What pissed me off the most was how utterly unwilling ICANN was to do anything at all about it even when it was reported to them. A huge number of domains were falling apart, and they were just sitting there. Grr. :mad: Well, what's past is past; I just hope it doesn't happen again…

Loosened or lost? :sad:


I don't know who first said it, but it a very valid quote for oh so many things.. "We must remember History, lest history repeat itself!"

The problem with ICANN doing anything about anything is that they're not a government entity. They're actually a private corporation. Everything is done by contract law, which means lots of well paid lawyering on all sides. In order to get something done they need to go to court and file a lawsuit. That means they need to have all their ducks in a row, and have all their evidence in order. The system is not designed to handle a complete meltdown like what happened to Registerfly.

Right. Which is why I'd just as soon have it under governmental oversight. Then you get into problems about which government should have that oversight – a debate I don't care to get into at the moment. :wink:

I would imagine since domains are sold in every country that turning it over to governmental control would mean either the UN gets it - which I think is an extraordinarily BAD idea - or each country forms its own agencies to regulate how things of this nature are handled according to their laws. I'd be much more comfortable with US government regulation of US domains, and letting everyone else fend for themselves :)

I might regret saying this, but here goes… :smile: Due to the inherently international nature of the internet, what would it even mean for the US to only regulate US domains? There will inevitably be international disputes, and you'll need one way or another to resolve those. You would need either an international organization, or at the least, some kind of treaty, for dealing with disputes. I really don't want to advocate any one position over another, but I can identify positions that won't really work… :wink:

Then I guess you'd need treaties much like you have with copyright, trademark, and patent. Much of domain law these days is usually related to those anyhow. There's no perfect system, but as I said, I'd be extremely uncomfortable with a corrupt entity like the UN being in charge of it.

I've had this same debate before with someone else, and I stick by what I thought then, which is that each country's government should control their own domains, and existing country-neutral domains (.com/.net/.org/etc.) owners should get priority and 3 years to re-register, to allow for a transitional period (i.e. the owner of mudbytes.net would get 3 years to re-register as mudbytes.net.us before the new domain was open to public registration).

That's an interesting solution which more or less already exists. The two letter country code domains are already quite common. I also agree that existing .com/net/org/biz/whatever neutral domains should get first crack at getting new domains with their name in them, but it's a bit late for that since the codes have been around for awhile now.

Yes, but not all countries use the name.function.country scheme. The UK, for instance, uses .co.uk instead of 'com'; it uses .ac.uk instead of 'edu'; France tried to use a subdomaining scheme and some people use it but a lot of people just go under the .fr heading.

Besides, I'm not sure it's always appropriate to have to identify with a specific country. It wouldn't make a lot of sense for international organizations, be they corporations or non-profits. Some organizations might not care, but for instance take MudBytes: which country should it go under?

I think you're erroneously equating registration with affiliation. Just because mudbytes.net is registered in the U.S., doesn't mean it is (or would ever have to be) affiliated with the U.S.

I suppose this would open up another can of worms, in that there's hundreds of countries around the world, and it would get confusing pretty quickly if people could create mudbytes.net.us, mudbytes.net.uk, mudbytes.net.fr, etc.; however, I'm sure there's a workaround for that.

If it's a domain suffix, then the affiliation is implicit in that, isn't it?

Yeah, that's how it works now, but I was suggesting a transition to a new system in the future, in which it wouldn't be.

I'm not sure how that could be. From what I understand you are proposing the eventual elimination of country-neutral domains (which, incidentally, aren't all that country-neutral and really mean "US" in most cases – think .edu). In place of country-neutral domains, you propose that countries control their own top-level domains, e.g. France and the UK control .fr and .uk, respectively. (That is incidentally already the case.) But now all domains would be tied to a country.

The association from country domain suffix to country is natural and immediate: if you see something ending in .de, you will assume (with very high accuracy) that it is a primarily German organization, perhaps operating entirely in German. Now, sure, you could perhaps register in some other country if you felt like it without being affiliated to the country, if the country would in fact let you do so (e.g. '.to' today). But nonetheless, I believe it would be a distinct exception to find somebody with a country suffix that wasn't relevant to their affiliation. The main reason that comes to me off the top of my head to do such a thing would be price differences in domain registrations.

In any case, one of the big problems is not just deciding which country or organization controls the existing suffixes, but also who controls the list of top-level domains and even what a valid domain looks like. Who gets to decide if we add new TLDs like .name, .mobi, etc.? Who controls them? Why should one country determine the definitive list of TLDs?

The other problem I mentioned, what a valid domain looks like, is a very real one for countries that do not have roman alphabets (or even roman alphabets with accents in them…). Think of China, for instance, who have modified their DNS servers to accept Chinese characters in domain names. Essentially, there's an entire (Chinese) fragment of the Internet that is unavailable to anybody who isn't hooked up to this DNS system. Or what if, some day, the French, Italians, Germans, or any other European language with accents decide that they want to have accents in their domain names?

The problem of who controls a given domain suffix is really just one problem among very many. I'm taking a course on networking that started with a very brief history of the Internet. Apparently it wasn't necessarily designed to be so international and it kind of took off by accident, taking even its designers by surprise (so I am told). That is why it is so US-centric in many of its conventions, e.g. accepted characters and most TLDs. It is possible that we'll see more and more fragmenting of the Internet over time, much as China has done. The problem for the US is that typically that fragmenting is one-way; the people inside the fragment can see out (modulo questions of censoring) but if you're not part of it (i.e. if you're not running the right software) you won't be able to see in. If, say, Europe decided to create its own fragment, that could be quite problematic for the US.

