
A solution to domain names - ivankirigin
http://tipjoys2cents.blogspot.com/2008/04/solution-to-domain-names.html
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pc
If I understand this right, the article proposes IP addresses as a replacement
for domain names in URLs. This would be a bad idea:

\- They'd break if you wanted to load-balance with something like round-robin
DNS.

\- They'd be a disaster whenever you changed hosts.

\- They make it impossible to tell (without clicking) where a link points to.

\- They're broken with respect to IPv6 (and any future protocols). By
specifying an IPv4 address, you're intermixing a transport-related detail with
the semantics of the page.

~~~
ivankirigin
The point is that the connection between a domain name and what a site is
about is broken.

All your problems can be solved with a Domain Numbering System I mention in
the comments. Map a nondescript number or another IP to your real IP. This
way, people don't even expect a connection to what you do. They'll just find
you through a search engine anyway.

~~~
pc
Basically, numeric-only domains?

~~~
ivankirigin
Yes. But that isn't to say people will be giving out strings of numbers as
identifiers. The point is that those identifiers are pretty useless today, so
may as well stop using them for human consumption.

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tlrobinson
One huge issue with this is phishing. DNS certainly isn't bulletproof, but
combined with SSL it's pretty secure.

If I'm at <https://www.bofa.com> and my browser doesn't warn me, I can be
pretty damn sure I'm actually at Bank of America's website.

If I were taken to <https://171.159.65.173> by Google I would really have no
idea whether or not it was BofA's site.

~~~
a-priori
This is a UI issue that can be solved with good search.

When loading a page, the browser can do a "reverse lookup" on the URL through
a search engine and display common terms associated with it instead of (or in
addition to) the URL. If you're expecting Bank of America, and it shows "sex,
porn, xxx" in your status bar, you may not want to click it.

~~~
tlrobinson
The problem isn't porn sites masquerading as banks, it's fake banks
masquerading as banks.

A reverse lookup through a search engine is more akin to a blacklist of bad
sites, whereas DNS and SSL is essentially a whitelist of good sites. The
problem with blacklists is it's inevitable that bad sites will slip through
the cracks.

DNS solves the UI problem: the inability of humans to easily remember IP
addresses.

As I mentioned in another comment, DNS isn't the problem, it's the allocation
of domain names. If squatters and spammers couldn't register domains so easily
and cheaply it wouldn't be a problem.

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pg
This has already been happening. I remember seeing a story on News.YC about
ads in Japan (I think) that told you what to search for instead of what site
to visit. And spammers have been doing it for a couple years.

~~~
mhartl
37signals is a case in point. They're currently the #1 Google hit for the
words "basecamp", "backpack", "highrise", and "campfire", despite not owning a
single one of those domains.

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thaumaturgy
I don't think that'll work at all. Instead of competing for presence in domain
names, squatters will simply compete for presence in keywords and phrases.
Getting a user to a specific website could become kinda challenging.

As one example, in my soon-to-end part-time job, I had to ask a user almost
every day to go to "www.whatismyip.com". Occasionally they would type this
into their search bar instead of their URL bar, and would magically end up at
something that wasn't helpful at all. (When I try it, it works, but who knows
what they're typing.)

This would just move the problem of competition for recognition to a new area.

~~~
breily
Spammers already do compete for keywords and phrases - its called SEO.

I sort of do what the post suggests: if I want to go to wikipedia, I just type
'wikipedia'. Works for a lot of sites.

~~~
thaumaturgy
Hmm. So, it might work for specific cases, just not generically.

Maybe it's time for the search engines to support a "certainty" statistic, an
algorithm which calculates the probability that the top result is what the
user is looking for, based on a combination of the user's search request and
the linking for the top result.

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brk
Interesting idea, but way broken.

The problem with an IP address based solution is that it wouldn't scale well
for web farms, load balancers/fail-over equipment, etc.

