
Tim Berners-Lee: we don't need arbitrary new TLDs - leejw00t354
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-04/18/tim-berners-lee-tlds
======
rlpb
Making the root domain a free-for-all effectively promotes what .com was to
the global root. We can only do this once, and then the root namespace is gone
forever.

We will never again be able to create new top level domains that have special
restricted meanings, such as .arpa, .gov and the concept of country TLDs[1].
Any sensible name that we want to use will probably already be taken. Even it
is not taken, a new special purpose name would never be able to differentiate
from squatters using the same level of the namespace.

Not only that, but the special casing of existing TLDs such as .gov could get
diluted to the point that the majority will not recognise them as official any
more.

There is a place for free-for-all on domain name registrations, and it is
.com.

[1] I presume that they will reserve two letter registrations for the specific
case of new countries coming into existence, but my point is about the concept
of new uses, rather than this specific case.

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anamax
If only we had gone with the other order for domain names, that is
com.disney.www instead of www.disney.com.

Then browser TLD defaulting would have handled most cases and we could have
had additional conventions (such as *.store). (The "www." subdomain is
basically useless.)

~~~
underwater
In that case there is still a TLD. It's probably worse because the
differentiating part of the domain is buried halfway into the domain name.
Imagine having domains like com.disney and com.donald. They look the same.

The web has no hierarchy so it doesn't make sense for domain names to have
one. It would have been nicer to ditch the TLDs, use a sane protocol name and
have implicit slashes. Like web:disney/some-path.

~~~
anamax
> The web has no hierarchy so it doesn't make sense for domain names to have
> one.

Actually, the "web" does have lots of hierarchy.

For example, Disney has hierarchy that the current scheme makes it inconveient
to express. That's why we have disneystore.com, disneycruise.com, etc. instead
of com.disney.store, com,disney.cruise, etc.

~~~
DanBC
See Berners Lee's regrets:

(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:BCP5023/Sandbox#History>)

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setrofim_
The US are claiming legal dominion* over all domains under a large number of
TLD's (.com, .org, etc.). New TLD's may help mitigate that.

*[http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/feds-seize-foreign-...](http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/feds-seize-foreign-sites/)

"If you just add one character to the length of the domain name you have 26
times as many names you can choose from. There's no shortage."

True, but TLD's like .pepsi and .HTC are a lot easier to remember than random
combinations of letter.

~~~
fredsted
pepsi@pepsi.com seems better than pepsi@pepsi.pepsi in my opinion.

~~~
DanWaterworth
there's no need for pepsi.pepsi as the domain, it could be pepsi@pepsi

~~~
davidu
There's a ton of legacy code and email software that will make that not work.

At best, it would be pepsi@pepsi. (note trailing dot).

My buddy used to be root@ws. but only a few MUAs and MTAs could handle
delivering mail there, and always with the trailing dot.

~~~
ianburrell
You have to put the dot at the end to make it a fully-qualified name otherwise
the resolver will think it is a hostname and add the local domain.

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zalew
I'm not a fan too, but there's one huge advantage of extending the TLD space -
we'll get out of the mindset of mainstream audience that only .com/net/org is
a 'serious' domain and maybe there will be no more ridiculous bids like
color.com in the future.

~~~
davidu
Why do you think that will be the case?

When ICANN introduced .cat, .aero, .museum, .coop, and others many years ago,
adoption has since approached zero.

~~~
CrLf
There's something to be said about ".com" addresses...

When you place "pepsi.com" in a can , people know it's a web address. Now, if
pepsi has its own TLD, how should they refer to their web site? Just "pepsi"?
"www.pepsi"? "web: pepsi"?

I suspect they will reserve their TLD, and then continue to use "pepsi.com" as
before, thus rendering these new TLDs useless at best, and noise at worst.

