[12466] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: About the creation of new 3-letter domain(s)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Robert Elz)
Wed May 18 17:53:42 1994
To: dcrocker@mordor.stanford.edu (Dave Crocker)
Cc: bigz@rice.edu, namedroppers@rs.internic.net, com-priv@psi.com
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 18 May 1994 10:33:33 MST."
<aa0000d50902101100ae@[128.102.17.23]>
Date: Thu, 19 May 1994 07:16:43 +1000
From: Robert Elz <kre@munnari.oz.au>
Date: Wed, 18 May 1994 10:33:33 -0700
From: dcrocker@Mordor.Stanford.EDU (Dave Crocker)
Message-ID: <aa0000d50902101100ae@[128.102.17.23]>
I'm confused...
Currently, this requires a substantial, separate administrative system for
the providers to interact with, when registering domain names.
I thought the discussion centred on choosing names. I certainly
agree that a fairly rigid system makes this easier, simply by
limiting choice - making the rigid system rigid down to a
quite small area also makes it less likely there will be
conflicts, and the smaller the area certainly the less likely
that conflicts will occur, and when they do, resolution will
be easier.
However I fail to see what any of this has to do with the
administration of the DNS, and all the work that's involved
there. Having picked a name, be it foo.com, or foo.123.456.pvm,
foo.16.main-st.hometown.dc.us (or something), it still has
to be registered, which involves finding the registrar (often
the hardest part for many people when the answer isn't
internic.net, or sri-nic.arpa...), and then getting the
registration made.
Am I missing something here?
Incidentally, there's nothing technically wrong with geographic
addresses, but they do cause people to try to read more into
domain names than should be read into them. The random numbers
scheme has the nice feature that its clearly meaningless.
All the domain name should do is allow the correct DNS server
to be located to provide information about the name.
Unfortunately humans see recognisable strings in there and
tend to draw conclusions that should be unwarranted.
kre
ps: if we had geographic names with lots of detail, as you
suggested, I fail to see the use for the postal (zip) code.
That's a post office artifact to make their mail routing
easier, and adds nothing meaningful to the address at all.