Also end-users/web businesses can't really "own" an IP like they do a domain
name, only ISP's can technically be assigned IP's. IPs aren't portable like
domain names, so you'd be stuck with 1 ISP once you built up your site.

~~~
smhinsey
This doesn't imply anything about load balancers not working. Load balancers
work by creating what are called VIPs - virtual IPs, which aggregate the IP
addresses of the balanced services. In a lot of cases, the individual services
need not even be routable from the public internet as long as they are
reachable from the load balancer's internal interface.

(edit: fixed a typo)

~~~
brk
Not all load balancing schemes use the VIP concept.

In either case, you are still tied heavily to the existence of a single IP,
which greatly limits portability.

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mixmax
And exactly how are you supposed to tell your customers the name of your site?
It might not be there next month if someone out-SEO's you.

And no "check my great site over at 239.263.137.852" isn't quite catchy
enough.

~~~
ivankirigin
Check out mydomainsucksbecausetheyrealltak.en

It's a hot new service.

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tlrobinson
The problem isn't with the domain name system itself, it's with the allocation
of domain names.

Recently a huge problem was so-called "domain name tasting", which allowed
squatters to register hundreds of thousands of domain names, monitor the
traffic (typically from typos, etc) for a week, then return the duds for a
refund. Fortunately ICANN is putting an end to that.

I think the best solution would be to raise the barrier to registering domain
names. Sure, it's nice that it's convenient and cheap to register domain
names, but that really doesn't matter if all the good ones are taken by
squatters, now does it?

If you had to either pay a larger fee (something on the order of a trademark
registration fee -- ~$300?) or demonstrate you had a legitimate use for a
domain, I think the squatters would back off. Of course, ICANN and the
registrars don't have any incentive to limit the number of domains registered.

Unfortunately I don't think there's a good way to reverse the current
situation, short of creating new top-level domains and enforcing stricter
guidelines. Perhaps certain TLDs could be designated for "premium" or
"verified" domain names (basically like .edu) while .com, etc remain free-for-
all.

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scooter53080
I would like a way to blacklist domains that are being squatted. I’ve thought
it might work to have a Firefox plugin to report and block these sites. If you
could get a large enough community using it, the list would grow pretty
quickly. You could maybe even have a script that would gray out any of those
sites on Google. Would this be enough of a disincentive to squat?...if the
domain was effectively "removed" from the Internet for those using the tool.
If a domain was actually bought and contained real content, it could be
removed from the blacklist...but the process to do so would have to be
difficult enough to not negate the disincentive of the blacklist. Any other
ideas on how to harm the value of a squatted domain enough to make squatting
not worth while? (When I say squatting I also mean domains that are just
parked and for sale. Technically I don’t think that is squatting, but it seems
like that is being lumped in the conversation here...could be misunderstanding
that though.)

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dhbradshaw
You might have a web browser that allows the user to assign pseudonyms to
websites. A user could have the word "news" mapped to "news.ycombinator.com"
for his browser. If such a browser collected pseudonyms from enough people,
then the pseudonyms applied to each site could start to have importance and
make it easy to give an intelligent guess on what the user might want. I guess
the idea is to apply del.icio.us type information to the url bar.

~~~
scooter53080
That is an interesting idea. It sounds kind of like a user-driven pagerank
concept. Since the mappings would be different for everyone (most of the
population would not map 'news' to 'news.ycombinator.com') could even
introduce a recommendation system where your unmapped pseudonyms came from
users whose pseudonym mappings were most like yours.

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ivankirigin
I should mention that I thought of this in 10 minutes, and don't feel too
strongly about my proposed solution. I do feel strongly that the current
system is broken and in need of institutional change.

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TrevorJ
You still need absolute domains as one form of brand-awareness.

~~~
ivankirigin
I think lots of people have this issue, and it's backwards.

Domains are used as identifiers, so people associate them with brands.

They are horrible identifiers. It needs to stop. Your domain is not your
brand.

I'm incredibly lucky to have tipjoy.com. It's such an excellent and short
name, on a .com. I'm amazed it was available. That this is the exception is an
indication of the problem.

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mrtron
AOL keywords were just this - and didn't work. And AOL is still using them.
You probably even will run into patent problems against them.

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jorgeortiz85
What about e-mail?