~~~
zalew
they didn't have problems with "go to our facebook page" so it shouldn't be a
problem to promote "win a ticket to justin timberlake concert - go to our
website - justin dot pepsi"

~~~
taytus
I agree. I can't believe how companies promotes facebook.com/brand instead of
brand.com. It's perfectly fine to have a facebook brand page, but you should
promote yours first!

~~~
sopooneo
Why? If you are sure you need a facebook presence, and not sure about your own
site helping the brand, then you just push the facebook one. It's simpler. No
confusion. One place to go to find out about the product.

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runn1ng
do we need TLD at _all_?

It is not my idea, but really, should't we abolish the TLD in general? Instead
of <http://google.com>, <http://google.de>, <http://google.tv> .... we would
get just <http://google> .

The reason why we have geographical TLD is just political anyway.

~~~
breck
Good question.

I don't think we do. I think 1 global namespace would be enough.

Say we ditched TLD's and limited domain names to 10 alphanumeric characters.
That would still be enough domains to give 450,000 to every person on the
planet.

That's with just alphanumeric characters capped at a length of 10. Allow
unicode and remove the cap and we would have plenty of domains to go around.

All in 1 namespace.

Edit: yes I understand that the vast majority of those domains would be
nonsensical, however even eliminating 99.99999% of them would still leave
enough meaningful domains to go around the world many times over.

~~~
mjwalshe
Yes you coudl just use somthing like a phone number to access websites.

I dont think you have thought this through who would rember that the local
doctors surgery is XDFE123456!

~~~
mahmud
that particular string is very memorable ;-)

~~~
cema
Every particular string may be made memorable, but you'd have to memorize it.
Instead of it being natural, as in: a natural extension of how people think
about things.

~~~
mjwalshe
Back in the day I worked for BT and had memorable mail addresses such as
018222211 (Prestel) and 80:BTG174 (Dialcom/Telecom Gold) at least the Telecom
Gold ones where slightly memorable as the prefix BTG stood for British Telecom
Gold.

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downx3
What a load of rot. You're better to advertise something generic such as
'visit the <brand> website.' or 'find us online', rather than a barrage of non
memorable domain names and various social media urls. This is such an
elaborate con.

~~~
roc
Indeed. Why not just ditch user-facing TLDs in the next DNS overhaul
altogether?

People don't recognize the difference between pepsi.com and pepsi.org and
pepsi.com.hackers-taking-your-credit-card.tt

.org _is_ interesting meta-data, but why not transport that data as part of a
meta-data record and let browsers display it to users in a consistent way they
recognize and understand?

The point of DNS is to map a human-knowable name to a network or provider. We
not only don't need new TLDs, we frankly don't much need the ones we have.
dot-com/net/country codes/etc and even 'www' and 'mail' are of dubious benefit
to the average user these days.

Sure, it's useful for engineers. And we can keep that in a diagnostic window.
But for user-facing concerns, _simplifying_ DNS is the only conversation worth
having.

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kijin
What we don't need is a bunch of stupid TLDs that do nothing but make existing
domain owners feel like they need to buy more.

What we really need is a single new TLD that is _distributed_ so that it
cannot be controlled by any particular government or corporation. Something
like dot-bit.org, but with more momentum behind it.

~~~
excuse-me
So for example a simple .pepsi controlled by Pepsi rather than a whole bunch
of .drink / .food / .crappy_sugar_stuff that pepsi have to buy 'their' name
in?

And all controlled by a company whose income mostly comes from making up new
ones of these?

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cjmauthor
I think that adding new TLD's is inevitable as the internet continues to grow.
I really believe the crux of the issue here is actually a two part external
one, not the inevitable adding of TLD's. First, there is the problem of how
the law on TLD's which is ambiguous at best, will deal with cybersquatting and
other legal issues related to TLD's. Additionally, the larger and second part
of my argument is how the search engines will add this to their already
confused algorithms.

