[12389] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: About the creation of new 3-letter domain(s)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (H Morrow Long)
Tue May 17 12:43:43 1994
Date: Tue, 17 May 1994 09:34:49 -0400
From: long-morrow@cs.yale.edu (H Morrow Long)
To: jlw@cs.columbia.edu, nettech@crl.com, postel@isi.edu
Cc: PAUL@tdr.com, PVM@isi.edu, bigz@rice.edu, com-priv@psi.com,
hostmaster@internic.net, hostmaster@nic.ddn.mil, ja@ess.cs.ucl.ac.uk,
namedroppers@rs.internic.net, pullen@darpa.mil
In "A Concept for Personal Identifier Domain Names", Jon Postel proposed:
> <simple-name>.<low>.<high>.PID
Jon, I like the distributed and decentralized aspects of your proposal, but
why use something meaningless when you could use something meaningful?
Why not allow people to use national ID #s whereever they exist (and the
people want to use them)? For those who didn't want to use them
then you could create arbitrary numbers in the scheme you suggest.
This would allow people to use a number that they already remember,
that has some mapping to the individual, is already registered somewhere
(yes, I know I will hear from civil libertarians about the potential
dangers of a mandatory national ID), and is supposedly unique (although
I know that there are cases....). In the US you could allow people to
use their Social Security #.
This scheme could either use a new top-level such as .PID (with a 'type'
field identifier for the type of identification number being used):
999.99.9999.US-SS.PID
or it could be placed under the 2 letter country code domain of the
issuing identity number:
999.99.9999.SS.PID.US
These domain names could be assigned to individuals to do with whatever
they liked (delegate and subdomain and create hostnames and other
nameserver records under, etc. If someone (ie. wary of stalkers) wanted
to be fairly anonymous in e-mail they would not have to prepend their
real name - ie. 'Wilma-Flintstone' - but could just use
999.99.9999.US-SS.PID or 999.99.9999.SS.PID.US as their e-mail address).
I'd assume that the UK, France, and many other countries have unique
identifying numbers for individuals for similar purposes (National
Health, etc.).
Those individuals who wouldn't want to use their Social Security
number (on philosophical or other grounds), or who lack one, could
go to an administrative agency which could create a unique arbitrary
one that they could use instead. And these arbitrary numbers could
be in their own hierarchy of the .PID domain (or the .PID.COUNTRY
domains):
Barney-Rubble.123.456.ARBITRARY.PID
...or...
Barney-Rubble.123.456.ARBITRARY.PID.US
If you wanted you could still delegate the adminstration of thousands
(e.g. the *.9999.US-SS.PID or *.9999.PID.US domains ) or more
(e.g. the *.99.9999.US-SS.PID or *.99.9999.PID.US domains )
to a multitude of volunteers - rather than centralizing the function.
I do realize that these strings are a bit overly long, but then again,
we will have so many more people in the future that we should plan for
the address space expansion now :-)
H. Morrow Long, Mgr of Dev., Yale Univ., Comp Sci Dept, 011 AKW, New Haven, CT
06520-8285, VOICE: (203)-432-{1248,1254} FAX: (203)-432-0593
