

Why not discard top level domains (TLD)? - pedrokost
http://blog.pedro.si/why-not-forget-about-top-level-domains-tld

======
AgentConundrum
There's a lot wrong here.

First, there's no such thing as an "abstract TLD". The closest analog would be
_generic_ TLDs. The author actually manages to get this completely backwards
since the gTLDs are .com, .net, .org and their brethren. The TLDs the author
calls "abstract" are all actually country-code TLDs (ccTLDs), and they all
have a proper meaning. .ly is Libya, .st is São Tomé and Príncipe, and .ng is
Nigeria.

Just because these governments don't traditionally care too much about who
uses them doesn't mean they don't have a meaning. They aren't abstract.

 _The address bar in Firefox will actually redirect you to google.com if you
type just google, however what I am proposing is to actually get rid of the
TLD for some websites._

This is pure fiction. What actually happens is if Firefox can't resolve the
address, it assumes it's a search term and passes the term into a preset URL
(defined by the keyword.URL setting).

Back before version 3.0 (I think; don't quote me on that), this preset passed
the "I'm Feeling Lucky" flag to the Google search URL. As a result, if you
typed "Google" into the address bar, with no TLD, Firefox would effectively
search Google for the term "Google" and the "I'm feeling lucky" feature would
redirect you to the first result, which is obviously Google.com.

Since 3.0, the preset doesn't have the "I'm feeling lucky" parameter, so if
you type "google" into the address bar, you'll actually get a page of google
results for the term "google". I, and I'm sure many others, have since tweaked
the keyword.URL setting to again use the lucky flag, but on a vanilla install,
the author is just plain wrong in his assumption.

One final nitpick:

* After this recent surge of custom TLDs, I am beginning to think, that they are not a limitation, but that we can change them, almost freely, presumed we have the knowledge to do it (Please, correct me if I am wrong, and forgive my ignorance).*

Perhaps English isn't the authors first language, and if that's true then I
apologize, but I simply was unable to parse that paragraph. Commas just don't
work that way.

~~~
BerislavLopac
It isn't, he's from Slovenia. :)

~~~
pan69
And he didn't know that the TLD for his own country is .si and he never heard
anything about any of his European neighboring counties TLD's? Some people
simply should not blog...

------
mopoke
Abstract TLDs? They're all country codes (e.g. .ly = Libya, .st = Sao Tome).
TLDs aren't just there to categorise US domain names - they're the namespaces
of individual countries.

~~~
wlievens
Particularly ironic since he uses a .si domain!

------
lysium
I have the impression the author does not understand a lot about TLD, so his
proposal isn't well thought through either.

First, TLD cannot be changed freely but are fixed, mostly assigned to
countries.

Second, we now _do_ have TLDs and I don't see a way how we could get rid of
them. 'kinder.com' may be a US website promoting friendly neighborhoods, but
'kinder.de' may be a German website about children. What should 'kinder' be?

The only change I would encourage but which I don't see happening is having
the TLD at the front: <http://com.ycombinator.news> just makes more sense (at
least to me).

~~~
timrobinson
The predecessor to the Internet in the UK in the 1980s - JANET - worked like
this:

 _For example, the University of Cambridge had the NRS name UK.AC.CAM, whereas
its DNS domain is cam.ac.uk. All NRS names had both a standard (long) and
abbreviated (up to 18 characters) form. For example, UK.AC.CAMBRIDGE was the
less widely used standard equivalent of the abbreviated name UK.AC.CAM._

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JANET_NRS>

------
pixdamix

        I've noticed an increase in the use of customized and
        abstract top level domain (TLD) names, such as bit.ly, 
        bu.mp,   babyli.st, etc. Even Microsoft recently 
        registered bi.ng
    

This is especially funny when you notice that his TLD is .si, pedro.si

------
yuvadam
Should we get rid of namespaces and packages, while we're at it?

------
ewan
I'm interested to understand why you would propose removing the ".com" before
first proposing the removal of "www."? From my perspective the "more
superfluous of the two" is the "www." in this example.

~~~
pedrokost
If you haven't noticed, many website urls don't include the www.

~~~
ewan
I agree with you. My point was that in [http://blog.pedro.si/why-not-forget-
about-top-level-domains-...](http://blog.pedro.si/why-not-forget-about-top-
level-domains-tld) the "www" is present in the example, yet the focus is on
the "com". I am curious to understand the though process that directed focus
to eliminating "com" before "www"

~~~
pedrokost
It's simply because with most urls, when you type them without www they will
work and send you to the page you are looking for, even if the url includes
www. Therefore www presents no additional typing for the user. However the TLD
does.

~~~
ewan
The observation you make depends on the DNS configuration for any particular
domain, but ok, lets not worry further about that.