~~~
pestaa
How are search engine algorithms confused in your opinion, and why would new
TLD's complicate it further?

~~~
cjmauthor
Sorry for the delay, I am a newbie and just noticed the response. The answer
to both parts of your question is that search engines factor in TLD's in
ranking, for instance .com's are often the most relevant when it comes to
search, especially EMD's with an exact match, especially with Google. And day
by day the search algorithms are changing, and search rankings lately are all
over the place with algorithm updates. Many SEO leaders will support the
argument that spammers dominate and the algorithms are struggling to get it
right. Something I agree with. Now if you add another element to search
algorithms it seems very likely that search ranking will only become more
confused as data is added.

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jamespitts
I usually agree with TimBL on everything, but not this time.

New or newly popularized TLDs represent new business and cultural territory.
Without this new territory, the consumer "domain name memoryscape" inhibits
the adoption of new business and artistic ideas.

It might even be a good idea to make it as arbitrary as possible: every year,
choose one random two letter and several three-letter domains. Then let
creativity decide how to make use of .kfi and .iz.

~~~
mappu
Randomly generated TLDs are a brilliant idea. You unexpectedly make some set
of people very happy. The problems come in (a) determining where to host the
root zone and (b) if that name is later needed for something else (a new
country)

At the very least, you get 26 new url shortening companies, and a stack of
people with cool email addresses...

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gambler
Will there be .news, .games, .tech, etc. and if so, who will own them? And
will they will be available for registration by normal people? Will normal
people trust the owners enough to actually reguster subdonanes?

Those would be logical TLDs to have, but somehow I don't see ICANN encouraging
their creation.

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mistercow
>He said that dot org was interesting because it captures the fact that you
know that any website with that suffix is a non-profit.

This is simply false. There is no requirement whatsoever for .org domains and
there are countless examples of .org domains owned by for-profit companies.

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nerdfiles
I'm sorry to play this card, but this is the (Tower of
Babel)[[http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Bible_(King_James)/Genesis#11:...](http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Bible_\(King_James\)/Genesis#11:5)]
all over again.

Perhaps the analogy is unnecessary, or even harmful, to make. But typically I
have been taught, or rather I have learned by direct method, that some
Christians believe BIBLE is an abbreviation, albeit a cheeky one, for "Basic
Instructions Before Leaving Earth".

Often I wonder what the "imperative mood" of this document is supposed to be.
Obviously it is not descriptive qua scientific authorship. We shouldn't assume
this, surely, since a sophisticated method of science had not been yielded to
the Hebrews of that time, etc. But yet it struggles, and seemingly succeeds,
at preserving its descriptive weight, as vacuous as it is, in a time of reason
and science. So we claim that it is allegory and tale. And so what if is? What
is it describing? Like Aristotle, I believe, it describes a cycle of
civilization: humanity's response to itself.

Obviously "God" in the story of the Tower of Babel is nothing more than the
height of political force of Shinar. It responds to what they have built. So
here we see the "confounding" of their language; like in our time, a
confounding of the DNS system. What motivates this story? To what end does it
serve?

Surely the U.S. government seeks to bolster the economy through its will, by
"securing" our economic creativity. For "now nothing will be restrained from
them, which they have imagined to do."

As we can clearly see this is a response to Otto Neurath, the Logical
Positivists, the adoption of ideal, scientific and pragmatic languages, etc.
Neurath sought to liberate the proletariat of his time through a technological
mode of thought applied to language: complex symbols efficiently characterized
such that they might contain chains of propositions. The illiterate worker
thus might be informed through a proximity of symbol to nature. Today, we see
this with technology: big-face-hypermodern-informational-UIs-with-geriatric-
buttons, usability research, cognitive-neuroscience centered on atypical
neuropathologies, the mobile web, Helvetica, etc.

The U.S. will respond as it should, and I play this card because, in the end,
the only argument we face from politicians is an uncritical one: _what we've
been doing works, so it must work_. How much influence these governments have
on ICANN is unclear to me, but given the list of possible TLDs; e.g., pepsi,
etc., it isn't tough to reach for the assumption.

~~~
nerdfiles
Okay, so the points about Neurath are good stock.

