
It’s time to place the web in safer hands - Flemlord
http://www.kernelmag.com/comment/opinion/2012/01/its-time-to-place-the-web-in-safer-hands/
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jaylevitt
Why, oh why, does everyone assume that a plethora of TLDs implies that all
those TLDs must contain a complete copy of .com?

I claim the problem with the first big expansion - .pro, .info, etc - is that
it WASN'T wholesale. Yes, if half the Internet thinks that only .com exists,
and you add .biz, every corporation has to go register .biz as well.

If you add a thousand real, active, well-used TLDs, they don't, simply because
that is no longer how the Internet works. We already see the start of this
with ccTLDs; Apple (a pretty aggressive trademark defender) does not own
<http://www.apple.fm>, and nobody expects them to, and nobody is confused that
they don't. I'm sure my grandmother sometimes confused Elvis Costello with
Elvis Presley, but nobody thought the one was impersonating the other, because
people have last names, and that's how it works, and that's normal.

Five years ago, the average American non-technologist's mental model of the
Internet was "you type the company name and .com, except sometimes it's .net
and I don't know why". Now it's probably a little more nuanced - but only a
little, because .com is still Where Everything Is.

If you change that, you've changed that. Because you changed it. So it's not
the same.

~~~
Jach
I'm in complete agreement except this:

> Five years ago, the average American non-technologist's mental model of the
> Internet was "you type the company name and .com, except sometimes it's .net
> and I don't know why". Now it's probably a little more nuanced - but only a
> little, because .com is still Where Everything Is.

I would say it's even worse now. Many people's mental model is "I type it into
Google and they take me there" or "I share this clickable text around and
don't have to type anything".

~~~
DanBC
I think it's worse in US; over here (UK) people are more used to .co.uk or
.org or whatnot.

People don't really know what an URL is. During ealry days of WWW and
broadcasting presenters would read the whole thing; aitch tee tee pee colon
forward slash forward slash double you double you double you etc etc. There's
still not much awareness of what the bits of an url breakdown to; you still
see even the BBC make mistakes about domain names and TLDs.

And I'm always gently disappointed to see URLs delimited by () and not RFC
compliant <>.

~~~
lurker17
> And I'm always gently disappointed to see URLs delimited by () and not RFC
> compliant <>.

Choosing a bracket character that resembles a tag, for use in the case when
you are definitively trying NOT to create an HTML tag, seems a misguided
choice in the RFC.

------
nate_meurer
I don't see how this can be fixed. I have yet to see a single proposal for
internet governance that makes me feel "safer" than the current arrangement.

Whatever entity is given control of the global name or number spaces has
extraordinary power. Any such organization will be subject to corruption, both
from within (the subject of the article) and without (e.g. SOPA). Moving
governance up to higher levels of government (like the U.N.) isn't any better.
Do we really want France or the WIPO to have any input, much less China or
Russia? That's a rhetorical question for anyone concerned about censorship.

I think it inevitable that the Internet will continue to splinter along
national boundaries. Ultimately, the internet will consist of national
networks, separate and insular to varying degrees. The challenge for hackers
will be how to connect to the networks outside of our own respective
countries.

~~~
dantheman
I'd much rather have a fractured internet with pockets of freedom than a
globally censored and controlled internet.

------
woodrow
While I don't advocate for breaking up ICANN, this article "Fixing DNS -- how
to break up ICANN" (<http://www.templetons.com/brad/dns/fix.html>) presents a
decent approach to the TLD 'problem' that would not focus on useless branding
TLDs but instead encourage only TLDs that were going to add value to the
Internet. In short, the idea is to only allow non-generic TLDs to be
registered to force the TLD operator to differentiate their TLD from others,
rather than just being the first one to register '.bank'.

It doesn't offer a solution to the complaint in the article that organizations
will have to register 'apple', 'mcdonalds', or 'cocacola' in each new TLD, but
I'm less sympathetic to that concern.

~~~
regularfry
Who would get .nissan?

~~~
jpitz
Whoever pays first. Or, more, maybe.

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cypherpunks01
This is a nice complaint against ICANN, but I'm disappointed that it didn't
explain any potential solutions to the problem.

Whose hands should DNS oversight be in? What alternative solutions are out
there?

~~~
dreamdu5t
DNS should be distributed. Eventually as the shadow P2P DNS system grows in
response to the mainstream one being increasingly controlled and
factionalized, it will become the dominant DNS system.

~~~
gorloth
I've seen the idea of a distributed DNS system mentioned a few times but I
still don't see how it would work out. What happens in the case of multiple
people wanting the same domain? How are disputes between what foo.com points
to resolved? With no central authority who collects payment? and without
payment of some kind what it to stop someone from gathering up an inordinate
number of domains as there is no cost to do so.

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sukuriant
non-latin TLD's? I really hope no one takes omicron for a new .com ...

~~~
astrodust
There's a lot of Arabic and Chinese TLDs already.

~~~
sukuriant
I did not know this. I suppose that removes my argument.

------
metajack
First time I've ever been to this site, and immediately a giant pop up appears
over the content. I doubt I'll be back.