Another reason to be wary of fragmentation is the ridiculous IP allocations. It's crazy that US universities have as many if not many more IP addresses than whole countries with higher populations. As those countries (say, China…) grow and want more IP addresses, they are probably not going to appreciate having to go through an allocation system in which they have no say. IPv6 will obviously help this by giving everybody many more addresses to choose from, thereby reducing the strain in allocating blocks, but the basic problem remains. Anyhow to return to fragmenting, if a country gets tired of waiting on somebody else for IP addresses, why not just create their own internal IP system and interface it to the rest of the world? They win, and the rest of the world loses, assuming they want to talk to that fragment's nodes.

Might as well stop here…

I'm not proposing the elimination of any domains. I'm merely suggesting a demotion for country-neutral ones. The only top level domains would be country-specific, and it would be solely up to each country as to what "mid-level" domains (.com, .net, .org, etc.) they allow, create, or remove.

I'm aware of the implied association under the current system. If I see a site that ends in '.jp', I automatically know it's a Japanese affiliated site; however, that could be a false assumption under the system I'm referring to, since, depending on Japanese domain registration regulations, a Canadian corporation with no ties to Japan otherwise could very well own that site. As far as international corporations and non-profit organizations go - they have to be centralized somewhere. Their headquarters is bound to be in a certain country, which carries with it as much (if not more) association to that country than their domain name would.

As far as what domains look like, that's a problem easily solved by the glorious invention of Unicode. Once it's fully standard (it's getting there… slowly), Chinese domains could very well be in Chinese characters if they desired, and DNS servers could properly point to them.

I fail to see how removing the top-level country-neutral domains is not eliminating domains. :wink:


Technically, yes, it could be a false assumption, but I'm willing to wager a fair bit that in the considerable majority of cases it will be quite accurate. Basically I really don't know what this is solving. You've given countries control of things that they already control. All you've done is removed some top-level domains. The rest is still controlled by ICANN; all you've really done is remove a bunch of domains…


I must not have stated the problem clearly enough… the technical issue is solved; the Chinese have already gone and done this. The problem is in getting ICANN and the rest of the Internet to adopt the Unicode domain names. I don't see that happening any time soon unless they get a big kick in the butt at some point for not having done it (e.g. more and more serious fracturing).

It's not eliminating domains. All of the country-neutral domains would still exist, albeit in a different role. You seem to be stuck in the "top level domains are everything" mode of thinking. When you register a new domain under a new system such as this, you would still have to choose .com/.org/.net/whatever. Actual "top level" domains will just represent your country of registration.



Again, it's not removing any domains at all. Also, countries do not currently control registration for anything but a handful of domains at the moment, and that only applies to a few countries to begin with. ICANN would no longer exist.



…which is why I said "once its fully standard (it's getting there… slowly)".

I wonder if we're disagreeing on what the definition of "to eliminate" is, or perhaps even what the meaning of is, is… It seems flabbergastingly obvious that, if you remove a whole swath of potential domains, then you have eliminated a whole bunch of potential domains. Sure, you move them into country TLDs, if of course the countries in question feel like having the same subdivision… I mean, what are you going to do, force all .co.UK domains to be renamed to .com.uk? If you want to keep the .com/etc. subdivision, would you force every single existing domain system to change? (Because that would be a really popular idea…)

If on the other hand you let countries do whatever they wanted under their TLD, you're basically in the current system except that you've lost a whole swath of TLDs and accompanying domains…


Oh really then, and just who would be in charge of everything else that ICANN does? (See e.g. their mission statement for a list of things they do)


What "it" are you talking about? It sounded like Unicode. Unicode is already quite standardized…

Speaking of… ICANN is asking for independence: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/72...

What exactly this 'independence' would mean isn't clear from the article, but it's an interesting note…

I agree that we seem to be disagreeing on the definition of "eliminate". To clarify, all '.com' domains that currently exist, would be given a 3 year grace period, in which they would have priority in the registration of the new country-specific domain with that same extension (i.e. mudbytes.net = mudbytes.net.us). Note that even though UK domains currently go by the unofficial standard of '.com' = '.co.uk', that doesn't mean that the UK couldn't add support for '.com'. It would be up to each country to independently decide which extensions they wanted to support. Really, the only potential snafu here, is in the case that someone with a currently registered '.com' in the UK is forced to re-register, but the UK opts not to support '.com.uk', in which case country-specific regulations as to the domain transfer would have to be created, and/or that person could opt to register the site in a different country, depending on their regulations (and obviously, these would not be guaranteed).

If you think about it, such a system would actually be creating more TLDs, as instead of only one 'mudbytes.net', as there currently is, there would exist the possibility of hundreds of 'mudbytes.net.XX'.



I'm not an authority on what exactly ICANN is responsible for, so I suppose I should have clarified that they would no longer be responsible for domain naming. Whether or not the organization "exists" beyond that isn't really within the scope of the discussion.



I was referring to Unicode, but not in the sense that you're thinking. Unicode is, by definition, a standard, so of course it's standardized. I was actually referring to support standardization through propagation within client and server software. For example, the C99 standard was "standardized" a long time ago, but up until recently, it was safe to say that because a lot of compilers didn't support it, it therefor wasn't standardized in that sense.