Assuming that we wish to start again with a flat name space, I'd be interested
to understand:

What rules would be put in place to govern the names that would be allowed? Do
you believe you should still be entitled to the domain “pedro”? Or are you
willing to accept Pedro-Kostelelec-DateOfBirth ? Or some other (likely more
complex combination) that is a unique distinguish-er for you globally?

Do you believe there should only be one company globally with any given name?
Or is it acceptable to have a “BurgerKing” company in one country that
operates restaurants, and another “BurgerKing” in the same / different country
that makes BBQ's? How do you allow for those to coexist, noting the rules we
already decided on in the previous question?

Personally I don't believe having a flat or hierarchical domain name space
makes any difference to the underlying challenge: users need to enter the
exact domain name of the business they wish to visit, if they fail to do this
the result may not be what they expect. The fact that so many people choose to
type some arbitrary text into a search engine and visit what ever site is
returned, is fundamentally an error of understanding that should be corrected.
I don't believe working around this misunderstanding by modifying the name
space used serves any useful purpose in the long run.

------
ehutch79
no.

~~~
ehutch79
I kind of get the feeling this proposal is as well thought out as when people
wanted to get rid of hierarchical file systems in the early 00s.

The top level domains provide some organization behind domains. it also lends
some authority to the system as a whole. would it even be posible to have
dnssec without a tld to be signed? how would you know who to ask for
information about the domain at all?

It'd be like telling all the national registrars they didn't matter anymore.
especially if there's a new nation and they can't have a domain because
squatters have taken over all two letter domains.

I'm sure there are a lot of other reasons why this is a bad idea, but i'm not
versed enough in dns to come up with more specifics.

I feel like a jerk being this negative. but please don't start throwing out
ideas for major changes in such vital infrastructure without a solid
background working with it. you could get people started on some crusade that
does more irreparable damage than good

~~~
VMG
Say you have a company FOO and you register foo.com. Nothing stops people in
other people from registering foo.de, foo.fr, foo.tv, foo.biz, foo.info and so
on, so you have to control all of these domains to protect you from domain
squatters.

My proposal is to to get rid of every TLD except for .com (or something
shorter) for all "normal" sites with little regulation and keep .mil, .gov,
.edu and national TLDs under governmental authority.

~~~
bad_user

          Nothing stops people in other people from registering foo.de, foo.fr ...
    

And that's a bad thing because?

~~~
VMG
For example, it makes the internet less safe - people remember just the
company name foo, foo.x is the real site, somebody enters foo.y and lands on a
scam site

~~~
ehutch79
and this is a problem why? i can see taking issue with allowing unicode tlds.
where some russian characters are almost identical to a latin based char-set
for instance, but if you can't tell the difference between bankofamerica.com
and bankofamerica.cn, you probably also fall for a lot of other scams offline
too.

~~~
VMG
What about multinational companies like paypal?

Would you recommend a non-internet-savvy user from china to rather go to
paypal.cn or to paypal.com/cn ?

What would a non-savvy user normally do?

In this case paypal.cn redirects to paypal.com/cn, but would you have known?

Another example: Python.com redirected to a hardcore porn site for years. Not
that there is anything wrong with that, but I think both sites and their
respective audiences would have been better off if there wasn't .com, .net and
.org

~~~
bad_user

          Python.com redirected to a hardcore porn site for years
    

It could have redirected to an online store selling snake aquariums.

And which would have been more "legit" in the eyes of the public?

The homepage of an obscure tool related to software developers, or something
actually related to pythons?

~~~
VMG
I think there isn't going to be a system where the domain name points to the
site that is more "legit" or "relevant", that is the job of search engines.
Laypersons already use google instead of dns and enter "facebook" or
"facebook.com" because they 1) don't have to remember the TLD and 2) get to
facebook even when they made a typo.

So a domain name should probably still belong to whomever registered it first.
I'm not a DNS wizard but using whois I figure python.com was registered one
year before python.org, which would have become python-lang.com or something
more descriptive if there weren't these other suffixes.

~~~
bad_user
Except _python.org_ is so much better than _python-lang.com_ that isn't even
funny.

Case in point ... I searched for "ruby language" dozens of times before
learning "ruby-lang.org". And the ".org" suffix was the easy part because my
brain associates those domains with non-profit stuff.

I also find TLDs to be useful for figuring out the target of a website. E.g.
".co.uk" / ".de" / ".eu" are usually companies with headquarters in the
European Union.

------
leon_
Erm, is this a troll, a linkbait or simply ignorance? Those "abstract" TLDs
belong to real countries. (Well except your .42 - which is a custom TLD that's
not accessible through the "official" DNS system.)

