[12487] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: About the creation of new 3-letter domain(s)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Einar Stefferud)
Thu May 19 03:55:31 1994
To: com-priv@psi.com
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 18 May 1994 20:45:42 EDT."
<199405190045.AA23913@world.std.com>
Reply-To: Stef@nma.com
From: Einar Stefferud <Stef@nma.com>
Date: Wed, 18 May 1994 22:55:32 -0700
Some comments on... BZS: "Here are my plusses for using phone numbers:"
1. There exist well-established standards for them (format etc.)
Yes...
2. They are a priori familiar to most of the world's population who
are likely to ever use DNS.
Yes....
3. There is virtually no internationalization issue. Digits
are a near-universal character set.
Yes...
4. Telephone company directory services and every other form of
existent infrastructure for looking up telephone numbers (CD/ROM,
phone books, minitel, etc) can be leveraged with this scheme.
But, all those directories are out of date when published, and their
owners will surely not load our DNS for us from there records, if they
could, so all you have done is preempt choices for registrants.
5. The telephone companies end up helping a lot as name space
managers, even if unwittingly (at first, perhaps that would change.)
Really? See comment on point 4....
6. It eases a lot of the potential trademark issues. Your phone number
is your phone number.
Nope! My phone numbers are all owned by The Phone Company! They have
the rright to cahnge them any time is suits their fancy. Furthermore,
they have a monolpoy control on assignements and use it to monopolize
dialtone acccess. You cannot get dialtone without buying (renting) a
number from the dialtone provider.
If you don't belive me, look at the wonderful infrastructure already
in place for X.400 Domain names in the Internet;-)...
All provided by ytour favourite Telephone Company.
7. They can be geographic if you like, or that can be minimized (e.g.
use 1-700 or 1-800 numbers or equivalent.)
OK...
8. It leverages a standard that has developed over 100 years of
practice and that we know is in widespread, global use and appears to
solve more or less the same problem we are attempting to solve here.
So have many other namign systems been developed over hundreds, even
thousands of years. If age of development effort is the criteria...
Ok, the minuses:
1. To be consistent with current DNS practice they need to be used in
reverse order and some people might find that awkward (at first,
whether we'd all get used to them soon enough is an open question.)
OK... Lets see now +1 714 842-3711 becomes 1.1.7.3.2.4.8.4.1.7.1.pid
Note how the grouping has disolved and it becomes a very long
non-memorable number.
2. Apparently a lot of people look at the idea and, at first
glance, have an emetic reaction to it.
Yep!... And some get their emitic reaction much later...
3. There exists at least one claim that this scheme presents
a human factors problem. I claim that the current practice
of around 2 or 3 billion people raises some doubts about that.
Fine... Lets keep what is good about it then. Use numbers, ala
Christian's proposal, with some form of grouping to aid memorability
(critically important), but create a new number space to avoid
collisions with The Phone Company.
We should try to find a grouping for the numbers that will distinguish
it from other number spaces, though with our dots, and final alpha
TLD, it may already be easily distinguished.
Now zipcodes might make sense in .us...
NMA.1.5615.92647.us is not all bad.
92647-5615 is one side of one block of Drey Lane. 17301 Drey Lane is
disinguished on that block by the subdomain name of "1".
I admit that it has reversed my Zip and +4 segments, but only in a way
that I can easily remember as two number blocks.
I think that maybe, for c=US (.us) this is the compromise of most of
the isdeas so far floated in this discussion.
Also, I recall hearing news of a move by the USPS to extend the Zip+4
to another 5 places for high density areas. Thsi is no problem...
Just us those numbers too.
Now, this does not solve any problems in any other country, but then,
every other country is not gong to like waht we like in .us, so they
can now go off and do whatever they wish.
In the meantime, we need to also allow the escape into our curretn DNS
system for those who are stuck in countries where someone has somehow
gotten monoopoly control of the contry-code. I have seen this happen
and it is not a pretty sight. One of the hall marks of The Internet
DNS is that it is impossible to corner the naming realestate market.
We must preserve this, as Christian has pointed out several times!
Remember, X.400, by design, gave name space monpolis to The
Administration in each country, and look at how nicely that is
working.
Cheers...\Stef
