[12375] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: About the creation of new 3-letter domain(s)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jon Postel)
Tue May 17 01:46:30 1994
Date: Mon, 16 May 1994 19:00:32 -0700
From: postel@isi.edu (Jon Postel)
To: nettech@crl.com, jlw@cs.columbia.edu
Cc: postel@isi.edu, PAUL@tdr.com, namedroppers@rs.internic.net, bigz@rice.edu,
com-priv@psi.com, ja@ess.cs.ucl.ac.uk, pullen@darpa.mil, PVM@isi.edu,
hostmaster@internic.net, hostmaster@nic.ddn.mil
A Concept for Personal Identifier Domain Names
If we want to have personal domain names that are independent of where
we live or work and are long term constant, and have enough structure
that the administration is manageable, then the names will have to
have some arbitrary components that are abstract and semantically
meaningless. The closest we can come to semantically meaningless name
components is a block of numbers (e.g., 564).
If we want to give simple names to everyone, that is to issue between
1 and 10 billion names, and we want to have a reasonable branching
factor in the name tree for manageability, say 1,000, then we will
need four component names. The form might be:
<simple-name>.<low>.<high>.PID
For example:
Fred-Flintstone.321.765.PID
These numeric fields (<low> and <high>) would not map to anything (not
to telephone area codes, or country codes, or zip codes). They would
be completely arbitrary. People could select which numbers they
wished to be associated with.
So if a new world-wide top-level domain were established (PID, or PVT,
or PVM, or whatever) for this we would immediately establish one
thousand (1,000) subdomains, and in each of those subdomains establish
one thousand (1,000) subsubdomains. Then we could delegate those one
million (1,000,000) branches of the namespace to administrators to
register simple names. Hmm, we might not have a million volunteer
administrators right away, so maybe we should hold some of the
branches in reserve.
Any one could contact any of the (potentially one million) volunteer
administrators to register a simple name.
--jon.
