 266MHz Alpha) shows the number of collisions (and the percentage of the total) for each prefix length in the set of domains under .COM. Chars #/Coll %/Coll ----- ------ ------ 1 140583 100.0% 2 139605 99.3% 3 127635 90.8% 4 93747 66.7% 5 64092 45.6% 6 41667 29.6% 7 24911 17.7% 8 13340 9.5% 9 6765 4.8% 10 3145 2.2% 11 1415 1.0% 12 660 0.5% 13 321 0.2% 14 154 0.1% 15 66 0.0% 16 30 0.0% 17 12 0.0% 18 3 0.0% 19 2 0.0% At 20 characters, there were no collisions. The percentages suffer from print truncation errors but they are substantially correct. I call .COM "full" because it takes eight (8) characters of typing before a user has narrowed her possibilities to under 10% of the total. If using a command interpreter (``shell'' to old timers) with electric filename completion, one would say that a directory with the above prefix distribution needed to be split into multiple subdirectories because it was pretty much useless the way it was. Randy asked "where's the meter" and I promised to try to answer him. It's a rule of thumb as biased by all of my earlier definitions and prose. If by typing the number of characters that the average user is comfortable "just rattling off" quickly and from memory, you can reach 90% of your destinations, a domain is not full. If by typing that many characters you can only reach 50% of your destinations, then the domain is quite full. Somewhere in between we have shades of gray like "it's pretty full but I think I can cram another one in there" and "this really hurts a lot but I'm going to eat one more donut anyway." -------- Endings .COM is full. We can argue about how full and what shade of gray. With 2,000,000 (or 20,000,000 or 250,000,000) names, it will be absolutely absurd. Neither wise men (anybody?) or fools (me?) would dare to venture in that direction. We can do PVM's MES but it will solve the registry's economic problems without doing any good at all against the real sociological problems that _lead_ to the registry's economic problems (and a lot of other problems as well.) There is no way to scale up another couple of O(mag)'s without pain. <URL:ftp://ftp.vix.com/pri/vixie/dns-badnames.psf.gz> is my position in full.